Buying cars for politicians

Each year legislators sponsor just over 2,000 bills. Many never receive a vote and a State Representative can expect to cast about 1000 votes during the year. About 400 bills actually become law. 90% of these fly completely under the radar of public perception.

You have no doubt read or heard about bills to issue debt for the State Capitol building, take money from the state’s unclaimed property fund and channel it to the Native American Cultural Center in Oklahoma City, or repeal Common Core standards which currently awaits the Governor’s signature, and perhaps a handful of other measures. But what about the other hundreds of bills the general public never hears about?

Last week I wrote about an ongoing encroachment on property rights which received Legislative approval. Over the next few weeks I will describe several other measures that I felt were important, but few know about. There’s quite a mix of encouraging and no-so-encouraging outcomes.

In the past I have written rather extensively of the need for reforming Oklahoma’s system of county government. Governance of Oklahoma counties is inefficiently broken down into 231 small jurisdictions otherwise known as county commission districts. Each one of these districts has a paid full-time commissioner.

It’s a system that might have been appropriate 100 years ago, but now it has become an antiquated and costly dinosaur.

Here’s just one small example of the costly nature of the current system. Each commissioner may choose to receive a personal car allowance of $600 per month. It’s an allowance so rich that it significantly exceeds the car payments paid by a majority of their constituents. Over the course of a four-year term, the taxpayers are essentially buying each commissioner a new personal vehicle.

This rich allowance doesn’t stop the commissioners from filing for additional compensation in the form of travel claims against their district’s highway funds. Not content to just benefit from the rich allowance, these travel claims represent a form of inappropriate double-dipping by which the commissioners can have their cake and eat it too.

Those who wonder why Oklahoma’s roads are poorly maintained in comparison to other states can find their answer in these types of inefficient policies which appear to escape both public and legislative consciousness.

Perhaps that explains why legislation to increase the travel allowance from $600 to $950 per month initially passed the House and Senate during the early part of session. Had this bill won approval, the taxpayers would have been forced to buy their commissioner a new personal vehicle every 3 years instead of every 4 years.

In March, the bill passed the House with just nine of us voting “no”. The bill received a Senate vote in April, by which time I think the word had started to get out about what the bill did as it received sixteen “no” votes.

I think the strength of the opposition in the Senate forced the hand of the bill’s proponents as they changed the proposed increase so that it only applied to county sheriffs and no longer increased the allowance received by commissioners.

As the session came to a close, this was one of the bills which didn’t emerge from the conference committee. It died for the year just a handful of votes shy of final passage.

For now at least, county officials will have to wait 4 years before receiving a new personal vehicle from their constituents.

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