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Oklahoma
Posted: May 02, 2025 10:11 AMUpdated: May 02, 2025 10:12 AM
CAPITOL CALL powered by Phillips 66 5-2-25
Tom Davis
Representative Judd Strom and Senator Julie Daniels were our guests on CAPITOL CALL Powered by Phillips 66 on Friday.
It's deadline week at the state capitol. Senator Daniels said, "We've heard 117 House bills so far. They've heard 122 of ours, so we're really doing very well by each other's legislation, so no fights there. There are 230 we could still hear, but we have just four days left, so now it's down to me and my team to make those difficult decisions about what things will not be heard this year. It's a bit trying when so many of them are money bills, and a lot of that money isn't going to end up being allocated because on the Senate side our caucus has said we want a flat budget."
The Senator said, "The two that I really wanted and I thought were very good policy for the state of Oklahoma was the elimination of that 6 percent mandatory markup, which did pass in the House with a tiny amendment, but it's okay. So it will come back to me. We will accept that amendment and it will go to the governor. I hope that that will be signed here within about the next, well, within the next two weeks he should get it signed." She added, " The other was to remove this one-year public school requirement for special needs kids before they could access our Lindsay Nicole Henry special needs scholarship."
Representative Strom talked about the House side saying, "I really got to commend my colleagues from Bartlesville and from the home area there. The senator, of course, is the floor leader in the Senate, which is directing and driving policy over the floor over there. John B. Kaine is the vice chair of the budget in the House." He added, "And so all the numbers that really fund and drive the over 300 agencies, boards, and commissions that are part of the Oklahoma government, he's just down in the nuts and bolts and working on that all the time, and they're doing incredible things."
Strom said, "In the House, we just finished the 12th week of 16 weeks that we are constitutionally allowed to be in the building making laws, and you are getting down to the end where every representative and every senator loves their own bills the best, and some of those are falling to the wayside. We started with 3,200 historically since I've been in the building, the governor's average signing of around 400 or just a few more than 400, and so I think we're on the path to get good legislation on his desk."
Strom called into the show from the state capitol because he was attending The Large Animal Veteranarian Summit. According to Strom, "The state of Oklahoma is facing a looming crisis as our large animal veterinarian population declines. We're in a position where I think when we get into food, animal, agriculture, large animal, 22%, I think they said, of all of our veterinarians are over 65 years of age. Thirty-nine percent are within 10 years of retirement age. We're just not getting kids into the pipeline.
The Representative said that Blaine Arthur and Jamie Rowlett from the Department of Agriculture, Food, and Forestry have kind of spearheaded this event at the Hammond Institute in Oklahoma City, and we're bringing together OSU, the Vet College, veterinarians, the Agriculture, Food, and Forestry. It's a great group of people to really start discussing what we do now that will have an impact on the number of large animal and agriculture food animal veterinarians five years from now, 10 years from now. I think it's very important that we do that.
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