As the final weeks of the 2023 Oklahoma State Legislative Session come into focus, Oklahoma Farm Report’s Ron Hays talks with Steve Thompson, Vice President of Public Affairs for Oklahoma Farm Bureau about the work still to be done before lawmakers can declare Sine Dei in May.
Thompson says the overriding issue when lawmakers get back from celebrating Easter will be to hammer out a deal between the House and Senate leadership over Education. Thompson says “Both the House and Senate have passed different versions of Education spending bills- we were very supportive earlier in the session of the House bill- it had a heavy influence on rural public schools and smaller schools that we worry about” but adds that now that the Senate has developed their own proposal “we hope that they can come together” and hammer out a plan that will be good for common education.
Thompson says that as you look at both measures- they acknowledge the need to have some tax credit dollars flowing to private education attendance and home school attendance as well as public school teacher pay raises. “We are optimistic that as long as the air conditioning continues to work in our newly renovated Capitol that they will be able to work through this- we are still in early April- we have got a lot of time left but I think the attitudes and tempers over there indicate we are already in May.” Thompson adds that this issue will need to be put to bed before other issues will have a chance to be resolved.
Steve Thompson also talked about the efforts by several lawmakers to move reforms forward on Medical Marijuana- building on the work that was done in the legislative session last year. He says that the strong vote to turn down Recreational Marijuana back in March has opened the door to work on stepping up efforts to shut down the bad actors in our state that have exploited the lax legal atmosphere and made Oklahoma the leading exporting state in the US of marijuana into other states.
That includes the discussion of foreign ownership of land in the state that has enabled the illegal growing of marijuana in Oklahoma since Medical Marijuana became legal. “With a lot of the criminal organizations that we have seen revealed through the marijuana industry – a lot of them are international in scope- the question is how did that happen and how do we reverse engineer that.” Thompson says Farm Bureau and others are looking at how we put laws into place to get the foreign players are criminal in nature out without harming some of the welcome and law abiding companies now in the state.
One idea is to craft a law that might focus on making illegal the foreign ownership of land with clear exemptions for businesses that are engaged in federally regulated interstate commerce.” The idea is that if you can legally do business in America- then you can continue to operate in Oklahoma, Thompson adds that “The state question in 2018 made marijuana legal in state- but it’s still a federally illegal product.”
Listen to Hays and Thompson talk about these issues as well as other bills still alive- and the early discussions that are happening now regarding the overall state budget that will be crafted in the next few weeks for Fiscal Year 2024. Click on the Listen Bar at the top of this story to hear their full conversation.
