Oklahoma governor calls for budget reforms, state lawmakers say "It's just unrealistic.”

We sat down for a one-on-one interview with Governor Kevin Stitt to both reflect on the 2025 legislative session, and look ahead to his final year at the capitol in 2026. One of his calls for the next session is for lawmakers to take a second look at the state’s budget process.

Governor Kevin Stitt’s calls for budget reform:

“I would love for us to look at some of the budgeting reforms. Maybe budgeting every other year a lot of states do that, Texas does that,” said Governor Stitt.

“We just got out of session, this fiscal year doesn't start until July 1st and every agency is already having to plan to come back to the legislature in October and present their budget for next year. So it's just this continual cycle that raises expenses,” said Stitt.

Stitt also floated the idea of keeping with the legislature’s current calendar, and just changing up what they work on each year.

“Let's budget one year, let's maybe do policy the following year as a legislature,” said Stitt.

Oklahoma legislature’s operations:

The Oklahoma State Legislature meets every year for four months beginning the first Monday in February and concluding the last Friday in May.

Each legislature has two sessions, and can bring up ideas in the second session that were not fully finalized during the first session. For example, in 2025 lawmakers held the first session of the 60th legislature, and in 2026 lawmakers will hold the second session of the 60th legislature.

The state of Oklahoma passed a $12.59 billion budget for FY’26 along with 616 bills.

Texas legislature’s operations:

The Texas Legislature runs a regular session every two years, starting on the second Tuesday in January of odd-numbered years. In 2025, the 89th Legislature's regular session began on January 14th and is scheduled to conclude on June 2nd, according to the Texas State Law Library.

In turn, the state of Texas passed a $338 billion two-year spending plan, along with more than 1,000 bills.

Oklahoma vs. Texas main revenue sources:

“The Texas legislature meets every other year, one of the reasons they do that is they have a very stable income base which is property taxes. Somebody is gonna pay those property taxes,” said Sen. Pro Tem Lonnie Paxton.

In fiscal year (FY) 2023, Texas generated approximately $81.4 billion from property taxes. This represents a significant portion of the total state and local tax revenue in Texas, accounting for 46.1% in FY 2023.

“Oklahoma's three main reliance's on income for the state to operate are income taxes , severance taxes which is your gross production tax and sales taxes. Especially if the oil and gas market goes down that affects all three of those significantly,” said Sen. Paxton.

From May 2024 - May 2025, Oklahoma has made $14.9 billion in revenue based on those three taxes.

How Oklahoma lawmakers allocate state dollars:

“Our fiscal year is July 1 - June 30th.. There's a Board of Equalization that meets in February to tell the legislature here's how much money you can appropriate from July one through June 30th. So what they're predicting is the start of the fiscal year four months ahead of time as well as 16 months ahead of time because you're talking about the following June 14 months after the BOE officially meets,” said House Speaker Kyle Hilbert.

The BOE numbers are just estimates and typically fluctuate even from their December to February meeting.

“Inevitably the Board of Equalization is wrong in their projections. Now that's not an indictment on the board of equalization it's just who can predict what's gonna happen tomorrow let alone 14 months from now in the global economy and how that's going to you throw into the mix how dependent Oklahoma is on the oil and gas industry which is an up and down market even in good times,” said Speaker Hilbert.

Reaction from the Speaker on a major change in the budget process:

“It would be very difficult. So if we had a two year budget instead of the one year budget we have now we would still end up individually having annual budgets because we would have to come in for special sessions every year to make adjustments to that budget,” said Rep. Hilbert.

“The other thing is by having an annual budget we're able to be responsive to the needs of our people,” said Rep. Hilbert.

Speaker Hilbert uses the Level I trauma center at St. Francis in Tulsa as an example: “We first talked about it in January and we were able to get it done by the end of this calendar year. There's a good chance St Francis is gonna have a trauma one and Northeast Oklahoma is gonna have a Trauma I center that we wouldn't have if we had a one year budget.”

Rep. Hilbert also says the state’s current plan allows for legislation to be both vetted and thought through.

“States like Texas that have biannual legislatures, I saw they had over 1,000 bills I believe signed into law down in Austin and we had just over 600. You don't see a reduction in the number of bills, you just see twice as many bills that end up going through the process because you only have one year to do it,” said Rep. Hilbert.

“The other challenge with that is that means there's less time frankly because you have one legislative session for the same number of bills to go through and they don't get as much time to go through the process,” said Rep. Hilbert.

“You'll see a lot of bills that didn't pass this legislative session that come back next year that members have had two years to work on. The public has had two years to vet these bills. It creates a better product, more transparency and more sunlight is never a bad thing,” said Rep. Hilbert.

Reaction from the Pro Tem on a major change in the budget process:

“It's always good to look at new ideas and new concepts out there. The idea of focusing on policy one year and budget the next sounds attractive, I just don't know how well it works in our system,” said Pro Tem Paxton.

“Our way we collect revenue in the state is more volatile than a lot of other states are so doing it every other year would be hard to budget for two years not knowing where the board of equalization coming back and saying how much money do we have would be difficult,” said Senate Pro Tem Lonnie Paxton.