Oklahoma Governor, Legislature, Refuse to Build Storm Shelters in State Schools

Last updated on: March 24, 2017 at 3:25 pm by Rebecca Hamilton

Oklahoma Governor, Legislature, Refuse to Build Storm Shelters in State Schools 2017-03-24T15:25:00-06:00 Rebecca Hamilton

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I debated against this and I am still totally disgusted with it.

Oklahoma’s Governor and Legislature have basically refused to build storm shelters for our school children, leaving them wide open to be killed and maimed by the ravages of a killer tornado.

There is a lot of political talk going on about the reasons, but what it comes down to is that the money that could have been used for this would come from the franchise tax, and the Oklahoma State Chamber of Commerce plans to have the legislature to repeal the franchise tax in the next legislative season. What the Oklahoma State Chamber of Commerce wants, the Oklahoma State Chamber of Commerce gets.

I have held off writing about this because I wanted to give my colleagues every opportunity possible to do the right thing.

Make no mistake about it, the children who died last spring are on every single one of us who sit in that body. It is our responsibility. The fact is — and I know this sounds stupid and that it is is stupid — but the truth is I didn’t think about it until those children died.

I had trouble sleeping after that tornado, thinking about the fact that I am a legislator and I had done nothing to build shelters in the schools. I talked to the man who was House Speaker at that time and he not only agreed with me, he seemed to have a plan for building shelters in the schools. Then, the Governor stepped in and announced that it wasn’t going to happen.

Public pressure forced the development of a useless bill that will allow property owners to vote an enormous tax increase on themselves to build shelters if they want them. If implemented, it will be the largest single property tax increase in the history of the state. It could easily cost farmers and ranchers their farms and ranches and put people who are tightly budgeted out of their homes.

And we could build those shelters with monies from existing taxes that would not raise the people’s property tax one cent.

I was ravaged by regret after those innocent children died from lack of proper shelters in one of our public Schools. My only excuse — which certainly didn’t satisfy me — was that I hadn’t thought about it before it happened. Even that feeble excuse is gone now.

We know that kids can and will die in these storms while they are attending our public schools.

We know it.

That makes it our responsibility, and there are no excuses; and I mean no excuses for not doing our best to take care of them. That’s even more important that doing what the Oklahoma State Chamber of Commerce wants.

News organizations outside of Oklahoma are beginning to take notice of this tragic situation.

From NBC News:

It’s tornado season again in Oklahoma. The ominous clouds and warm air one day last week reminded Danni Legg of the afternoon last May when a twister laid waste to the city of Moore and killed her 9-year-old son.

“Your heart drops,” she said.

Legg and the families of six other children killed at Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore helped gather more than 100,000 signatures last year for a ballot initiative to equip the state’s 1,800 public school buildings with storm shelters.

But a rewrite of the ballot language by the state attorney general led to a fight in court, and now the dispute has landed in the middle of the race between Gov. Mary Fallin, a Republican running for re-election, and her Democratic challenger, state Rep. Joe Dorman.

A coalition called Take Shelter Oklahoma, which includes the Moore families, proposed having the state sell bonds to raise $500 million to build school shelters or fortify existing buildings so they could can withstand tornadoes like the one last May, which killed 24 people.

Their idea was to let schools start building shelters almost immediately and have the state pay off the debt with the $40 million to $50 million that it expects to collect each year from a recently reinstated tax on some companies.

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