State budget leaders got their final revenue certification from the Board of Equalization recently. The Legislature is authorized to appropriate up to $12.3 billion for state programs and services for Fiscal Year 2026.
This is about $1 billion less than FY25 and includes about $11 billion in recurring revenue and $1.3 in available cash and one-time funds.
While $1 billion less sounds severe, this is actually good news for the Oklahoma taxpayer. It means they're keeping more of their own hardearned income to spend at their discretion. Last year, the Legislature enacted the largest tax cut in state history, removing the state's 4.5% portion of the tax on groceries. Several years prior, we cut the personal income tax by a quarter percent. With that money staying with taxpayers, the government understandably has less to appropriate.
We're still in great shape. We have healthy savings accounts to get us through any potential downturn, and we'll be able to keep core services stable, including public education, roads and bridges, public safety and health and mental health care.
Pertaining to that last item, the House last week unanimously approved a consent decree to settle a lawsuit between plaintiffs and the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services.
In 2023, lawyers for a group of pretrial defendants in Oklahoma State Court proceedings, who had been deemed incompetent to stand trial, sued the state. They alleged the department, under former leadership, violated their clients' substantive due process rights to have their competency restored.
The consent decree establishes training and a timeline for competency restoration, ensuring not only that the mental health care needs of the plaintiffs are met, but also that victims and their family members will finally see justice administered. In addition, this will ultimately save the state in protracted litigation costs.
Feb. 19 was supposed to be the deadline for all policy bills to be passed out of regular committees and moved to their oversight committees. Snow and ice shut down the House for a day, pushing that deadline back to Feb. 24. We'll spend the next several weeks hearing bills in oversight committees before they are eligible to come to the floor for a vote.