March 30, 2025

Friends,

I’m back with another Stay in The Loop – which I hope, actually does help you keep you in the loop on state legislative matters at your house – the People’s House!  For me, I find it hard to keep up with what’s going on OUTSIDE the Capitol because it’s a true vortex over there.  When I came home this weekend and saw all the trees and flowers starting to bloom, I was reminded there is more to this life than state politics — everybody help keep me grounded!

 

A Good Deadline Week

Thursday was the deadline for bills to pass out of their chamber of origin, so all House bills needed to pass off the House Floor to be considered this session.  Of the total of 470 house bills still alive, I am so proud to report that six HD 70 bills passed and are off to the Senate!  A big thank you to the constituents that brought these great ideas forward. In the chaos that is politics, it is very rewarding to take a problem solving idea from a constituent, get it into bill language and begin to share the problem and the fix with my colleagues.  I can only hope the Senate feels as passionately about these bills as we do as they are the next approval for advancing the bills to the Governor’s desk!  We still have work to do but we are marching toward the finish.  Congrats to us.

 

A reminder of our bills this session:

 

We will now restart the legislative process with Senate bills, going back into our committees and moving Senate bills off the House Floor.  Each bill requires both a Senate and House author.  I am the House author on three Senate bills:

• SB 59 by Sen. Dave Rader: sales tax exemption for certain organizations providing clothing or supplies for students
• SB 256 by Sen. Kristen Thompson: tax credit for childcare employer expenses
• SB 515 by Sen. Avery Frix: expand deductibles to include cash payments for out-of-pocket medical services (this bill is super important to us and we ran the same language in both chambers to ensure passage!)

 

Every bill we are bringing forward solves a real issue or at least partly solves one, so I will push very hard for them all.  I am especially happy that more and more people are getting excited about Oklahoma’s childcare.  Thank you for bearing with me over the last few years as I may have sounded like a broken record about the importance of childcare, but our efforts are paying off!  You can read more about the childcare bill package here.

 

Capitol Conversations:  What’s in it for Tulsa?

To wrap up our deadline week, we had our first Capitol Conversation here in Tulsa.  This event came about through the vision of Speaker Kyle Hilbert who mentioned to me that Tulsa needs its own political shows.  Absolutely, I agree – Tulsa needs its own everything!  Oklahoma City has three or four weekly shows bringing the news of the Capitol but not surprisingly none of them have a Tulsa lens.  This event with the Tulsa Press Club was the pitch to fix that and it was not just informative but also fun!

 

 

We covered everything from Tulsa’s need for state support for a Level 1 Trauma Center to making more degrees available at the public higher education institutions in Tulsa to freeing up state support for the OKPOP Museum.  We even talked about tax cuts, but our biggest point of disagreement was proposed changes to the initiative petition process in Senate Bill 1027.   I have serious concerns about taking power away from Oklahomans to make changes that the legislature cannot or will not do.  At its heart, that is what the initiative process offers – the ability for the people to legislate.  I don’t support restricting that freedom in any way.

 

All in all it was a great conversation and a reminder to me that while the gridlock, fighting and toxicity in DC reaches epic levels many state legislators are out here doing the workday job of trying to make government work for the people.  That’s my mission anyway and while it can be frustrating, I really like doing it!

 

Upcoming

This week in addition to beginning to consider Senate bills in the committee process, I will be working to understand multiple notices of cuts to local mental health care providers who receive funds from the State Department of Mental Health.  Read more here about the details of this issue. But essentially the cuts defund Tulsa’s crisis response system and will mean lack of connections to crisis stabilization services which in turn will mean more work for our first responders and police and more people on the streets.  I will do everything I can along with my colleagues in the legislature to understand what happened to the funds for these services and what is needed to ensure they continue.

 

 

I hope to see you at our next townhall on April 17 from 6:00-7:00 PM at our usual spot, Schusterman-Benson Library.  We will be joined by Senator Rader and then later in May, I will do a joint town hall with Senator Dossett who is the other Senator who represents House District 70.  Senator Rader and I have a bill together supporting non-profit work and he also brought forth the death penalty moratorium bill and some interesting tax reform bills.  As your state legislators we are responsible for reporting to you, listening to you and working together.  I hope you all will join for an informative and respectful conversation.  If your schedule allows you to join us, register here.

I hope to hear from you soon whether that’s in the district, in my inbox, or at the Townhall.  Remember to get out of whatever is consuming you even if just for a minute and enjoy the blooms and the beautiful place Tulsa is in the spring.

 

Let’s Keep Going –

 

Suzanne