Most Oklahoma houses have a stack of mail to sort through on their kitchen counter.. The stack grows and shrinks in size over the course of the month and consists of things that are pending or things that the recipient might not want to deal with right away. The electric bill is on top because it came last. Under it is the water bill and under that could be the renewal notice from the insurance company.
Every piece of paper in that stack has a number on it that has gone up over the last few years. And every one of those numbers was decided by somebody. Not by the weather. Not by the economy, or at least not only by the economy. These decisions are made by people sitting in offices in Oklahoma City who had a choice about what you’d pay and made it. Most of them were put in those offices by voters and their jobs are on the ballot five weeks from now.
Let’s start with the electric bill. In Oklahoma, the price that a regulated utility can charge you isn’t set by the utility. The company asks for an increase and three elected officials, known as the Corporation Commissioners, decide how much of it to grant. The same goes for natural gas and the private water companies that serve a lot of rural Oklahoma. One of those three commissioner seats is on your ballot on November 3.
But there’s a part of this process that most people don’t know. When a utility walks into that hearing room asking for more of your money, it brings lawyers. You’re supposed to have one too. The Attorney General’s office has an entire unit whose job is to represent you, the customer, in every rate case. When it shows up and does its job, requests get cut. When it doesn’t, you pay the difference. The Attorney General is elected and that office is also on your ballot on November 3.
Now let’s talk about that insurance renewal notice. Oklahomans pay an average of $5,533 a year for homeowner’s insurance according to a LendingTree analysis this summer. That’s more than anyone else in the country. Specifically, that’s about $2,900 more than the national average, roughly $1,000 more than Kansas, and $1,600 more than Arkansas. The state office that regulates that market, approves the companies that sell in it, and takes your complaint when something goes wrong is the Insurance Commissioner. It’s another elected job that will be on your ballot this year.
Then there’s everything else in that stack of mail, the parts of your budget that don’t come as a bill but feel like one. A notice that your nearest hospital is closing and the next closest is 60 minutes away. Information from your child’s school about their need for teachers. Those kinds of things get decided in the state budget, and the state budget gets written by the Legislature. Every House seat and half the Senate are on the ballot in November.
And then there’s the office that sits on top of all of it. The Governor signs that budget or vetoes it, line by line. The Governor hires the people who run the biggest state agencies, the ones that decide whether Medicaid dollars reach a rural hospital. The Governor appoints hundreds of people to the boards and commissions that hand out state contracts. No single office in Oklahoma decides more about where your money goes. It’s an open seat this year. And it’s on your ballot.
Here is why this matters more than a civics lesson.
We spent nine months this year listening to Oklahomans and two things were repeated the most. The cost of living was one. The other was corruption: holding politicians accountable and making sure the people in charge aren’t rewarding friends and donors with taxpayer money. Forty-eight percent named each of these issues as important to address. And unlike almost everything else in politics, the corruption number didn’t split by party. Republicans, Democrats, and independents all put it in the same place. We used to think of those as two different worries. They’re not. They’re actually the same worry, seen from two sides of the kitchen table.
When a no-bid contract goes to somebody’s friend, that money came out of the same budget that keeps the rural hospital open. When a company’s donations buy it a friendlier hearing on a rate increase, the increase lands on your light bill. When fraud gets found and nobody goes to jail, the next person figures they can get away with it too and you end up paying for that as well. Corruption isn’t a scandal you read about. In these cases, it’s a line item on your bill.
Fifty-eight percent of Oklahomans told us the state government could do something about the cost of living and chooses not to. When we asked why, the most common answer was that the people in charge are more focused on the corporations and donors who write the checks than on the families who pay the bills. That’s not cynicism. It’s an accurate description of how the money moves.
This is why the biggest question on the ballot this year is a simple one: will our next governor look after the people of Oklahoma or the special interests that fund their campaign? Every governor gets asked to choose, over and over, in ways that never make the news. A contract goes to the lowest bid or to the donor. An agency head is picked for what they know or for who they know. A policy that would ease your bills gets signed or gets vetoed because somebody who writes checks to campaign accounts didn’t like it. Oklahomans told us, in the words that tested strongest in all our research, that working people built this state and it’s time the government worked for us rather than the corporations, utility executives, and insiders writing the checks. That’s their job description and whoever wants the job should be held to it.
Which brings us back to the Attorney General. It’s the state’s top law enforcement office, and most of what it does is exactly that – enforcing the laws of our state. This could be through a Consumer Protection Unit that takes your complaint when a business scams you and that returns money to Oklahomans every year. It could be through a unit that investigates Medicaid fraud, the money that’s supposed to be keeping that rural hospital open. And it’s also through the utility lawyers who are supposed to be in the room for you every time your bill is about to go up.
The people we talked to were clear on one more thing: they want that office to be about law enforcement, not politics.
We’re not going to tell you who to hire for any of these jobs. The people we talked to were very clear that they don’t want to be told and we know that is for voters to figure out for themselves. What we will tell you is what the jobs are.
A Corporation Commissioner decides your light bill.
An Insurance Commissioner decides whether that renewal notice gets a second look.
A legislator decides whether the money goes to your kid’s classroom or to somebody’s tax break.
A Governor decides whose calls get returned, and whether the whole machine runs for the people who pay the bills or the people who write the checks.
And an Attorney General decides whether anybody is watching all of them, and whether anybody is in the room for you.
So — take the stack of bill off the counter this week, look at the number on each one, and then ask the only question that matters: who decided that, who was supposed to be watching out for my family, and do I get a say?
You do. Registration closes Friday, October 9.
Check yours in two minutes at the voter hub on oklahomaisours.org.
Because Oklahoma IS ours. Vote like it.
