Lt. Gov. Jari Askins gave Claremore Chamber of Commerce members a sobering but nonetheless encouraging report on the state of affairs from the state Capitol at Thursday’s Chamber luncheon.

“I guess it’s been not quite two years since I was last invited to be here at your chamber and then, we made it a great day — toured Pelco, the J.M. Davis Arms & Historical Museum, and the Will Rogers Memorial multiple times, and had an opportunity to see the then-new Robson Performing Center — that was an incredible opportunity,” she said. “It’s good to be back in Claremore and have another opportunity to visit with you again.

“Today, I’d like to talk about what I’ve seen happening, and what’s been happening as it relates to the state budget,” she said, “and what I think is going to happen as we lead into the legislative session which starts in February, and the impact I think exists in communities all across the state. Duncan is my home and so the impact being felt in my community is not unlike the impact, I believe, here in Claremore.”

One major concern, Askins said, is that as dollars are reduced and agencies are forced to downsize by attrition or layoffs, that employees have less money to spend in their communities.

“When you have that happen, people will only buy what they have to buy,” she said. “They don’t go to the dry cleaners, they don’t take the animals to the veterinarians if they don’t have to, they don’t do things that are ‘extras,’ and that’s not a good formula for economic recovery. What we need is dollars being turned over in our communities, and for people to feel like they’ve got money that they can spend — we need those dollars to turn over and help local businesses. That’s how things get better.”

As a member of the Oklahoma Board of Equalization, Askins said she annually looks ahead at the state budget.

“One of our functions is we look at numbers presented us, based on economic models, to anticipate what our revenues are going to be,” she said. “So when we meet in December, the amount of money we’re given as a belief of what the estimate of the following fiscal year. When we met last December, we were looking at the fiscal year of 2010 — that number is the number the governor uses to prepare his budget.

“We meet a couple of months later in February and we have about 60 more days of data, and when that formula is run again, that’s the estimate the legislature has available for appropriations,” she said. “Or, more specifically, 95 percent of that estimate is what the legislature has available to appropriate.

“In the three years I’ve been lieutenant governor, the number in February has been less than the number in December,” she said. “What happened was natural — gas prices started falling, so in April and May and June, we saw revenues coming in less than anticipated. Agencies were encouraged to be prudent and take some cuts on their own but there were no across-the-board cuts ordered to end the fiscal year.

“As appropriations were made for 2010, budget cuts were endured on an average of seven percent — that was pretty much an across the board cut for elected officials,” she continued. “What happened then was that we were already anticipating revenue was going to be less than what we’d guessed in February.

“We knew, even then, when we were anticipating revenues in February, that the dollar amount we were given to work with was what we had in 2004, so we were anticipating 2004 budget year with 2010 expenses,” she said. “Probably in most businesses, overhead went up between 2004 and 2010, and that’s the same thing that was happening with state government — we were getting ready to do 2010 services with a 2004 budget.”

Although Askins said state legislators knew it would be “tight,” none could have anticipated the continued fall of revenue throughout the fiscal year.

“Every state agency gets it budget monthly in a 1/12 allotment, so it’s divided up — state revenue dollars come in 1/12 at a time,” she continued. “But obviously, revenue doesn’t come into the state equally like that. July and August are our lowest (revenue) months — always have been, always will be — so we knew things were low, but we’d hoped they would pick up, so you started seeing state government offices ask for across-the-board cuts of five percent since August.”

These cuts, Askins said, would increasingly be felt across the state as legislators respond to cuts impacting their community.

One such impact recently felt, Askins said, was in Tahlequah with the announcement of the Department of Mental Health’s planned closure of the Bill Willis Center.