A top Cherokee Nation official calls Oklahoma’s last decade of fiscal policy "an abject failure."
Cherokee Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin Jr said tribal governments are picking up the slack where the state makes cuts.
"In the last year, billions of dollars in the Indian Nations have been invested in education and health care and housing, investing in communities that, frankly, the rest of the world forgot about. But we’re saving them," Hoskin said. "Now, if you take that billion dollars, you can look at tax cuts over the last decade, and you can wipe out that billion dollars in the form of tax cuts."
The Cherokee Nation pumped $5 million into northeastern Oklahoma public schools last year, and they plan on increasing that going forward.
"Our communities, we know they’re going to fail or succeed in large measure on whether those public schools fail or succeed, and we’ve seen some of them fail and we can connect the dots and we can do the math," Hoskin said. "And so, we know we’ve got to throw in to help with public education."
Hoskin said while the Cherokee Nation has boosted its scholarship funding 700 percent, state universities’ tuition is going up because their budgets are going down.
"It’s a common theme of the last decade: The Indian Nations are stepping up to invest in our communities and our people, and the state of Oklahoma is pulling the rug out from under us," Hoskin said. "It’s not right. It’s the opposite direction that we should be going."
Hoskin said if tribes can pay 5 to 7 percent of their gaming revenues to the state, energy companies can pay a similar rate on oil and gas.
