Lawmakers plan to take up a measure that would help the state dip into its allocated Rainy Day Constitutional Reserve Fund to help supplement the cost of the damages Oklahoma City and surrounding suburbs underwent earlier this week.
According to the official Oklahoma State website, "The official name of what we commonly call the Rainy Day Fund is the Constitutional Reserve Fund." Money is put in the instances where a fiscal year exceeds 100 percent of the official estimate for that year.
"The fund is capped at 15% of the General Revenue Fund official estimate for the prior fiscal year," according to the OpenBooks portion of the state website.
The determination for use of the Rainy Day Fund is done over a formula wherein the Governor and Legislature declares an emergency (25 percent of the decision), Revenue shortfalls experienced in the current fiscal year (approx. 37.5 percent of the decision), and Certified revenue shortfalls in the next fiscal year (approx. 37.5 percent of the decision).
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Currently, the fund has about $577 million, and would provide $45 million in money that would help those communities that were most destroyed by the string of tornadoes they faced this week. Part of the rebuilding initiative would reinstate public property, including bridges, city hospitals, schools and roads.
The bill, known as Senate Bill 249, would also help the state pay for overtime for emergency responders, and also be used in coordination with federal disaster relief support.
Though some politicians have condemned officials in Washington for spending too much and not cutting enough in other areas to finance the support for Oklahoma, Yahoo! News reports the lawmakers on Capitol Hill will not be cutting or allocating anymore more money to their main disaster relief fund because they currently have about $11 billion in it already; which is more than enough to cover the cost in the rebuilding efforts in Oklahoma estimated to cost around $1 billion.
