OK Voices; Tornado Shelters in Oklahoma Schools Panel

Good morning, you're listening to Oklahoma Voices on KGOU, I'm Kate Carlton. Almost exactly six months after a tornado took the lives of seven students at Plaza Towers Elementary School and more, KGOU and the Oklahoma tornado project gathered journalists, scientists, lawmakers, and members of the community together to discuss the issue of storm shelters in public schools. KGOU's news director, Kirk Gortney, moderated the discussion and introduces the panel. Good evening, I'd like to welcome everyone to this panel discussion on the topic who should pay for school storm shelters. I'm Kirk Gortney news director at KGOU. Joining me is state representative Joe Dorman, Democrat from Rush Springs on the end there. Next is Harold Brooks, senior scientist, forecast research, and development division of the national severe storms laboratory. His title actually can go longer by kind of cut it short there. And then Joe worked as a reporter with state impact Oklahoma. And you just need to know Joe was one of the first reporters on the scene that

May 20th he was actually caught on the road as a trade-off across I-35. And state impact provided a significant reporting for both our network, national public radio, and all of Oklahoma's public media stations during the weeks following the tornadoes. And welcome to all of you. Thank you so much for coming out tonight. Now I believe the reason that we're here really comes down to seven lives. Seven lives that were lost from the May 20th tornado hit Plaza Towers Elementary School. I know as I was doing my reporting for KGOU for NPR and other networks including the BBC, the question that kept coming up was that I got over and over again for people who don't live here was why don't all Oklahoma schools have storm shelters. And that question continues to be asked of local school boards at the state capital and even in Washington. In the days following the devastation there were efforts to begin addressing the lack of shelters in our public schools. The best known is probably the Shelter Oklahoma Schools project that's raising private funds to help build those shelters. But the money needed likely won't be fully met by any nonprofit

group asking for donations. Now that led leaders to search for other ways to pay to protect Oklahoma's school children including the initial petition being led by Representative Dorman. So let's start there. Representative give us a brief overview of how you decided this was the best way to fund shelters in Oklahoma schools. By during the legislative session there was an effort after Sandy Hook Elementary a Newton Connecticut with the shootings to look at a $500 million bond issue to improve the safety standards there schools. And that legislation did not proceed because of several flaws with the drafting on that and constitutional questions. So that was set aside. Move forward to May 20th when the tornadoes hit. It was apparent that we needed to do something because the schools did not have shelters after all the stories we heard and doing some investigating saw that there was a great need. So we tried to resurrect that bill in the last week. We're not successful. Filed an interim study which was just recently held. It was held on Halloween and looked at the

information we had collected on that. We just assumed we would have to go forward to the next legislative session. When the governor decided to call a special session to deal with tour reform there was an effort made to expand the call that special session to address storm shelter school security standards and schools. Fifty seven of my colleagues voted against that expansion to look at that subject. So with that we decided it was probably going to be highly unlikely that legislation would work its way through the system to look at a bond issue. So we decided to form take shelter Oklahoma the initiative petition drive. Filed that on September 18th and have 90 days to collect 155,000 plus signatures to get that constitutional amendment to the ballot. And how's that the signature gathering going so far? That's the magic question that I get multiple times each day. We are two thirds of the way through this and we feel it's going very successful. Recently we started the Get Your 20 campaign encouraging citizens, volunteers

to email us their address and we would mail them a copy of the petition. I have it with me. It has 20 signature lines on it, hence the Get Your 20. Want people to sign the top and then go get 19 friends and sign this. This has been an all volunteer effort. So to answer your question is we simply do not know how many signatures are out there already collected. Last week we got a stack of 1,700 signatures from one school. We got 35 signatures from another school. We simply do not know how many people out there collecting and we have until December 16th to collect these and get them filed with the Secretary of State. So we're working diligently to try and encourage people to get signatures and send them in. Harold, I want to ask you about the risk. Before May 20th of this year, how many school children had died in school buildings as a result of a tornado as far as you know? In public schools in the state of Oklahoma, this is in fact the 83rd anniversary of the only other incident in which school children had been killed during the

day. So there were six fatalities in 1930 at a school in Bethany and then there were two other occurrences in 1945, a death at a basketball practice in the evening, and then three deaths in 1945 at a residence hall for the Oklahoma school for the blind in the evening. So overall in the history of state of Oklahoma, there have been 13 deaths during the school day in public schools. And there are two that really weren't during the school day, but my third school related in Woodward a year ago, there were two people who were out for prom and died in that. I know that wouldn't be the official count, but the people in Woodward certainly count those two kids in that kind of count. How about, do you have any numbers or statistics on the number of children who die in tornado storms who are home or elsewhere? Sure. Well, I don't have the exact numbers with me for the state of Oklahoma. On average, if we look nationally, about 15 percent of the fatalities are our school age children. So roughly in an average year, that would be about 10 children to die per year. And Joe, I know that you and Logan Layden, who's our other state impact reporter,

looked at some of the data involving storms in schools. Tell me what did you discover in that reporting? Yeah, we've certainly done a lot of data reporting, specifically dealing with the school shelters and the times, the times that Torneo's touched down when people were talking about this and talking about the potential for putting storm shelters in every school. A lot of people came out and said, well, one reason we don't need shelters in every school is tornadoes don't hit during the school hours. Everybody knows that. And so we sort of kick the tires on that, just use some data because this is sort of something everybody had said, and everybody had sort of said that everybody knows this. So we looked at the data and it is true that the majority don't occur during the school hours, but they certainly do happen during the school hours. And you know, it's not as cut and dry. It's not statistically none of these happen. The chances are lower during these hours. But when you factor in before school activities,

these kids are not going to school right at 8 a.m. They're there before school and the kids are not leaving right at 3 o'clock. You spread that window out a little bit. So certainly there is a risk there. And I remember looking at what when you started mapping this information, which you can find that at KGOU.org, you can find a link to Joe's Work at State Impact, when I saw that map that you put together, what struck me was the number of tornadoes where we are right now through this more area. Absolutely. I mean, this is this is the alley within the alley. I mean, there's certainly a lot that touch down here and it has happened. So it's hard to argue the statistics, argued that something is statistically unlikely when it's happened and then happened with such tragic results. Harold, whenever we talk about those kind of numbers and things, people seem to rely on their past experience rather than whatever smart people like you and good reporters like Joe are putting together, how do you perceive the threat from a scientific

statistical point of view for the more southern Oklahoma City area? Well, I mean, there was from, when we look at the long run record, we know that there's no real difference in terms of occurrence between more insane Norman and northern Oklahoma City. They're all roughly about the same frequency of occurrence. And we know that when we look at the, again, at the long term record over the last 60 years, that basically 10% of the tornadoes occur between the hours of 7 a.m. and 4.30 p.m. in Oklahoma during the school day. So down on the weekends and not during the summertime. And so the, when we link the threat, the threat is there and one of the real, I think the whole question of shelters and schools is part of a broader question in terms of how do we, how do people get protected and how do we, how do we ensure that things happen in that, you know, what's the, what's our goal in terms of, do we want to reduce the overall death toll? Do we want to reduce the death toll from certain aspects of the event? And I recognize that there's certainly a large emotional component in this that has to be factored in when we do things.

Representative, I realize even losing just one child is too many, but some of the statistics we're hearing, you know, 10% during the school, school day. Do you, do you think this money, this is how this money should be spent? We have a lot of needs in Oklahoma in terms of funding. I know you are on the floor of the state capital regularly trying to get some of those funded. How does this petition and where the money would come from and how this would be paid for? How would that affect other state needs? It's a great question and one of the things that's written into this program is it's not only for tornado shelters, it's also for school security standards, which we have seen issues with shooters come to school. So we're trying to get a one-size-fits-all program to protect these students, protect these teachers. We looked at the possibility of doing a tax increase and similar to what Governor Fallon has proposed doing a local property tax increase to cover these through local control issue and it was just not that popular with citizens. They wanted us to find a way to fit this in our budget and make it work with existing dollars.

So the franchise tax was the tax that we chose because it has not been collected in several years. It was suspended in 2008. It will be renewed and collections began July 2014. That tax has not been used for any state resources at this point. The money would go into the General Revenue Fund, but there's also an effort underway to repeal the franchise tax. So I feel it would be better to use this, do not repeal it, and direct it to this cause. And the businesses we've spoken to have said they would feel much more at ease knowing their money is going to go to a worthy program like this than simply just going into the General Revenue Fund. The franchise tax will collect over $40 million. The debt service on a $500 million bond, which we're proposing, would be about $30 million. And we're also wanting to use that additional revenue, the $10 million plus, to put together a permanent rebate program for Oklahoma citizens, to be able to apply and reduce the cost of individual shelters in their homes or cover businesses like daycares and mobile home parks and assisted living facilities.

And I know, Joe, that one of the state impact stories that you did was talked about the difficulty people had in getting help to build a private storm shelter for getting refunds and rebates for their own shelters. Right. I think it's important to think back to 1999, because that's really when this latest conversation about school storm shelters, storm shelters in general really began in the modern sense. In 1999, there were tornadoes in Oklahoma, of course, here and more, tornadoes in Kansas. Kansas used a lot of the money from the federal government for disaster mitigation, these hazard mitigation funds. They passed down the states, they do it and hurt Kansas, they do it in tornadoes, I storms. Kansas used a lot of their money to build school storm shelters. Oklahoma didn't. Oklahoma used their money to offer rebates for private and individual shelters. So stark difference between what Oklahoma Kansas did. You know, we both get a lot of tornadoes. So we asked, you know, what's the difference here?

Why did Kansas use their money differently than Oklahoma? Well, it's it's sort of simple in a way that in 1999, Kansas had a their tornado hit at school. It touched the school, didn't cause, you know, as much of the widespread damage that it did here. But it really ignited the people, got them really interested in it, got them really worried about what could happen if a tornado hit a school. So in 1999, you see this happening in Kansas where this this was a reality for them. So that was what really drove their effort to spend that federal money on school shelters. Not the same thing here. So that this money for individual personal private shelters through rebates here in Oklahoma was really born out of a direct experience with what happened in 1999. Because the school wasn't hit in 1989. The school wasn't hit, right? Lots of homes were hit. Lots of homes were hit. Lots of people impacted individually and families. But no widespread school damage like there was in Kansas at the same year. Harold, when we talked to state

emergency management officials, they're the thing they say is shelter in place. Stay where you are, you know, don't don't go to the school even to get your child. Don't go to the big building with a nice big basement to protect yourself. Tell me what you know about that policy and then what you think about that as a research. Well, shelter in place is simply an outgrowth of the idea that you want to you should have a plan for yourself to begin with. And when you have adequate shelter that's close by, usually we think of say five minutes walking distance. I think we saw in May 31st an example of what can happen when a lot of people decide I'm going to go somewhere. And it's the kind of thing that if I'm the only person who leaves and drives away and goes someplace, hey, that's easy. If you know a quarter million of my closest friends all decide to get on I-35 at the same time, that's a big problem. And so the shelter in place is what we think is probably the best way to go about things in large part because there are a lot of issues when you have,

when you get large gatherings of people in a place you have to have security available, you have to worry about injuries in the in one of the tornadoes on May 24th or one of the shelters in May 24th and on 2011 in Norman. We had several people in the emergency room because of dog bites. People had bought their dogs. And so we have lots of issues. I know that the building I work in at the National Weather Center apparently there are over a thousand people there on May 31st. And the forecasters talked about watching pit bulls walk by the forecast windows. And it was one of those. This doesn't seem like a conducive atmosphere to things. And so one of the things that also has happened is that you get more people to confid into the shelter. And at that point, you have a big problem. We've got a whole bunch of people who have left what may not have been the greatest shelter, but was better than being sitting out in their cars out in a parking lot that what they thought would be a better shelter for them. Well, and you've written some herald on this idea that some language that we heard both in 99 and in 2013 was the if you're not below ground, you will not survive this. And I know you

wrote a blog post about that. I thought that was very interesting. Tell me a little bit about your how you're thinking and why that's not good language. Well, we basically we know several things. One is that factually that's just not true. I mean, it's, you know, a tornado is obviously a dangerous place to be in a violent tornado. It was a very dangerous place to be. But when there have been a number of studies done in the number of tornadoes, the May 3rd was one of the best studied cases. And then a tornado in 1990 in Birmingham, Alabama was also very well studied and went and Joplin is the third example. And what they found was it in houses that were rated F4 or F5. And the people who were inside those houses when the damage occurred approximately 1% of them died, 1 to 2% depending on which study you're looking at. And so your chances of survival are pretty good. And the, I mean, they're not as good as your ordinary walking around day to day, but still they're not, if you do something, you've got a good chance. And one of the things that we know that happened on May 3rd that was, it's one of those

stories that will stick with me forever. The May 3rd tornado, one of the, one of the, one of the things my wife actually was the first to notice it and let me know about it was that there were no school children killed at all on that tornado at home. And what it appeared, and we did some survey work with the more public schools, the middle schools and found, or junior highs and found that in fact, most of them had done their tornado safety lesson the week before. And apparently the kids went home, told their parents what to do. And I can speak from experience that night with my daughter, a Norman who was very emphatic about telling me what we should be doing at the time that we were, that the tornado was approaching. And they, but a couple of cases, there was one case in particular that one of the, one of the students' parents weren't home. His, his, what he was supposed to do was you don't go, you don't leave the house until mom and dad get home from work. And he, so he was sitting watching the TV. One of the TV people said, you know, if you can't get an underground, you're going to die. He decided he was going to die. There was nothing to do.

He watched the TV until the power went out when the tornado basically went at the end of the block he was living on. He did nothing at all. And there was up for damage, five houses from him. And I think that's one of those things that we, that we know from lots of experiences of looking at people and disasters. If you tell people, basically, you're going to die, they tend to essentially turn off the message and they don't respond. What we want to tell people is know the basic safety rules and do what you can't get as low as you can, put as many walls between you and the tornado as possible. Ideally, like in my house, we, when we did our addition onto our house, we built a safe room into it. But that if you don't have that still, you know, small interior closet in a house is a, you've got a pretty good chance of survival. I wanted to note now that we originally had two other state lawmakers who were scheduled to be here. My representative's Mark McBride and John Eccles and they have not supported the initiative petition and they told us late last week they had a conflict. But I also asked the governor's spokesman, Alex Wentz, if the governor's office wanted to provide someone to speak about the ballot measure because they had not been supportive

of it either and they also declined. But it was interesting the email I got representative that the reply said the governor quote, neither opposes nor endorses the initiative petition end quote. And as I remember her earlier statements about that, they were stronger to the negative. Do you think, is this a, are we seeing a shift? Are we seeing a change? And why would you think that would happen? 80% of the public supports shelters and schools. And when elected officials are up for a reelection and they go against the will of the people, it's pretty evident that they probably need to adjust their thinking. Do you think you'll see growing support as, as, you know, if we do see this get on the ballot, do you think we'll see some more people kind of turning around on this? We've seen a shift in the discussion because of the efforts that the Attorney General made to rewrite the ballot title and some of the comments the governor made earlier, they threw some doubt and tried to lead this down a partisan fight. It made it look like it was Democrats versus Republicans

and that's absolutely not the case. The chairperson of our campaign, Kathy Turner is a registered Republican. In fact, most of the membership of our committee are registered Republicans. Even the high school student from Fletcher who is working on our campaign, she registered three weeks ago because she turned 18 and she registered as a Republican. So I'm not happy that politics has been brought into this. It's unfortunate. If people have another method to do this, they should step up and bring their program forward. So far, all we've heard is private fundraising or let the local school districts pay for it in the fashion that's been done for years, which is not acceptable. And that leads right to my next question for you is, you know, that some of the language we have heard from a governor's office in particular is this should be a local issue and we've seen school districts around the state, not a whole lot, but have seen several, including Woodward, where they are putting that before the people for a bond issue to create safe places

for their kids. And as you've said, it's not just about storm shelters. It's also about, you know, intruders and things like that. The state typically, you know, doesn't build school building. So why is it important for state government to pay for this? Why are you behind this? Why, why does it have to be that state money? Why do you think that's the way it should be? The state has placed limitations on the school districts on what they can do with bonding mechanisms. You cannot bond for more than your school district can pay. That makes perfect sense. You should not be able to go into debt and not be able to pay that debt down. There are some exceptions where you can go to the exercise board and get that. But people have to remember that any bond issue that's voted on by a local school district must pass by 60%. It's tough to pass these bond issues. And with what we've heard from the governor's office with expanding that debt limitation, again, we're putting the school districts at risk for giving them more debt than they

could possibly have a off in the future. I don't think that's responsible. The state requires students being schools. They provide benefits for the teachers. They're essentially state employees when it's convenient for the state to recognize them as state employees. And with so many school districts at their cap on bonding, I think the next level should go to the state to provide an avenue and doing this $500 million bond issue. When you match it with a local match, which the office of emergency management at the state, requested there be a skin in the game and were the exact words. And we did, we couldn't disagree with that. People need to build within their means. The money that would be brought in from the $500 million plus the local match plus any matches that could be brought in from FEMA will get us to the roughly $800 million that we need to build shelters in all 1109 school facilities in the state that currently need them. And the figure I remember from the governor's office, in fact, while I was doing a story for

NPR on this, was two billion dollars. There's quite a difference between the figure you quoted and that one is- Governor's wrong. Okay. And why is that? We've had experts that helped with Joplin. It came in and gave us the numbers of what they collected through the survey that we sent out. Course lab and a couple of other organizations. When we didn't have that information available, the State Department of Education did not have it. The office of emergency management didn't have it. We went to some private organizations and conducted a survey of every school in the state. And we had 100% response. They gave us the breakdown of which schools had shelters, which ones did not, which ones had some type of shelter, even though it might not be FEMA 361 standard. And going off the data, we had engineers and architects go through and estimate how much is needed and they came up with roughly $800 million. The $2 billion, I think, is overshot

by just an early estimation that was not based on any fact. And Harold, whenever I was in Woodward, one of the things that this focus to look and see what kind of shelters we do have caused them to realize that the primary place they were sheltering their high school kids in was actually very unsafe. It was a concrete, well-designed, constructed building, but the engineer went in there and said, one wall goes, it all goes. And so we're talking about, even though we're talking about who's going to pay for school shelters, really all our schools and examination for where is the safest place, don't it? Indeed they do. I'm part of an effort that we're a group of us are trying to go through all the Norman schools right now, simply because those of us in the Weather Center, it's local to us. And in fact, we started when my wife, who's a teacher at one of the elementary schools, or one of the middle schools and the National Weather Service's morning coordinator,

me and our all-just son goes there, we got asked if we would mind going in and looking at that. No shortage of meteorologists in Norman. And so we've gone in and we've started that effort over the next few weeks, but we're going through all the Norman schools. I think one of the things that we're hoping we can put together out of that is that, assuming that the initiative petition passes and there's lots of money, it's still not going to happen, we're not going to get shelters everywhere in 12 months. And so one of the things we're hoping to try to do is to put together something that will help people identify where their best places are. Because in fact, we could tell when we looked at the plant at my wife's school, there were some aspects of that that were legacy probably from 30 years ago. And the building had had serious reconstruction since then, and there were some places that were really awful that were being used. And so I think we've got a much better plan for them, and we really need to figure out a way to put all that information that we're gathering together to provide someone with guidance for here's what I should be doing to protect in school or any other public facility, or even private facility to think about the

things that they need to be doing to make everyone their place as safe as possible. Well, I want to take a little sidetrack here with private homes because we're talking about sheltering in place a little bit as well. But I know that I was in Key West on a vacation recently and drove by and saw some new construction. And there were all these things, there were these straps and things tying every bit of the frame hard to the foundation. Joe, what have you found out about how building codes are we are we building anything you say for as anything changed as far as you know? No, we're not. On, you know, maybe on the margins a little bit, you know, after the 1999, tornado, a lot of engineers, structural engineers came in and surveyed the damage and more, and looked at how homes were constructed, and examined it several years after, you know, the tornado in 1999 to see if they were building any different, if anything had changed. And at that time, no, they came out with reports in 2001, 2002, I believe, that said, no, they were

basically rebuilding the same style of house, style of home that was there when it was destroyed. So now, after the tornadoes this year, engineers going back in, we met and talked to some of them Tim Marshall, down at Hague Engineering in Texas, and he did some of the early reporting from that 1999 thing, and he was out pointing out to me some of these construction flaws, and he wasn't even optimistic that even again, after this time, that homes would be built any differently. You know, this comes down to some building code questions, local building codes, the state, thing that's different between 1999 and now is we now have a state agency, the Uniform Building Code Commission, which wasn't there in 1999. It came on board in 2011, so this is supposed to set a minimum standard for building codes throughout the state. It's a slow process, a lot of people have to be involved contractors, these types of things, but it's important to know

that right now the standard in more is a 2006 level building code, which, and for the state, it's a 2009 level building code, so even if they adopted the current building code, it doesn't address any of these issues. There's no building code currently that addresses tornado winds, tornado level winds, or anything like that, so there's some talk about adopting a stricter code that you can have changes to the building code, that you can call for more stuff, call for additions, and they make all sorts of specialized additions to the building code, but nothing for tornadoes. So I think Harold would probably back me up, and we've certainly read his reports on it, but in a net 5 tornado, most of the damage to the house isn't from an F5. It's from an F3, so if you can build your house to survive an F3, like Harold alluded to, just a minute ago, you have a really reasonable chance of being able to survive a storm. You don't have to build

a F5-proof bunker home to be able to survive these things. You have to be able to withstand an F3. And one of the things that, to me, is in some sense, really sad about all that, is that, I mean, the additional cost to dramatically improve your structural survivability, you know, to attaching the walls to the foundations, attaching the roof to the walls, well, is, you know, less than 1% additional cost on the building of a house. I mean, it's just not that much money, uh, and it would be, and you can do a whole lot with just very little. Is there a legislative will to make something like that happen? Do you think? There's been discussion for years, oh, start by saying Alabama is the only state in the nation that requires schools to have storm shelters. And on polling that was done by Senator Paul, the citizens still did not want to have any kind of mandate saying that they want to, that they have to have shelters. The will of the people is not there and therefore I'm certain the will of the legislature would not be there to pass any kind of mandate on the citizens.

Really, the only discussion that's come up as far as what people would support is looking at the shelters in schools. All right. Well, we've talked a lot, and we have a lot of people out here that may want to ask you a question. Make a brief comment. Brian and Jim, Brian Hardzinski is our operations director, Jim Johnson, our program manager at KGOU. They have microphones, and please do speak into the microphone because this is radio, and it doesn't work very good if we can't hear you. So I invite you to just raise your hand, they'll bring a mic around, and you can ask your questions to any of us up here. I'm Danie Legge. Christopher Legge was my son that died at Plaza Towers, and the information you have received for Oklahoma in 99. Kelly was blown away, which is an elementary school, and Westmore High School was blown away, and both of them were rebuilt back with FEMA shelters in them. Why Kansas still works at a different build zone than Oklahoma did

when we had schools lost in both states. I'm a little confused on. You know, I don't know. I do know that if you look back at the archives of the news in Kansas, I think maybe it was, I don't know whether there was a population question or a media question on what got coverage. I do know there, when we talk to the emergency management officials in Kansas, they were very clear that this was all anybody could talk about in Kansas in 1999, where the schools just scared everybody to death in Kansas. I don't know why that wasn't the case in 1999 when schools were damaged. Why, I didn't reach that critical mass. Maybe it was because so many homes were destroyed that it was just a bigger percentage of the damage and the loss that people were a lot more focused on that. I don't know. I know in Kansas, certainly not the kind of damage we saw in 1999 and more. So maybe just the level of devastation in 1999 and more, a lot more focused on homes,

people dying in homes, and these types of things. In Kansas, it just really touched off a response to the school. I do know though that these are state officials in two states that made a decision on how to spend their federal money. I don't know where that pressure comes from and the politics that they go into that, perhaps, Representative Norman knows more about that. But I do know that was the impetus for it. That was why they decided to spend the money that way. And I have a unique perspective from that area. We have 12-year term limits in the legislature in Oklahoma. But in that year, I was a legislative staffer. I served as a staffer for the House of Representatives for seven years prior to being elected. So I was able to be present. And at that point, the legislature was concerned about getting the necessary funding for rebuilding period. They had no input specifically because these tornadoes happen at the end of the legislative session.

It's impossible to file legislation at the very end. And I remember that a shell bill had to be stripped of the language. And the language was put in place into that bill to help with the rebuilding and provide the funding for emergency management to do the rebuilding was necessary. There was no discussion whatsoever on how to direct that. And then by the time the next year rolled around, it was off people's minds. The difference that happened this year was we did have an extra week. And I had been working on storm shelter language for three years going back to the tornado that hit Chick-a-Shay where I tried to get mobile home parks to have a mandate to have storm shelters. And so I don't want to take credit for it, but that was on my mind. And I drove the discussion early on for the need for shelters. And that's what's kept it on the forefront and the discussion. Another question? Hello, I'm Linda Evans. I live in Norman, just five

miles south of where the tornado struck in more. And I went to school here and grew up here and have been a teacher in our public schools. I have a comment first and then a question for Representative Dorman about the financing of the shelters. First of all, why the state, we had a question earlier about why would it be appropriate or not appropriate for the state to fund the building of these tax shelters. Sorry, tax shelters. Everybody is looking for one these days. No, the tornado shelters in our schools. And then it should be local. Well, I've been hearing, I always hear local. Nobody wants to part with their money, but I say why wouldn't it be a state issue? These are our children. They are all Oklahoma's and they are all our children. And what greater resource do we have than our own

children? And we have an obligation to provide safety to our children. Now, I have a question. Of course, everybody is wondering where are we going to get the money? You know, whose responsibility it is? We always pass the back. I don't want to pay for it. You pay for it. That kind of thing. So it never gets done. But you say that there's already a plan in place or a stream as I was reading online. There's already a franchise that's not being used. We're collecting tax monies already for those franchise tax. And what is that based on? Like cars, motels, recreation. I don't know what franchise is. I think we're sitting there telling us giving us, give us a brief education on the franchise tax and how that fits into your plan. Okay. First, on your comment, I just want to say amen. You're exactly right. And our children are most our most precious commodity. The franchise

tax is currently the tax that's collected on corporations in the state of Oklahoma. It was set aside several years ago and replaced with a business activity tax. That was a very unpopular tax because it shifted the burden to smaller businesses. The franchise tax will be reinstated July 2014. And it is charged on corporations that do business in state of Oklahoma for more than $2 million worth of physical expense. And we have over 40,000 corporations, businesses in the state that could qualify to pay the franchise tax. But there is a waiver in place for any business that their tax liability would be less than $250, which would be that $2 million mark I mentioned on the business. Those corporations do not pay the franchise tax. It's currently waived. So this is only a tax on mid-level to larger corporations. And even the largest corporations, the major players like the energy companies AT&T, they are capped at $20,000 no matter how big

their business might be. So that will bring in about $40 million. And the collections begin on that July 2014. And that was the funding stream that we chose to use for this bond issue. We take $30 million of that franchise tax annually and use that to pay the credit card debt essentially on the bond. Think of the bond like a credit card. We'll leverage $500 million up front because we want every school to be treated equally. We want every school to have the money up front. You shouldn't have to wait and line $30 million a year and hope your school is selected next based on some type of need. The reason we need to do a bond on this is so every school will have the money immediately and they can begin their construction and get these shelters in place as soon as possible. And I was exactly right. We're still looking at a year away before everything could fall into place. We're going to go through another tornado season. And if you think about what happened Sunday, November 17th, the tornadoes hit Indiana, Illinois,

Missouri. Two schools were hit during the daytime hours. If that had been on a week day, there was no telling what would happen in these other states that aren't as weather prepared as Oklahoma. One teacher was injured while she was at school on Sunday preparing her lesson plans the next day. They were fortunate. It was not a week day when those tornadoes hit up there. Another question, Jim? Mike Bass from Norman. I'm a little concerned with how minimal we kind of make the sound a little bit. I think that Alabama and Oklahoma do lead the nation in F5 tornadoes both states and our meteorology guy can probably congratulate that, right? It's that's approximately right that it's although I don't, you know, that's a interesting question. Yeah, you know, I don't think though that like California or Florida go around and decide that because of the minimal amount of people killed or what it goes on, they still have standards that they build in those states to make ensure the safety of the citizens because they have earthquakes to deal with, they have hurricanes to deal with.

We have our situation too, which is tornadoes. If we're going to lead the country in F5 tornadoes, which we do, I do think it's a pretty serious issue, no matter how many people get hurt. I mean, our population base is pretty small. As it grows, as more people come here, as we spread out more, that's going to be more open. You mentioned the housing you'd live in, apartments and mobile homes don't account for that. I mean, you're stuck there, you know, you don't have a lot of options. So my concern is, I mean, I get the state's attitude towards we want to eliminate ourselves tax, we want to, you know, try to push business and whatever, you know, what better to me message to send a business than we want to protect the people that move here as businesses because we care about you and turn that to a positive and try to fund that in a certain way because we don't do that. I mean, I think we're just playing with the time bomb, it's going to go off. We've just been lucky, folks. If we haven't been hit hard, we're going to, at some point, do that. I mean, Tuscaloosa got nailed. But the job right now has to have schools. They did pass it to where they do have all their schools, have storm shelters.

And you bring up a really good point that, again, a little bit of a sidetrack, Kate and I, were at a forum three or four weeks ago. And I represented it from the state chamber of commerce. They were actually in Las Vegas, you know, selling Oklahoma to businesses when the tornado hit here. And she talked about just how hard that was to be that far away. But then the interesting thing she said, which I had not thought of before, and I'm native Oklahoma. But she also said, that's one of the things that businesses are concerned about when they look at relocating to Oklahoma is the effect of the weather. And if you look at our insurance rates, especially for, you know, for how much insurance, because that were really really high. So that's a very interesting comment. And it has been, and your intuition is shared by the state chamber of commerce, even. Yeah, I had a, I have a friend who's the, I guess he's the local president of the Otachi plant in Norman. And the week after the tornado, there's this desperate phone call,

you know, Japan is very concerned about the plant in Norman. And should we expand, should we close it, anything it's like, okay, I have to explain this to Japanese now. You know, and that was a really, that's a, that's a, I think you're exactly right. And I was, I was talking to a politician who were a main nameless, who was expressing some frustration. He said, you know, we don't even require helmets for motorcycles. You really think we're going to get people to go along with, we're going to have you pay, you know, this to do something, is that's a, you know, the, the culture is very opposed to, you know, any kind of requirements for, for public safety. That's one of the issues we do face. And the tourism director got a $40,000 pay raise, and hopefully she can earn that by figuring out a way to better brand Oklahoma. So we're not tied to tornadoes. Another question? Hi, I'm Stacey McCabe, and my son Nicholas McCabe was also at Plaza Towers. And in 99, we should have looked at this. We're right in the big middle of tornado

alley. This should have been a very important issue at that time. That's where those people should have chosen, whomever chose where that money needed to go. They did not choose the right thing. So now seven children have died in the state of Oklahoma, and now we get to decide it's the Republicans against the Democrats to who he with all that, okay? My seven-year-old didn't care who was a Republican or a Democrat. He cared that he went to Plaza Towers Elementary and stood high every day because he thought he was safe. That's where we left our children because they've always been told to us that that's a safe place. Our babies died with their heads tucked between their legs and their hands on the backs of their head to be crushed like a bunch of little rocks because of the Republicans and the Democrats making these choices. Now it's time for it to stop before everybody else's children die as well and not just for storm shelters, but for the idiot

that's going to come in here and slaughter our children. Do we need to wait until that happens as well before we make it mandatory that these schools be locked down when their children are in there? Wake up people. It shouldn't even be a discussion. And there are, I mentioned Woodward in particular, and I spent a pretty good amount of time there talking about their plan and they're checking all those boxes you just listed at the local school district level. So there are options, I would say. Representative Dorman has an option that where the state gets involved in Woodward, the local district got involved, and as Representative Dorman also said, you know, you're open to plans. The thing was that it was left to the municipalities. It was left to the school boards. They didn't do anything. So now the big boys need to do it and we need to get it done this time because May is right around the corner. Yeah, and it comes every year, doesn't it?

It does. And we don't even have to think about May now. Look at Illinois. There's was in November. And above that, too, you have to remember this is also looking at dealing with terrorist activities in Bartlesville. Then 24 hours of Sandy Hook, there was a 19 year old that was planning a mass shooting in auditorium. That student was convicted September 25th. And you never know when that's going to happen, where that is going to happen. So the tornadoes, we know, their tornadoes happen every month of the year. They just happen to be the most frequent in May. We have an average of 55 tornadoes that hit in Oklahoma. We don't know what severity it will be. But in the shooter type situations, you simply do not know when and where that will happen. And just I view all of this like an insurance policy. You hope every single day you never have to use a shelter, but you're certainly going to be glad you have that when you need it. Yeah. Yeah, she brought up 1999 saying this should have been done in 1999 when we had a big tragedy and reason

to have these conversations. We talked a minute earlier about why Kansas did things differently, why they spent their money differently and had the priorities differently. Representative, maybe you can talk to me a little bit about how that works. Who's in on these decisions at the Department of Emergency Management aside from the storm shelter funding issue. But on these decisions about how this federal money gets spent, how this emergency emergency prep money, because there's state appropriations for that in general too. How these decisions get made on how to prioritize this spending. Who's in the room in 1999 or 2013 when they're saying here's how we're going to spend this money from the federal government or from the state coffers. Out of 149 legislators, there are probably four to five, maybe six that have the ability to designate where funding is going to go. They draw up the budget plans behind closed doors. They bring them to their caucuses, present them. If they can get a majority vote of their caucus, make sure it will pass, then they bring it before the rest of the body. Unfortunately, that's the way it's always been done

and it's not the right way to do it. It wasn't right when the Democrats did it. It's not right now when the Republicans are doing it. The same old situation just doesn't work. And the discussion on how this is spent is really generated back to the legislators from the will of the people. If the citizens will contact their legislators and indicate there is a strong desire to do something, that impacts legislators' views more than anything else. I don't know how many people reached out to the legislators in 1999 and said, this is something we need to do. There was a strong emphasis, as you said in Kansas, where people wanted to deal with the school situation there. Here, it seemed like there was more of a discussion on preparing individuals. The Office of Emergency Management at back at that point determined they wanted to spend most of their money on individual shelters. And OEM is opposed to community shelters in general. We saw the community shelters were shut down in Norman. They're driving that direction, just like we had said. 1,200 people showed up at the National Weather Center on May 31st and they only have the

facilities there for their employees. So people were standing in a glass atrium and the worst would have happened if they would have taken a direct hit. We have got to do what we can to make sure that these facilities where individuals are at during the day are protected, schools, nursing homes, etc. But we've also got to drive that discussion and generate the interest on individuals but storm shelters in their own homes. But the Department of Emergency Management is not a legislatively driven agency, right? It's a committee. It's an executive agency. Right. So when they're getting together and saying, hey, we've got $100 million in the federal government to spend on disaster mitigation, how should we divide this up? Who's in that room? Who's making those decisions? Do you know? Ultimately, the director would make that call and currently it's Albert Ashwood and he's got a good team over there, Mike Lannout and Kelly Kane. They have a good organization. They're recognized around the nation as one of the best because of how many disasters we have to deal with

here in Oklahoma. It's more than tornadoes. One year Cato County, one of my counties, was the most affected counties by disasters in the United States between floods, flyers, ice storms, etc. So they get lots of practice and dealing with federal funding. My impression is that they feel, even though they're not directly responding to voters, they feel the political wins. Because in 99, when the emphasis seemed to be more on individual shelters, that was what they wrote the grants to FEMA for in the use of the mitigation money. And this time, they're looking at funding of schools. So that's been a... Another question from our audience. Got to hear it in front. So you get these 160,000 signatures you need. What happens next? Do you still have my question? I was going to ask that next. The petition drives are based on whether you're filing statutory changes or constitutional languages. And it's based on percentage of the last election for the governor.

So by that statistical formula, we have to come up with 155,000 and a few hundred signatures of registered Oklahoma voters. So we must get more than that because many people will sign the petition, not realize they're no longer a registered voter. I've had a couple of people who have signed signatures. I'm certain that is not their real name. And those will be invalidated. We have to get the proper amount within 90 days. Once we get that proper amount, we file that with the Secretary of State. There can be a challenge on it. If there's no challenge, Secretary of State adopts it and we go on, the governor sets the day of the election. With the way things have gone with this, I'm expecting someone will file a challenge on this just because there's been no easy path so far on this petition drive. So once we get past that hurdle, verifying we have enough signatures, the governor must set the date for the election. She is compelled to do that. We do not know when she will set the day of the election, but it would have to be before the next general election in November or on that date. And there will be a campaign for that,

just like what you would see on any other of the state questions. I'm certain there will be forces aligned against this that don't want to use this revenue or simply just don't want to see this program going to affect. There will be citizens that will work hard to make sure that that constitutional amendment does pass. And we'll just have to leave that up to the voters. Ultimately, the voters will decide if we pass a constitutional amendment to help fund storm shelters and schools. And one thing I would also say is that because the chief executive of the governor has the power to set the dates for those elections, they sometimes will strategically set them at times so they don't affect other elections. So it can be a bit of a trick to see when that would happen. It's not easy to figure that. Yeah, go ahead and follow up. Well, my opinion is we talk a lot about the legislators and politics and one party and the other. What are we doing to get those signatures? Do each of you have 20 names written or 20 people

you can go talk to and sign? Then before you leave, grab a paper and make sure you get 20 signatures. That's we have the power to do that. And if anybody out there has any interest in helping collect signatures, I didn't mention this before, take shelteroclehome.com is our website. We have a Facebook page. Any individuals can message us and send us an email. We will send them a sheet. Anyone who wants to help with this effort can help get those 20 signatures. But we need people to help out with this. This truly is driven by the people. It's an all-balling to your effort. The only way this will be successful is if Oklahoma step up and get 20 signatures. And we're going to close there. And I thank all of you for coming out tonight and also the panelists. And I want to be sure to let you know that tonight's meeting was made possible by the staff of KGOU, our chief engineer, Patrick Roberts with all our sound, Kate Carlton, our trade-off project reporter,

who is storing on this Brian and Jim with the microphones or General Magic, Karen Hulp, who brings us money to do things like this all the time. And then also Jolly Brown and Laura Nell with our development underwriting staff. So we really appreciate everybody's support in coming out tonight. And of course, this also ahead of the storm, the Oklahoma Tattoe Project is also funded from the Corporation of Public Broadcasting. And I want to thank our panelists. Joe Wertz, we're staying back at Oklahoma, her books, Nationals, Vistramans Laboratory, and State Representative Joe Dorman. And thank you again for taking the time to come out. And learn more about who should pay for school storm shelters. And be sure to check out our homepage KGOU.org. You'll find lots of information there on the tornadoes and also our Oklahoma Tattoe Project. Have a very good evening. You've been listening to a panel discussion recorded November 19th at the more norm in

Technology Center's South Penn campus in Oklahoma City. You can find more information and download the audio of this discussion from the Oklahoma tornado projects website tornado.kgou.org. The views and opinions expressed this hour do not necessarily reflect those of KGOU, its staff, or its licensee, the University of Oklahoma. Special thanks to KGOU's Chief Engineer Patrick Roberts for recording this conversation. Stay tuned next for here and now with National News from NPR and local headlines from KGOU. For Oklahoma Voices and the Oklahoma tornado project, I'm Kate Carlton.