After patching a financial disaster of their own making, the Oklahoma legislature is observing the scandal of Terry Cline's mismanagement of the dept. of Health. Cline has survived 3 administrations and managed to keep getting top appointments from governors and agency boards. But his fiscal sloppiness finally caught up with him. He quickly submitted his resignation and the board of the state health dept. quickly accepted it. Without missing a beat, Preston Doerflinger jumped at the opportunity to diversify his portfolio and land a more stable position than the OMES (a position which will end when a new governor is selected in a year). This gives Doerflinger some protection because the legislature killed a reform which would have allowed the governor to step in and make a replacement. The legislature further contributed to the problems over several years by not conducting a rigorous rotation of State Performance Audits. To their credit, the legislature recently created their own commission and mandated that the top 20 agencies in the state go through a State Performance Audit by the legislative commission. |
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Sooner Politics
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