By Courtney Bell, Oklahoma Voice
OKLAHOMA CITY — A state governing body will allocate up to $150,000 to a private Georgia university despite concerns from some lawmakers that Oklahomans intended for the funding to remain in state.
The Oklahoma Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust’s decision could bring the total money paid to Emory University since August 2022 to nearly $1 million, according to an Oklahoma Voice analysis of the agency’s spending.
Records obtained through open records requests show TSET, which oversees a $2.2 billion public trust endowment, has allocated Emory Centers for Public Health Training and Technical Assistance over $930,000 to provide technical assistance and training services, including creating and maintaining an online learning community for public health information.
The most recent allocation, which could reach $150,000, will enable Emory to provide other grantees of tobacco settlement dollars technical assistance and training support in the current budget year, said TSET spokesperson Thomas Larson.
TSET, which was created by voters in 2000, is responsible for overseeing the spending of proceeds from Oklahoma’s portion of a multi-state settlement with the tobacco industry. A state board allocates the interest from the fund toward priorities designed to improve public health.
Much of TSET’s expenditures — which totaled nearly $82 million last fiscal year — remained in Oklahoma and were allocated to local nonprofits, counties and public universities, making the Emory expenditures an outlier, Oklahoma Voice’s analysis found.
Larson said nothing prohibits the agency from allocating money to out-of-state entities as long as it benefits the health of Oklahomans.
He said the agency first chose Emory to provide services in 2011 as part of a joint initiative between TSET, the State Department of Health and the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services.
Emory University had a reputation nationally as a “premier knowledge expert and technical assistance provider for comprehensive tobacco control services and strategies,” he said.
Beginning in 2015, Larson said TSET began sending additional money to Emory to create and maintain the OK In The Know training portal, a website that contains public health training and networking information.
TSET on Friday is discontinuing the training portal that Emory developed following a decline in use, Larson said. However, he said the agency is still contracting Emory’s training services because its “deep experience and expertise benefits Oklahomans through TSET’s partners and grantees.”
Larson said the agency did not go out for bids before awarding Emory the contract to build the website. He said the university was already under contract for training services and offered two learning system options for TSET to choose between.
The agency did not select an in-state university because Oklahoma’s institutions of higher learning lacked the expertise to create the training resource, he said.
TSET does contract with the University of Oklahoma’s Hudson College of Public Health to operate the Oklahoma Tobacco Helpline, which helps Oklahomans quit smoking, and to evaluate ongoing TSET programs, Larson said.
State Rep. John Pfeiffer, the House deputy floor leader, said he believes OU or Oklahoma State University, which are both nationally recognized academic research institutions, had the expertise to build and operate the training portals.
“If all that it is is a collaborative website with resource sharing, there’s no reason that any university with a public health division shouldn’t be able to do that,” Pfeiffer said.
Pfeiffer, R-Mulhall, believes TSET has been successful at curtailing tobacco use, but he said some of the agency’s other expenses are questionable. For instance, he said the money allocated to Emory would be better spent supporting programs, including Oklahoma’s 211 helpline, that assists in connecting Oklahomans to services, including health care access.
Pfeiffer said he hopes TSET prioritizes keeping its spending in Oklahoma.
“If there’s something that isn’t offered in the state of Oklahoma that they absolutely need, then yeah, sure,” Pfeiffer said, “but if it’s something that could be done just as easily through our partners here in the state, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t do it here.”
House Appropriations Chair Trey Caldwell, R-Faxon, said the money going to Emory was “a little bit concerning.”
He said he could understand if TSET sent money out of state if there was not a local entity that could complete the services, but he said in-state medical groups like OU Health, OSU Medicine and the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation are capable local options.
“The University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University are both flagships and are world class when it comes to not only public health, but also when it comes to technology, when it comes to websites,” Caldwell said. “Basically, there’s nothing that they can’t do on a world-class level, in my opinion. So I do find it troubling when we’re choosing to send almost a million dollars of an Oklahoma asset and not continuing to reinforce our local institutions.”
Caldwell has recently led efforts to broaden the Legislature’s influence over TSET and its spending. Last year, the Oklahoma Supreme Court found unconstitutional a measure he authored that would have term-limited the agency’s governing board.
During the most recent session, Caldwell authored legislation to consolidate the agency’s governing structure and move a billion dollars of TSET’s money into a fund the Legislature could spend. Both measures failed to advance out of the Legislature.
Sen. Mary Boren, D-Norman, said she was not worried about the Emory contract, and said TSET’s decision to outsource it was likely a consequence of “political backlash” to certain types of research in Oklahoma. She said behavioral health research, like addiction recovery, does not see as much state investment as other areas she says are less political, like cancer research or diabetes.
“In that environment, I’m not surprised that our folks who are charged with tobacco cessation and healthy living have to pay a lot of money and have to go outside of Oklahoma for the help that they need,” Boren said.
