Good morning, good morning, good morning, and welcome, welcome, welcome.
It's time for our community connection right here on K one. The one
you trust and judge, Strum is with it. He is the incumbent in
District ten. Tomorrow is a big day. It's election day and a lot
of people who've already cast their ballots for early balloting. He find good on
you, but I'm kind of a traditionalist. I do it on election Tuesday.
That's kind of im important. Even though this is a primary, it's
a big day for a lot of races. It's a huge day. It's
a big day in this area, big day in my district, big day.
You know, when you get up here, most of these elections,
most of these seats will be chosen in the Republican primary. You know,
there are two Republicans in my race. There's no Democrats. So tomorrow,
tomorrow's the end. People will say, you know, I don't have a
voice in government, or I didn't you know, I didn't didn't have a
chance to to get someone that represents me in there. Well, tomorrow's tomorrow.
You're picking your your state senator, You're picking your corporation commissioner, you're
picking your state representative, you're picking in you O Sage County, you're picking
a sheriff, you're picking your county clerk. Uh, these all these races
are being decided tomorrow and there's yeah, there's commissioners in each county too,
county commissioners in both counties. That's right. Uh. People keep asking about
this thing called dark money that appears in campaigns, And first of all,
what is it for the layman who's not too familiar with that term, you
know, really dark money. When we talk about that, we're really talking
about out of state money that comes in. And it gets confused. People
will say, once you hear all the time, is I'm not taking any
lobbyist money or I'm not taking any pack money. Well, first of all,
lobbyists don't really you know, they're just an employee of a pack.
They don't really write checks. But when it comes to packs, they're political
action committees. They're the political arm of organization to reach out and say we
want to help this candidate. You know, to me, it sounds great
when you read it on paper, but when the ag pack, when Farm
Bureau's agpack reaches out and says we support you, and what you're doing and
we want to help in your campaign. They represent over one hundred and seventy
five thousand farmers and ranchers in the state of Oklahoma, and that that organization
say and we appreciate what you've done and we want to help you is great.
You know, I drew a lot of support from the State Chamber,
from the Tulsa Chamber, from the Oklahoma City Chamber, you know, and
the chambers represent three hundred and over three hundred and fifty thousand small businesses in
the state of Oklahoma, and they said, you know, we really appreciate
what you've done to help those businesses grow and thrive. You know, we've
done a lot in this state to help individuals or you know, small groups
of people start businesses, to lend to you know, a more entrepreneurial spirit
in this state, give people the opportunity to go out there and start their
own business and run it successfully. And so, you know, I appreciate
when those organizations reach out and say we want to help, we appreciate what
you've done, we want to see you continue to do the work that you've
done. And like I say, I if they support me, you know,
I'm glad. I think you're doing something right. And we you know,
like even here we have the Barbsville Firefighters. You know, I've done
a lot of work here to make sure our fire departments and our police departments
are well equipped and well trained, and you know, going so far as
helping to build the burn tower out here so that our guys didn't have to
spend the money and the time and the effort to go to Ada or Oklahoma
City or Burns Flat all the way out western Oklahoma. Those organizations can train
right here in Bartlesville, and that's been great for the entire northeast region of
Oklahoma because those different departments and the different organizations, your emergency management, your
fire departments, or police departments can come right here and train at home.
And I just I think that's a great deal. I've been glad to work
on that kind of deal. Well, you kind of know that one at
I level. You've been a firefighter for a long time I have, you
know, I tell people I was a certified firefighter before I had my driver's
license, and it was one of those kind of loopholes, but they said
back then you had to go kind of get certified to drive the brush trucks
and and we were I think it was about a week before my sixteenth birthday,
and they said, well, there's really nothing on here that that said
you have to do that. You know, that was back in the day.
I guess. I won't say how long ago that was, but but
you know, and I tell people too, it's important, and I'll take
the moment, take a plug. Get involved with your local fire department,
your local volunteer fire department. I hear people say all the time like,
well I don't know anything about that. Well, nobody did when they started.
And it takes a village to run those volunteer fire departments and so and
there's so many out here and they do so much good. And I tell
people too, you can help a volunteer fire department. You don't have to
be on a truck or on a hose, you know. Come we're out
there in those departments changing out a master cylinder, you know, or fixing
a pump or fixing a motor. And you got guys that will build hot
rods in their garage and say I can't help. No, No, you
can help, because we've got to replace a carburetor a on a pump Motor
and there's yeah. So I love being a part of those organizations and helping
those because they really do. I mean, they helped the community so much.
Now when people see you back home, they know you as Judd Strum,
they know you as the District ten representative. They know that you're going
to represent their their views, their issues, their concerns in Oklahoma City.
What else do you do in Oklahoma City? You've got a committee that you're
a part of. So do I serve on several committees, and I inject
myself into many many committees. I try to go to as many committee meetings
as possible to watch what's coming through the capital. But you know, when
I went to Oklahoma City, good friend of mine set the most important thing
that you do in that building is as you decide as a representative, especially
as representative working on the budget, how you spend Oklahoma's tax dollars. You
want the service to create the service people expect from their government. You want
to do it effectively and efficiently. And I took that to heart in just
my second term. I mean I work so hard and injected myself into so
many of those things that it's very rare, but in just my second term,
I was named the Chairman of General Government for the work that i'd done
there on the budget and on on taxation and on spending and on you know,
working in those agencies to help create a better service. And I've served
there for four years now and we have we've been able to make you know,
we've improved how your government finds and what we get out of that dollar
just just leaps and bounds. And so I'm proud to have been a part
of that. And you know, there's still so much more work to do.
And one of the things we say in the Capitol were on the in
session, you know, four days a week for four months, and I
think this year it was sixty seven days we were actually in the capitol and
we considered over three thousand, five hundred bills in that time in sixty four
days. And we build it almost thirteen twelve and a half billion dollar budget
from scratch. So we're busy. But at the same time, if you
make it your goal to be an advocate for your people, there are so
many other things that you want to get involved in. You know, when
someone calls me and says, hey, the tax Commission is not answering their
phone. You can bet I'm going to be over at the taximission figuring out
why and trying to fix it. When when we got word that, you
know, a young person would graduate from Career Tech and it would take almost
one hundred and twenty days to get your license to go and cut hair,
you know, or provide the service you've just learned to get your license from
the state. I mean on Monday, I was in the cosmetology building down
there, trying to figure out why this is taken so long, what can
we do to fix it? And within a week you have that shortened down
to i'd say a more acceptable span of time. But really, I've told
people, by the end of this next year, I want that down to
where you can graduate, get on the internet, give them your credentials,
print off a temporary file or a temporary certification, and go to work the
next day. And that's the kind of thing we need to be working on
down there. And one of the things I appreciate about this position is being
able to advocate for my people and be be able to advocate for you know,
not just the people of District ten, which is the job, but
you really affect the whole state, and I think we're moving the state forward
in that. Digitization has been a big thing. You know, the entire
state government used to revolve around file cabinets and file clerks. You went to
Oklahoma City and you stood in line and someone will go get your file and
you get it out and you'd work on it. We can do that all
digitally now and to have the opportunity to change the way the government works.
Now, hopefully within the next year, you'll be able to go into service
Oklahoma and stand and talk to a person right here in Bartlesville and get any
of your issues handled right there. And we all thought, you know,
oh great, this will be on the internet, and this will be so
much easier. I don't like doing things on the internet. A lot of
times I want to go talk to a person and I might have two or
three issues and I want to get them handled. So I'm glad to have
been able to handle those kind of things. Very good, Very good.
Now with your role as the chairman on the government General government, you get
to really look over the budget quite carefully. You're one of the first people
that gets to all that. I always said it was one of the most
important things to me to have a seat at the big table. Yep,
and I do, and I try to contribute as much as possible. I
think that you know, some of your budget directors, especially your chairman,
probably probably think sometimes I might even get a little bit annoying in there,
but it is important. Somebody's got to say no. Well, somebody's got
to say no, and always say and I've got to quit saying it.
But somebody's got to call the baby ugly on some of those things. And
it doesn't doesn't, you know, hurt my feelings to get up and do
that, because these the decisions that are made down there really affect every every
family in the state of Oklahoma. And so having a having a seat at
that table, you know, especially a rural representative from District ten, having
a seat at that table is really a big deal because you're you're you're more
i say, influential representatives or legislators you know, tend to come a lot
of times from your your big cities, your Oklahoma City, your Tulsa,
you're Latin, and they get a lot of the attention. And so my
being welcomed into that group and then and really trying my best to do the
job and do it right. Is is really a big deal? Well,
one of the things that people will sometimes say is that, wow, here's
a big bill with a big name. Oh red meat bills. Yeah,
And sometimes the devil's in the details. Can you explain that very much?
So speaking of calling the baby ug, you know, it's hard when you
walk when we walk into that building, like I said in in in February,
there's there's three thy five hundred bills waiting for you this year, and
it's just you can't cover everything there. There are a group of us that
trial hardest to read every single bill and and look and one of the things
that I try to find all the time are the unintended consequences and and so
many bills that run are the result of of someone saying, well, I
want to write a big bill that'll that'll sound great at home. You know,
my people really want this, and so they rush in the final hours
to put a bill up. And it's got a great title that people love.
And but when when it comes down to it, you look through that
bill in there, it's either poorly written or all the unintended consequences of that
bill that that you just you have to go around and you have to you
have to either try to fix it or fight it or kill it. You
know, I've caught a lot of a mailer come out against me that said,
you know, we don't like Strong because he killed the drag queen bill.
Well, the reality was, you know, that was a big topic
here in Bartlesville going on where the drag shows, and so someone rushes down
there and says, I want to write a bill that's about drag queens,
because really it's a big hot topic right now. But what they wrote was
actually an adult cabaret bill, which an adult cabaret is a strip club,
which it's already very illegal to take a kid to a strip club. We
have very strong indecency laws in the state of Oklahoma. You take a kid
to a strip club, you're going to jail, the strippers going to jail,
you know whatever. But one of the problems I saw in that bill
was the language of the bill set out as something harmful to children was men
or women dressed in masculine or feminine costumes. So you had men or women
dressed up masculine or feminine. So ultimately the language of the law would have
been a man couldn't dress like a man and a woman couldn't dress like a
woman. And when I asked, you know, I was hit for asking
questions and debating. I asked, would make a Dolly Parton concert illegal in
the state of Oklahoma? You know that's a woman dressed up feminine costume.
So well, I don't think so, I don't think they'd prosecute that.
Well, I don't want to make everything illegal and then pick who we prosecute
based on what we like or don't. You know, it's just not a
great way to write statute. And then when you get farther down into that,
that bill would have crippled our film industry because when you look at Killers
of the Flower Moon, that was hundreds and hundreds of people dressed up in
costume and then given it in our rating, you could easily argue that that
would be harmful for children. So it would have, by the letter of
the law in the state of Oklahoma, made it illegal to film Killers of
the Flower Moon in Oklahoma. It would have made it illegal to film Tulsa
King. It would have made it illegal to film twisters here, you know,
And so you say these are the unintended consequences, and this is no
good. Can we fix it? Can we make it better? Yeah?
I don't think so this is good, This is what people want. But
it's a red meat bill. You know. Always, I've said before on
our Friday show that you always run into those save the puppies bills, you
know, and everybody wants to save the puppies. And then you read it
and you're like, now, wait a minute. You know this says that
we have to you know, shut down I, you know, or I
thirty five for three hours a day so that these puppies can go play in
that pond across the room. You know, You're like, well, that's
ridiculous. But it's got a great title. And so then people get mad,
how dare you vote against that? Well, it's a bad bill,
it's bad legislation, it's a bad statue to put forth in the state of
Oklahoma. And so out of thirty five hundred bills, though, those are
the ones that get the attention, and those are the ones that you see
on Facebook or read about in the paper. So nobody, nobody gets real
excited about bills that you know, have something to do with the Oklahoma Water
Resources Board. I do you know those are the important states the probably affect
people's lives. Yeah, you know, and you don't see people out there
really fighting about those. Those are boring. But at the same time,
you know, we face the most historic drought in this area that we've ever
had. I worked very hard with the Water Resources Board to bring resources back
to District ten to get through that. You know, we've I think we've
spent over a million and a half dollars or close to a million a half
dollars in Copan on the water system. Because the people of Bowering and Whipperwill
and Copan and Wand want clean water. And it's easy for someone to sit
in Oklahoma City and say that's not a problem and the state doesn't need to
be working on that because they're under the umbrella of Oklahoma City that's solving all
their problems. Their day to day life is all city government. You know,
your roads, your bridges, your water, your utilities, that's all
handled by the city. You don't have that in Whipperwill, Oklahoma. You
don't have that in Wand, you don't have that in Delaware or Lenipol.
What you have the assistance you get has to come from the state. And
that's really one of the important things that rural representatives have to have to face
and have to fight for, is getting resources out to these areas because we
want good roads, we want good schools, we want good utilities, we
want broadband internet, we want good well equipped and well trained firefighters. We
want to think when we go to bed at night that our treacher being patrolled
and our our property and you know, our homes are safe. So that's
those are the things I work on. All righty, well's the last word
you want to tell the folks before we sign off here again, it's it's
very important that you get out and vote. Tomorrow is the Republican primary,
and it decides a lot of those a lot of these offices. And vote
all day tomorrow. Watch out for the what they call the October surprise,
where you get those last minute text messages that make unfounded, wild claims that
nobody can disprove until Wednesday after the election's over. You know, those will
become very popular. You know, understand that when you're some of the things
that people are sending things out that you know have conservative ratings on them.
Just understand that I don't. What's your index, Well, it depends on
who you look at. You know, if you go with the you know,
the Petroleum Alliance, I've got like a ninety eight percent. But if
you look at Save the Constitution that they call the gold standard of conservative rating,
out of thirty five hundred bills, they picked ten to look at,
and I'm already out on three of them because i support public education and I
support you know, I supported the towers that broadcast our tornado warnings and our
amber alerts and all that. Well they're against those things, and so they
picked their ten bills and say, well, he voted against these bills,
or he voted for these bills that we don't like. The film tax credit
brought one hundred million dollars to this area. That's very important to me to
support. They don't support that. That's fine. You have to look at
where these organizations come from, what their purpose is, and kind of take
that with a grain of salt. Because I'm out in the district all the
time, I talk to a lot of people, and trust me, I
vote for the people at District ten, and I hope to continue to because
I have to come home every weekend. I don't say in district, I
say, I have to come home and face my mama when I get home,
so I have to do right. But again, I think the most
important takeaway is it's important that people get out tomorrow and vote because there are
so many very important choices being made tomorrow for the people that will represent you
or that will serve you. So tomorrow's Tuesday, Republican Primary election day,
get out and vote. Thank you, Jude Judge Strum District ten. Right
here on our community Connection