OKLAHOMA CITY
The race for State Treasurer was shaken up last week as front-runner and then-current Oklahoma County Clerk David Hooten abruptly resigned from the clerk’s office amid threats of removal by Oklahoma County DA David Prater following allegations of harassment by county clerk employees.
The allegations, parroted by Oklahoma’s Own News 9 reporter, Storme Jones, appeared to paint Hooten out to be a deranged, power-hungry tyrant set on intimidating and harassing the employees of the county clerk’s office. As usual, this picture was in stark contrast to many of Hooten’s lifelong friends and supporters, and appeared to be a well-timed attack on Hooten’s campaign for State Treasurer.
Ignite Liberty reached out to Hooten to try and understand the context of the allegations, as well as ascertain their legitimacy…something which no mainstream reporter has even attempted to do. The context paints a very different picture than the one blazoned across the state’s local media.
According to Hooten, the issue has been with three county employees who regularly fail to show up for work, leave work early, and regularly cause contention among the county staff. These employees, who apparently have been secretly recording meetings with Hooten for years, were a constant source of conflict for the office that he had been trying to deal with for years.
The meeting, whose recording was made public, was actually a meeting where Hooten was giving these employees one last chance to correct their behavior and start working together as a team. In doing this, he used a well-known tactic among most Fortune 500 companies: a team building exercise.
Team building exercises are designed to put a team into difficult, even scary, situations in order to force them to work together to face their fears and solve a common problem. Nearly every Fortune 500 company has employed some version of a team building exercise, usually to outstanding success.
The meeting in question was where Hooten was announcing the mandatory participation in the team building exercise to these problem employees. The entire purpose, according to Hooten, was to get them overcome their contentious differences and start working together as a team to serve the taxpayers of Oklahoma County.
Though the news widely reported that the employees would be expected to drink and do tasks that would leave them physically sore, there was never actually going to be any alcohol served. The exercise was going to consist of lunch and a trip to iFly – an indoor sky-diving facility in OKC. Regardless, the exercise never actually happened.
This attempt at team building is well in line with the efforts Hooten has made to clean up a disastrous county clerk’s office over his term…efforts that have turned the Oklahoma County Clerk’s office into the finest county clerk office in the country.
Hooten’s Record Shines
When asked to detail his accomplishments in office, as well as address the accusations, Hooten issued the following statement:
“Personally, I’m appalled by how the media has had a feeding frenzy over a meeting about a training which never took place. The training has been requested by me for team building for a specific part of my office whom can’t seem to get along nor take direction. Each year we propose a training, each year they never show up! One will call in sick and so on. As to any strange calls after hours, I will only comment on what I do during my office hours as County Clerk. What I do on my lunch hour or after hours is none of your business.As to my hours. It is well documented that I go to work about 3:30 each morning. I take a picture of my car, in the empty garage,and go upstairs and play a short trumpet tune which I post. The reason I go into the office so early is so I can be home by 3:30 in the afternoon to see my kids get home from school. Being a good husband and father are my two most important jobs.
My office was in shambles when I took over. Ghost employee, staff not showing up for work. The office only accepted cash. Lack of team spirit and obviously there had been no leadership. Within two years, I set a course that made my office financially sustainable, fired employees that had no job and some that just didn’t show up. I was sued in federal court by the employees I had let go and won! One employee settled out of court against my will. We implemented new credit card machines, new and improved work flow procedures, new upgraded software, a countywide time keeping system which used fingerprint identification to stop people being paid for more than they had worked. A digital system to not only automate our voting in meetings but also we began streaming all our meetings live on YouTube so that everyone sees how the sausage is made. Transparency in government, what a concept. You also can go back and access the meetings at anytime and view them. I built OKCC.Online, a website where we digitized our land records and placed them online so that you can see them 24/7 from anywhere in the world. We placed all our forms online in three languages. No more paying ten dollars to park to see a deed that is the taxpayers anyway, for no charge. We built a “Lien Alert System” so that if you opt in, if anything is filed in my office with your name in it, you are texted, emailed, snail mailed or phoned. We went to the legislature 11 times to pass new legislation to modernize our statues. Ten became law!
The Oklahoma County Clerk’s Office has been nationally recognized with two National Awards, one being in our Youth & Government program and another touting Oklahoma County Clerk’s office as being the most technologically advanced Clerk’s office in the United States. We also now make $360,000 a month that goes into an account that we do not spend due to the fact the statue that controls how it may be spent is antiquated. We literally have $2,000,000 in those ‘special fees’ accounts. I could go on and on. This is what can be done with a great disciplined staff and a leader that has proven government can be run like a private business.”
The $2,000,000 is not an insignificant amount, considering when Hooten took office the County Clerk office was unable to make payroll. Hooten’s efforts to cut the fraud, waste, and abuse from the clerk’s office has been nothing short of remarkable, by any reasonable person’s standard.
The Truth Behind the Attacks: The County Jail Bond Misinformation
This fact is, in part, what’s makes the accusations and his resignation so shocking. When we asked Hooten to speculate on the timing of the attacks, he pointed to the June 28th bond issue for a new Oklahoma County Jail.
In a recent News 9 article covering the bond issue, Oklahoma County Commissioner, Brian Maughan, is seen telling voters that, “What happened in 2008 is voters approved a bond. This is just going to renew that bond amount. The same rate that was issued 14 years ago, those bonds are now falling off. This would just continue at the same exact rate, not an increase but not a decrease.”
According to Hooten, however, that is far from the truth. This would not be a “renewal” of the previous bond as bonds cannot be “renewed” once paid off. Instead, this is a new bond whose rates will skyrocket in the second year…going from a 0.64% millage rate to a 5.00% millage rate, essentially raising the borrowing costs 10 times over, thus raising property taxes by an extraordinary amount.
Hooten questioned in numerous public forums how that huge increase in taxes during the second year would not be felt as a tax increase. “In my mind, they knew I would tell the truth about the new jail bond. They knew I would not lie. So, they found a way to finally take me out of the picture.”
Though sickening, the attacks did not come as a surprise to Hooten. Back in 2018, as he began to ruffle feathers by making the much-needed changes in the office, he predicted that in 2022 his enemies would find a way to launch a scandal against him about 2 weeks before the election in order to get him out of office.
Sadly, his predictions have come true.
While he no longer serves as Oklahoma County Clerk, the real question is whether the voters of Oklahoma are savvy enough to see through the politically motivated attacks and elect a man who has single-handedly revamped a corrupt and insolvent clerk’s office to handle the state’s finances.
As his record proves, the state would be better for it.
