UPDATED: Limestone Miners Avoid New Tax Again This Session

• Logan Layden
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  Logan Layden is a reporter and managing editor for StateImpact Oklahoma. He is a native of McAlester, Oklahoma and graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 2009. Logan spent three years as a state capitol reporter and local host of All Things Considered for NPR member station KGOU in Norman and six years as a reporter with StateImpact from 2011 to 2017. Most recently, he was news director for McAlester Radio before returning to public radio in 2020.

Logan Layden / StateImpact Oklahoma

State Sen. Frank Simpson, R-Springer, in his office at his Capitol office.

An effort to impose a tax on the mining of limestone, sand, and other aggregates is dead for this legislative session.

Sen. Frank Simpson’s, R-Springer, bill failed in a senate committee last week, and Simpson confirmed to StateImpact on Monday that he will not try to bring it forward again in 2013.

The idea was to treat mining operations more like energy companies, which pay a 7 percent gross production tax on the oil and natural gas they remove from the ground.

“Gravel and rock and sand are a natural resource just like oil, natural gas, copper, or lead,” Simpson says.

More than 80 percent of the gross production taxes collected in Oklahoma go to the state’s general revenue fund. But some of that tax revenue goes back to oil and gas-producing counties to improve local schools and repair roads.

Simpson’s bill would’ve allowed counties to hold a referendum and decide for themselves whether to tax aggregate miners, and at what rate. But creating a new tax is virtually impossible in Oklahoma because of State Question 640, the 1992 law that requires a 75 percent legislative majority to enact new taxes. 

“That bill has been around for quite a while. I think, probably at least 10 years that that concept has been tried in the Senate,” Simpson says.

The Oklahoma Aggregates Association is a big opponent of any new severance taxes on mining. Executive director Jim Rodriguez says taxes on mining companies are too high already. He’d like to see minerals exempted from sales taxes, too.

“Oklahomans are already paying for the sales tax on aggregates that a contractor buys when he builds a project for the State of Oklahoma,” he says. “That’s money going around in a circle. We shouldn’t tax that.”