The fact that Oklahoma’s marketing budget, at roughly $5.75 million, is about one-fifth the size of Arkansas’s doesn’t sit well with Oklahoma Lt. Gov. Matt Pinnell.

“I’m getting really sick and tired of our legislature not moving on that,” Pinnell said Tuesday at the Tulsa Regional Chamber’s Leadership Retreat at Southern Hills Country Club. “I’ll be blunt about it. Next session, we have to go after it again.

“We aren’t even competing with a Missouri, an Arkansas, a Kansas, and we have far more tourism assets than they do.”

Before a crowd of about 200, Pinnell spoke at the Chamber event immediately after attending a news conference in Owasso, where officials announced that Amazon is partnering with the Cherokee Nation to fund the tribe’s new film institute.

Twenty-five Cherokee and Native American students will be able to attend the institute tuition-free starting in January.

“We are really, really on to something when it comes to film and television production in Oklahoma due mostly to our sovereigns (tribal nations),” Pinnell said. “…The Amazons of the world and everybody else understand that reality.”

Pinnell said he also is encouraged about Oklahoma’s net migration growth, which ranks ninth in the country. That has prompted the state to urge young families to move to Oklahoma from large metropolitan areas such as Dallas-Fort Worth.

“Dallas is full,” he said. “It will be the third-largest city in America in less than two years.”

But to lure folks across the Red River into smaller Oklahoma cities such as Durant and Ardmore, more money must be funneled into strengthening basic infrastructure, Pinnell said.

“If we do not address infrastructure concerns we have as a state, then we cannot grow much more,” he said.

That revenue assist might need to come from the state’s surplus, Pinnell said.

“I’m not saying we shouldn’t have money in our rainy-day fund,” he said. “We should, but not $4 billion, not even close to $4 billion, in my opinion, when we have towns in this state that are dying on the vine and could use a little help. Our sovereign nations can’t do it all.

“We can’t just grow in two counties across the state when we have 77. We’re never going to get the taxpayers we need, i.e. the workforce that you need, if we don’t address those workforce challenges.”