Several Oklahoma City civic leaders gathered Tuesday evening for a town hall meeting to discuss the city’s 10-year general obligation bond issue, which voters won’t decide until next year.
They also discussed what the next Metropolitan Area Projects, or MAPS, might look like. That initiative is being led by a grassroots organization calling itself MAPS 4 Neighborhoods, and over the past year they’ve been making some noise and building support for another iteration of the multimillion-dollar sales tax to pay for more capital improvements around the city. The group isn’t officially affiliated with the City of Oklahoma City, but they are interested in seeing more projects in some of the outlying areas.
“MAPS 3 does have some sidewalks and community centers and things – Mick Cornett likes to talk about that,” said The Journal Record’s managing editor Adam Brooks. “But the criticism is that a lot of those bigger projects – the convention center, the park, the canal, the ballpark – they’re all downtown.”
For 23 years, the MAPS initiatives have roughly followed an eight-year timetable. The original MAPS that redeveloped Bricktown passed in 1993. Voters approved MAPS for Kids, which helped out Oklahoma City Public Schools, in 2001. The third iteration was approved in 2009. There’s nothing official about that timeframe, Brooks says. It’s just a coincidence. But The Journal Record’s Brian Brus reports that after Mayor Mick Cornett proposed MAPS 3 in his 2007 State of the City address, the city took input from thousands of residents to determine citizens’ priorities:
The survey website accepted input for four months, producing more than 2,700 responses, with 85 percent expressing support for the issue. It was then set aside briefly to bring more public attention to upcoming bond issues for Oklahoma City Public Schools repairs and city streets. It wasn’t until September 2009 that Cornett and City Council members announced the final list of MAPS 3 projects worth a total of $777 million, following months of town hall meetings and council discussions over fine details. Officials then called the election date and submitted the text to the county election board for approval and printing for the December ballot.
“[MAPS 4] is probably not something that can happen real quickly,” Brooks said. “The Oklahoma City chamber of commerce is heavily involved. I know that they might be concerned that there's lots of other things on the ballot this year anyway. There's going to be a lot of state questions. So this might not be the right time to put out a new sales tax.”
But if the city waits until next year, they may have to compete with hundreds of millions of dollars in general obligation bonds that come up every 10 years. Brooks says the city sets up a big fund once every decade, and then dole it out in a piecemeal approach.
“Right now they have about $184 million left from an $835 million bond that was approved in 2007,” Brooks said. “What the city's doing right now is trying to figure out exactly what they need, and then they have to judge what they think the voters think they can afford.”
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