Quote:
Originally Posted by okcpulse
The police and fire unions are crying for more money, and that is by opposing a program that is funded by a temporary one cent sales tax while they have permanent funding through a dedicated .75% sales tax in addition to the lions share of a 2% general sales tax fund.
They argue that with MAPS 3 passing that police and fire services will be in peril. That's the bull**** story.
What they SHOULD be saying is with the continued growth of Oklahoma City, the current funding trend would put the fire and police protection in peril. I would buy that. If I were them, I would have been going public with this problem long ago. That would have put the city in a position BEFORE MAPS to address their needs.
As far as the vague ballot is concerned, there was information released as to why the wording of the ballot is extremely different. It turns out the wording of the original MAPS ballot was illegal, and to avoid possible challenges, the ballot for MAPS 3 had to generalize MAPS 3 as a single project, not multiple projects as it was on the first ballot.
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I brought this over from another thread. As you can see, you are right. We should have done a better job of voicing our concerns to the public years ago. Hopefully this lesson will not be forgotten in the future
To say that no one from the Fire or police departments said anything about staffing concerns until the MAPS 3 press release is not actually correct.
I can not speak for the administrations of either the Fire or Police departments, or the FOP. But I can assure you the IAFF has been talking about Firefighter staffing issue since 2001. Talks with Fire Chiefs, Councilpersons, and the City Manager have at best only been able to maintain the status quo.
When the Fire Dept. staffing level was at 999 in 2000 the City manager began his reduction plan. We argued against the reduction of staffing every year but to no avail. We had year after year of cuts that brought staffing down to 948 in 2004.
The City Managers plan was to continue making cuts down to a level of 900. The best we were able to accomplish is getting him stopped at 948. The only thing that kept him from his goal was the economy and the threats of a lawsuit.
Now with the economy as his cover and a game plan 6 years in the making he sees his oportunity to resume his plan. Our mistake I see now was that we did not take our vocal protest to the public years ago.