As we prepare for a MAPS4 vote this December it is important to consider that while the MAPS programs have brought many positive changes to the city, they do not occur in a vacuum; our commitment to these capital projects programs results in a decrease in the amount of services the city can provide to its residents. While city operations and maintenance of our collective assets is never as fun to observe as a ribbon cutting for a shiny new project, they are crucial to our quality of life.

While certain MAPS projects have increased the quality of life of OKC residents (most significantly trails, sidewalks and senior wellness centers IMO), what if those benefits came at a cost of not being able to provide adequate city services? What if part of the reason that we have been such an outlier over the last decade in terms of failing to provide Sunday and evening public transit, inadequate street and park maintenance, and operating with insufficient numbers of public safety personnel was that the City was starving its Departments in order to accommodate placing almost 50% of the sales tax we allocate to all Departments in our General Fund towards the MAPS programs.

Particularly during the last ten years (the MAPS3 era), the City has kept the sales tax rate to fund city services artificially low (compared to other cities in OK) in order to accommodate a one-cent MAPS tax. City government is the branch of government that affects our day-to-day lives the most and by starving city departments (such as parks and recreation, public transit, public works, planning, development and police/fire), or bringing capital projects online which require operations costs to be diverted from other city services because no source of operations funding was planned at the time of passage, the MAPS program indirectly diminishes our quality of life.


Oklahoma City is an outlier among large cities in the U.S. in terms of its reliance on sales tax to fund City operations; anything that decreases OKC sales tax will have an outsized influence on the amount of city services delivered and our quality of life.


Oklahoma is the only state in the U.S. that does not allow municipalities to fund operations with property tax. This is the principle reason that sales tax plays such an outsized role in funding city services.


The capital and operations budgets of most of the City's departments are funded through the General Fund and sales tax is, by far, the largest revenue source for the General Fund.









The sales tax rate in Oklahoma City is 8.625% (with 4.5% going to the State and 4.125% going to the City (there is also a county tax for those who live in Cleveland and Canadian County) which was raised in January 2019 from 3.875% due to a 0.25% increase approved by voters in 2018. Oklahoma City divides that 4.125% as follows:









Initiative Petitions in previous decades created a dedicated funding source for the Zoo of 1/8 cent and for police/fire of ¾ cent, which cannot be altered except through an additional vote of the people. Think about that for a moment; the City of OKC has a dedicated funding source for the zoo, but not for public transit or parks. The Council approved a resolution that a ¼ cent increase in the sales tax going towards the General Fund starting in January 2019 would essentially all be spent on police/fire. While that helped increase police and fire staffing levels, it did nothing to help alleviate inadequate funding of Departments outside of Public Safety.


Roughly 2/3s of the General Fund is spent on public safety and since one full cent is dedicated to public safety (the ¾ cent tax passed by initiative petition which is split evenly between police and fire, and the recently passed ¼ cent addition) decreases in sales tax (such as the two year decline in sales tax in fiscal year ’16 and ’17) will be felt disproportionately by the other City Departments; this means layoffs, decreased services and self-defeating policies such as travel bans.













When one compares the sales tax rate for Oklahoma City to other cities in Oklahoma, and subtracts the one-cent dedicated to capital projects in the MAPS program, it becomes clear that OKC has a sales tax rate much lower than other cities:


OKC 3.125% (MAPS tax removed; this was 2.875% until January 2019)

Edmond 3.75%

Lawton 4.5%

Moore 4.0%

McAlester 5.25%

Norman 4.25%

Tulsa 4.017%

Yukon 4.35%


In March 2019 the sales tax for general fund was $19.39 million and the sales tax allocated to the MAPS tax (“Better Streets/Safer City”) was $8.63 million. In other words, approximately 55% of the sales tax that the City collects is dedicated to the General Fund and 24% is dedicated to the MAPS capital projects (2.25/4.125=54.5% and 1/4.125=24.2%).


The ¼ cent increase in the sales tax, which began on 1 January 2019 and which the council has dedicated to public safety is estimated to generate $28 million/year.


So, going forward, if the MAPS program was decreased by ¼ cent and that ¼ cent was redirected towards City services other than police/fire, which has already been addressed by the voters, one would see game-changing alterations in the services the City provides to its residents.


For years, including throughout essentially the entirety of the MAPS programs, OKC was the largest city in the U.S. without Sunday or evening bus service. It is unfathomable that a city of our size would deprive its people of public transit on Sundays and evenings and only provide service once an hour on Saturdays. In a City deemed by Prevention Magazine to be the worst in the entire country for pedestrians, with absolute minimal infrastructure for bicyclists and suffering the highest bicyclist fatality rate in the U.S., along with a 620 sq mile sprawling autocentric city design, the lack of Sunday/evening bus service deserves the strongest rebuke. Given that some $3 million/year made Sunday and evening bus service possible, it is easy to see how making the MAPS program 25-50% smaller would have a massive impact on the daily lives of people throughout the city.


During the MAPS3 years, particularly FY ’16 and ’17 where the city saw the first consecutive two year decline in sales tax revenue in 30 years, employee layoffs, travel bans and cuts in services were all implemented which would have not been necessary but for the largesse of the MAPS program.


Keep in mind that each and every MAPS project, which is capital in nature, could be placed on a General Obligation Bond and paid for with our property tax. This is how we build many things and how we funded large capital projects almost exclusively prior to the MAPS programs. In other words, decreasing the size of the MAPS programs does not mean that we are not ultimately able to complete those capital projects.


According to the 2013 Parks Master Plan, Oklahoma City only spends 28% of what a typical city spends on parks maintenance ($1421 per acre per year compared to an average of $5,000 at the time of the report. Citizens expressed a C minus-rated level of satisfaction (71%) with parks maintenance and D minus-rated level of satisfaction (60%) with walking and biking trails and paths (these satisfaction figures are sourced from the 2016 Citizen Satisfaction Survey, page iii).

Again, with a total annual budget of $26 million, relatively small decreases in the size of the MAPS program would lead to substantial increases in the level of service the City could provide its people through the parks department. Most city parks do not have restroom facilities or adequate trash facilities and these are among the most egregious examples of MAPS causing inadequate spending on our facilities.





Finally, it is important to remember that no funding source for the operations of the MAPS3 projects was identified at the time of its passage a decade ago. While partners were secured for Senior Wellness Centers, there was no mechanism identified to pay the annual $3 million operations budget of the streetcar, nor of the $3-4 million it will take to operate the new downtown Scissortail Park, nor the operations of the Convention Center etc.… Absent a funding source for the operations of these MAPS projects which continue to come online, money is simply diverted away from existing services as there is no increase in the size of City Department budgets.


After years discussing and trying to design a MAPS for Neighborhoods, my conclusion is that the best MAPS for Neighborhoods program is to end MAPS or significantly decrease its size and equilibrate our sales tax rate with other cities in Oklahoma. Decreasing the size of a MAPS4 program and redirecting those savings into departments such as Public Works, Planning, Parks and Recreation, Development and Public Transit is the most effective path towards obtaining the greatest increase in the quality of life for the greatest number of people throughout the entirety of the city.