The voice of youth: Sara Jeffries on the blurred vision

In this week's Whirled's Satellite section, Sara Jeffries explains why this "vision" is a blurry one at best. Sara is a home-schooled junior and a hard-hitting writer. First she takes on the Mayor:

Vision 2025 is Mayor Bill LaFortune and his cronies' idea of a sales tax to boost the economy.

Un-LaFortunately, any economist worth his weight will tell you that you can't tax your way to prosperity.

The brunt of this tax burden will lie heavily on the backs of the impoverished people of Tulsa County. Why should these citizens have to pay for an arena when they probably couldn't even afford the tickets to an event there?

Why take a penny from the penniless just so the wealthy can have a fancier playground?

Mayor LaFortune, what can we as tax-paying citizens do to get you to climb down off the backs of the hardworking, low-income people of Tulsa County?

Then Sara takes on the arena:

According to a Convention, Sports and Leisure International feasibility study, Tulsa does not draw from a sufficient population to support a large arena.

"Promoters were skeptical of a new arena's ability to draw incremental events to the marketplace. A few promoters thought that the Mabee Center (11,575 seats) is as large a facility as the Tulsa marketplace can support," stated the CSL feasibility study.

"Promoters believed that to differentiate itself, a new arena facility would have to be larger than any of the existing facilities, but they thought major concerts would still skip the Tulsa market since the market probably is not large enough to support that size of facility."

If this arena is going to be such a success, then why haven't private investors built one? Investors are always looking for a good, sound, money-making project.

She goes on to tackle the river, the American Airlines and Boeing deals, and the "higher ed free-for-all", and closes with this:

More, more, more! Why, why, why? What does it all mean?

I'll tell you what it means. It means that the mayor and a handful of chamber members are digging deep into our pockets for their quixotic projects. Not only that, but they're trying to lay a guilt trip on citizens who are carefully questioning this prolonged money grab.

I urge all citizens of Tulsa County to stand up and fight against this fiscal fallacy, a.k.a. Vision 2025.

Wow. Go read it all.