Sun rises in the north?

| | Comments (3)

So it would seem from Doug Marlette's latest cartoon in the Tulsa Whirled.

I shouldn't be too hard on Mr. Marlette. Since he doesn't live here, he can't be expected to be too familiar with local geography.

For cartoons by a long-time Tulsa resident, pick up one of these.

Somewhat related: On Sunday, Julie Del Cour wrote this:

Every five years for the past quarter century, the city of Tulsa has offered voters a deal: If they approve a third-penny sales tax the city will keep chipping away at capital needs.

"Chipping" is the operative word. Even with regular bond issues and renewal of the third-penny four times, the city has about $4 billion in unmet capital needs. Theoretically the city could dedicate its total budget for the next seven years to those needs and still not catch up.

It's funny: The amount of unmet capital needs has been $4 billion as long as I can remember, at least going back to the 1999 bond issue. If we've been "chipping away at it," shouldn't it be getting smaller? Between two bond issues and two third-penny renewals since then, plus Vision 2025 (which mostly unded one of the biggest single items on the list, the arena) we've funded roughly $1.4 billion dollars in capital needs, if memory serves me correctly.

3 Comments

Paul Tay said:

One Small Penny. One Big SCAM. It's really not about a penny, is it? The City budge is NORTH of half billion dollars, and City Hall can't even find 600G's to pay for replacement Glocks. What's next on the TP list? Bullets?

Part II: $1.15 million Brady Village Implementation Plan. Segregating bicycles away from Denver and Archer. Inconsistent with BOTH OK Statutes and Tulsa Revised Ordinances. Bicycles are TRAFFIC.

Part III: $60 million street widenings in South Tulsa. Moves traffic and sales tax receipt into Bixby, BA, and Jenks. Kills Downtown/River Development.

Careful whatcha voted for. Tulsa will get it soon 'nuff.

mad okie Author Profile Page said:

Maybe he ment to say:
"Just as sure as the sun rises, the people of Tulsa voted yes to more taxes"

Jeff Shaw Author Profile Page said:

I agree, the penny is a scam. I was in Portland, Oregon a couple of weeks ago. They had bicycles and cars and buses and trains. They all seemed to work toghether extremely well, in their bustling and vibrant downtown area.

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Michael Bates published on May 11, 2006 9:47 PM.

Things I want to write about, but not tonight was the previous entry in this blog.

SB 1324 is still lurking is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Contact

Feeds

Subscribe to feed Subscribe to this blog's feed:
Atom
RSS
[What is this?]