Recently in Tulsa::Vision2025 Category

I very nearly turned my column this week into a sociological study of the denizens of Tulsa's Money Belt and how their behavior is shaped by peer pressure and fear of ostracism. In connection with the Great Plains Airlines bailout, I was thinking about a friend who asked me if my life insurance was paid up and another friend who told me a qui tam taxpayers' demand would never succeed in a Tulsa County courtroom, because no judge would dare cross the powerful entities who were pushing for the City's taxpayers to pay $7.1 million that it did not owe.

I was also thinking of the many times someone would tell me how they opposed this or that initiative or would confirm some speculation of mine about skulduggery in local government. He would be happy to tell me all this privately, but wouldn't dare go on the record: "I have to make a living in this town."

It brought to mind a story by cartoonist Walt Kelly. In 1955, Kelly published the seventh collection of his strip Pogo and the third book which consisted of entirely new material. The Pogo Peek-A-Book included a story called "The Man from Suffern on the Steppes or 1984 and All That: A Russian Tale of Madisonav." In one comic story, Kelly managed to spoof suburban commuters, Madison Avenue, and the Soviet Union.

In the run-up to the Vision 2025 vote, I emailed a series of panels from the story to a fellow TulsaNow board member. I was frustrated by the reluctance of some TulsaNow board members to say publicly what they were saying privately about the flaws in the package that the County Commissioners were putting before the voters. About a draft statement from the board, I wrote, in a July 12, 2003, email:

I have a lengthy comment, in a separate message, about the second draft, but for now, I will let Pogo and Howland Owl speak on my behalf. This is from the Pogo Peek-a-Book (1955), from a story called "The Man from Suffern on the Steppes", about ad men in the USSR. The ad exec (Howland) is having a subversive conversation with the train stationmaster.

Translator's note -- "gummint" == "government"

Lately, a lot of things remind me of one Pogo comic strip or another.

Here is the excerpt:

The next day I sent the following email to the TulsaNow board:

NOTE: I wrote this last night, but network problems prevented sending it until now. Please forgive the length. Indirectly, it addresses some of what Jamie said in his recent message. This morning I had breakfast with someone I was meeting for the first time -- young, energetic, deeply engaged in the community, although a fairly recent arrival -- who, unprompted by me, made very similar observations.

I continue to prefer L___'s original draft, enhanced by specific enumeration of our principles. R___ and W___'s version reads too much like a "vote yes" pamphlet, even if that wasn't intended. Below (far below) is my attempt at a rewrite, which attempts to express the concerns that were voiced without taking sides. I think we ought to explicitly say that we are choosing not to endorse or oppose, rather than allowing people to read in what they like. I also think we should be explicit and honest about the problems we have with the process and its product.

To use the terms of the Pogo cartoon I sent earlier, let's speak our criticisms openly and plainly, not into a bag and disguised as praise. We don't live in the old USSR. We shouldn't be afraid to utter mild criticisms of Tulsa's politburo and nomenklatura. And yet fear is precisely what I detect beneath the surface: Fear of ostracism, fear of exclusion, fear of economic consequences.

This may be a bit impolite to say, but it's there beneath the surface and ought to be dealt with openly. Some of our group work for organizations which are funded by supporters of this package. Others aren't personally dependent, but are involved with organizations that need the funds that the package supporters can offer. Others need the goodwill of city government to conduct business and make a living. Some of us have even been paid to facilitate and promote the vision process and to work for the "vote yes" campaign. Beyond the financial considerations, many members of our group move within a narrow circle of social and organizational connections -- a virtual "small town" within the city, focused on the arts and other non-profit organizations, centered around Utica Square and chronicled by Tulsa People and Danna Sue Walker. As in any small town, some opinions are acceptable and some are not, and speaking your mind risks ostracism.

To those of you who fall in one of these categories (which is very nearly all of us): You have made a valuable contribution to TulsaNow and to the dialog thus far. I don't wish to discount your input regarding this statement, I don't doubt your sincerity, and I appreciate the desire to "make lemonade out of lemons," as J___ put it. But I know how this town works, and you may be feeling the pressure right now to make certain people happy. I ask you to consider that your situation may be leading you to swallow your disappointment and smile for the cameras, rather than speaking openly about both the pros and cons of this package.

The people pushing this package, particularly the sports arena, are bullies. They want what they want, and because they have money and power, they think they have a right to bulldoze anyone who stands in the way. (Why they don't use all that money to build an arena themselves, rather than taxing the food, medicine, and electricity of the working class for it, is an interesting question.) After the 1997 election, an opposition leader was fired from his job with a downtown company, solely because of his opposition. In 2000, the bullies used implicit and explicit threats to silence opposition to "Tulsa Time" and to shut off public debate. Although I am (I thank God) not dependent on local moguls for my income, as an opposition spokesman, I felt the effects as well -- They tried to sway me with a board appointment, there was an attempt to undermine the Midtown Coalition, and they got their revenge on Election Day 2002. (That wasn't just about "Tulsa Time"; it was also because of my support for a meaningful neighborhood role in planning and zoning, something else the bullies don't want. )

The bullying has already begun for 2003. The bullies threatened the Mayor that they would withhold "vote yes" campaign funds if the arena was excluded or made to stand alone on the ballot. They have sent subtly threatening letters to both the Democratic and Republican Party chairmen. Elected officials who opposed the package were afraid to vote their conscience, afraid to speak, afraid to stand alone. Elected officials, holding the power we have granted them, talked of their decision as if they were helpless victims. A university president told me he would have liked to split his project off from the arena, but he wasn't in a position to speak out. Citizens expressing legitimate concerns are labelled "grumps" and "whiners" by the monopoly daily newspaper. The bullies are sending signals that anyone who fails to endorse the package can have no role in deciding how the money will be spent, should it pass (even though it's public money). The image they wish to project is that no respectable person would say a word against this package, much less vote against it. It appears that they will again try to cut off debate -- the Mayor has already backed out of a scheduled joint appearance on OETA with me.

As important as walkable neighborhoods and lively urban centers are -- and I do believe they matter -- I don't believe our city can flourish until we are capable of having a mature public conversation about such an important issue, without threats and arm-twisting. As long as the bullies run the show, we will not have grassroots-based planning; we will not have land use policies that encourage walkable neighborhoods and enlightened development; we will not have a workable historic preservation system; we will not progress in any way, if it means that the bullies must yield control. As long as the bullies are in charge, every vision process will end the same way -- whatever the structure, whatever the process, they control the final decision.

How can we advance the dialog about our city's future, if we are afraid to speak freely?

How many visionary civic and business leaders, with bold ideas for Tulsa's future, have been beaten down and have given up? How many have been co-opted? How many have decided to take their energy and vision to a city where it will be nurtured and appreciated? Perhaps this is why Tulsa is in the doldrums and doesn't seem to be moving forward. These bullies won't lead, don't have any visionary ideas and don't want any, but they refuse to yield the levers of power. Perhaps the most important thing we can do for our city is to throw off this oppressive pall.

Giving a bully what he wants only encourages him. The only way to stop a bully is to stand up to him. Not violent confrontation, but a refusal to back down, to give in. It can be as simple as saying no: "No, I will not be mean to Susie just so I can be your friend." "No, I will not give you my lunch money." "No, I will not move to the back of the bus." "No, the emperor is not wearing a beautiful new suit of clothes." "No" is a powerful word, and it becomes more powerful as more people speak it together. It can stop a bully in his tracks.

Some of us have observed that Tulsa's power structure is teetering on the edge of collapse. The Chamber is falling apart. Once dominant companies have fallen on hard times. Perhaps a little resistance will be enough to demolish the whole rotten structure. I don't know that I care so much whether this tax wins or loses, but I want to see Tulsans stand up to the bullies and break their stranglehold on progress.

I'm not asking you to come out and oppose this package, unless you want to. I'm simply asking you to say publicly what you think about it, pro and con. If you think the process stunk to high heaven, but you still plan to vote for the package -- fine, but be willing to say both things. Don't spin it to appease the bullies. The city body politic isn't a draft horse, to be fitted with blinders and a bit, and steered to a destination. Tulsans should be treated like free men and women, grown-up enough to weigh pros and cons and come to a decision.

I'm also asking us, collectively, as TulsaNow, to call the bullies' bluff. Say what you think people need to hear. Insist on public, frequent, and fair debates. Expose underhanded pressure tactics. If you're told to shun people who take a different viewpoint, refuse. If you're threatened with ostracism, or worse, go public. Insist on treating everyone involved in the debate with respect. If we stick together and do this, it would represent a real step toward maturity as a region.

Michael Bates

This week in Urban Tulsa Weekly, I wrote about a tour I was given a few weeks ago of Tulsa's BOk Center arena, scheduled to open this fall. Far from winning me over, the tour convinced me that by foregoing the "iconic" approach to architecture we could have had, for an amount closer to the original budget, an arena that would make a positive addition to downtown's urban fabric.

In the column, I mentioned another Cesar Pelli public facility with a curved, "iconic" glass wall. That's the Benjamin and Marian Schuster Performing Arts Center in Dayton, Ohio. The Schuster Center opened in 2003; construction began in 2000. The Rike Building, a handsome seven-story Sullivanesque department store built in 1911, was demolished to make way for the Schuster Center. Before:

After, from about the same angle:

You can see the transformation from good urban form which works well at a distance and up-close at pedestrian scale to a building that is somewhat interesting at a distance but monotonous up close. You would have been able to peek in the display windows of Rike's; the reflective glass on the Schuster Center won't let you see inside.

If you want to take a virtual Google Street View stroll past the Schuster Center, as I suggest in my column, start here and head west on W 2nd St.

There's a nice story on KOTV.com about Michael Sager's 1st Street Lofts, scheduled to be ready for occupancy this fall. Michael gave me a tour during the Blue Dome Arts Festival, and I wrote about some of the interesting ways he is adapting this old building; KOTV's Steve Berg reports on many of the same features, which you can see by clicking the video link at that story.

This week's column in Urban Tulsa Weekly continues the effort to get our Tulsa County Commissioners to find out for themselves exactly how much Vision 2025 funds are on hand, how much is likely to be on hand in the next couple of years, and how much has been obligated. At the heart of the debate is informal county financial adviser (and frequent bond vendor to the county) John Piercey, to whom county officials defer all questions about Vision 2025 finances. Be sure to read Brian Ervin's news story on the topic from last week's edition, and my column from two weeks ago.

Also in this week's issue: Brian Ervin looks into Rev. Victor Orta's recent flight on Pre-Paid Legal's private jet down to company HQ in Ada. Some think it might have to do with his legal challenge to HB 1804, and U. S. Chamber of Commerce plans to go on the offensive against immigration enforcement efforts like HB 1804.

UPDATE: Fixed all the broken links. I think.

Tickets range from $49.50 to $167 for Celine Dion, the first big name act to be booked for the new BOk Center.

Don't be shocked. Bubbaworld told you so:

Honestly folks, when you voted for the Vision 2025 proposal to, among other things, construct Tulsa's new playground for the rich and faux-rich did you actually believe that you would be able to afford to attend the "big name events" that would be held there?

You mean you did not learn anything from the Tulsa Performing Arts Center, a venue for events often beyond the financial means of the vast majority of taxpayers whose dollars built it also?

John Benjamin, the former Tulsa City Councilor who left town for Bixby, the prototypical member of the Cockroach Caucus, on the wrong side of nearly every local issue (most recently pushing for the recall of Jim Mautino and Chris Medlock), has spoken out on the river tax. No surprise here; he's voting yes, evidently because all the money we spent on Vision 2025 didn't do the trick.

Fellow Tulsa County voters, greater Tulsa is drifting and needs a transformative event to trigger our resurgence. We need economic stimulus, infrastructure improvement and restoration of our sense of community and pride in our physical appearance.

I can't find where Benjamin made this argument four years ago, but plenty of other spokespeople did, and I don't recall Benjamin speaking up at the time to say that Vision 2025 wouldn't be sufficiently transformative.

Reminds me of something Randi Miller said at a Republican club meeting last month, as reported by Steve Roemerman:

One of the things I've heard her say on this and other occasions is "I wanted to do the river during Vision 2025, but we did not have a plan in place." She is admitting that she knew, in 2003, that development of the river is what was needed to spur Tulsa's growth. She knew that our real vision for Tulsa was the river, but she decided to support 2025 anyway. It was said that something had to be done, and that this was our opportunity to help Tulsa grow, and this was the tax package to do it. But now she is trying to sell us on the idea that 2025 was some how deficient and the river is the real opportunity for growth? I now hear the same rhetoric as before: something has to be done..this is our one opportunity and if we don't pass this tax Tulsa wont grow. Well excuse me if I don't buy it. If Randi knew this needed to be done in 2003, she should have shown real leadership and fought Vision 2025. I have to say it would be a much easier sell if we were not already over-burdened with the 2025 sales tax.

Benjamin gets a bit off-message in trying to minimize the cost to a typical household:

As voters we can make great strides in our river development by approving a limited seven year, 0.4 percent tax increase that each month amounts to about the price of a movie ticket for a family of four.

I think he meant to say that a family of four would sacrifice the price of a single movie ticket each month, but it comes across as, "You're going to have to cancel your monthly family movie night so you can pay for this tax." It's not as bad as that -- the family can still go, but dad will have to stay home.

I wasn't familiar with this idiom with which he starts a paragraph:

Least I mention Oklahoma City?

Anyone want to parse that for me?

As I mentioned in last week's Urban Tulsa Weekly, a few weeks ago I began my search for the source of the numbers being cited in defense of the need to raise taxes to build the two low-water dams and the Zink Lake modifications promised in Proposition No. 4 of the Vision 2025 sales tax.

The debate over this issue has two prongs:

(1) Did Tulsa County officials promise to build the dams during the Vision 2025 campaign? And did they promise that they'd have the money to build them even if Federal matching dollars weren't available? Despite word-parsing efforts by Commissioner Randi Miller and others, the clear answer to that question is yes, as I've demonstrated from the official ballot resolution, the official project map used during the campaign, and quotes from Commissioner Bob Dick and others during the campaign, and even after the campaign, when Federal funding was once again in doubt.

(2) Is there enough money in projected Vision 2025 revenues to cover the cost of the new dams and the Zink Lake modifications? County officials, citing numbers developed by John Piercey, the county's bond adviser, say that the answer is no. Based on revenue projections, remaining projects to be funded, and debt service, there isn't enough money, they say to fund the low water dams beyond the specific amounts listed in the resolution, much less fund any other project on this October's ballot.

That second point set me off on a search to find out for myself. I combed through the five big binders of monthly Vision 2025 reports in the fourth floor Government Documents department of the Central Library. (The most recent three binders are in the work room, so you need to ask at the reference desk if you want to see them.)

Having looked at the sales tax summaries and project summaries in the monthly reports, I had a simple mental model of how it all fit together. You had two pots of money: A pot of sales tax revenue and a pot of bond proceeds.

Sales tax receipts come into the sales tax revenue pot, and from that pot comes bond repayment (debt service: principal and interest) and cash expenditures (e.g., money to pay down the Oklahoma Aquarium debt, fees to PMg and attorneys).

The bond proceeds pot is fed by proceeds from revenue bond sales, and that money is spent on expenditures for most of the projects.

So what I wanted to know was this:

(1) How much money was in each pot as of, say, the end of the fiscal year on June 30, 2007?

(2) How much money was likely to be added to the sales tax pot between now and the last sales tax check in February 2017? (There's about a month and a half delay between collection and the resulting check from the Oklahoma Tax Commission back to the cities and counties.)

(3) Of the money in the sales tax pot, how much is committed to debt service, and what is the repayment schedule?

(4) Of the money in the sales tax pot, how much is budgeted but yet to be spent for projects and for overall program expenses, and what is the schedule for spending that money, and for which projects?

(5) Of the money in the bond pot, how much is budgeted but yet to be spent for projects and program expenses, and what is the schedule for spending that money, and for which projects?

I figured that, with all the talk about how we wouldn't have enough money to build the promised dams, that somebody must have all this worked out, at least on a year by year basis. If you had the answers to those five questions, you could make decisions about borrowing against future revenues or the likelihood of additional money that could be spent on a pay-as-you-go basis or possibly even reprioritizing the sequence in which the remaining projects (including the dam and Zink Lake projects) would be funded.

I wrote about my quest a few weeks ago:

I asked Kirby Crowe by phone if he had a copy of this plan. I'm not sure if I made my meaning clear, but I came away from the conversation with the impression that he did not have a copy of Piercey's financial plan.

I called Jim Smith, the County's fiscal officer, and asked if he had a copy of the financial plan. I thought he might, since his name is on the monthly memo in the Vision 2025 report listing tax receipts, the monthly wire transfer from the sales tax fund to the trustee, and the interest earnings on the sales tax trust account.

Smith said he didn't have the financial plan, but suggested I call John Piercey. Mr. Smith could tell me what the payment to the trustee would be for the next six months, at which point it would be recalculated, but couldn't tell me anything more about future expenses.

I called Capital West, and they gave me John Piercey's number. I called John, and he was very gracious. He said he'd e-mail it to me that evening or the following morning. He said something about recalculating based on more recent tax receipts. I'd really be happy seeing the most recent version, whatever he's been using as the basis for his statements about Vision 2025 surpluses.

That was a week ago Monday, the 20th. I gave him a reminder call on the 28th -- got his voicemail and left a message. Haven't heard back yet. I'm sure he's quite busy.

Can anyone suggest somewhere else I could find this information?

That was on August 30. Eight days later, on September 7, I left another message for Mr. Piercey. I also, on a whim, called County Commissioner Fred Perry's office to see if they have a copy of this rumored financial plan. The administrative assistant didn't know, but she took my message, and about an hour later, Commissioner Perry called me. (Part of that conversation found its way into the update to this entry about the Republican Women's Club's exclusion of the opposition from a discussion of the county river tax.)

Perry told me he would ask Piercey to get me the information, and not long after I heard from Piercey. The following Tuesday afternoon, September 11, he dropped the three-page Excel printout, entitled "Vision 2025 Financial Summary" by UTW's offices. (Clicking that link will open a PDF file, about 300 KB.)

Off and on over the following week, I crunched through Piercey's numbers covering the next nine and a half years and tried to fit them together with the numbers in the Vision 2025 reports covering the past three and a half years, trying to meld them together into a consistent set of answers to my questions.

Finally, I sent Piercey an e-mail, attaching a snapshot of the financial spreadsheet from the June 2007 Vision 2025 report:

John,

Thanks again for providing me with that spreadsheet printout last Tuesday. I'm still looking at it and trying to understand how your numbers line up with the ones I observed in the Vision 2025 monthly reports from PMg.

The most puzzling thing is the gap between previous years debt service numbers and the numbers in your projections. Attached is a photo of the Vision 2025 sales tax report from PMg's June 2007 Vision 2025 report, which includes all receipts and expenditures through the end of FY07. It shows the following amounts transferred to the bond trustee:

FY	Transferred to Bond Trustee
2004	15,213,697.60
2005	34,394,424.51
2006	33,402,757.79
2007	34,645,690.81

I take those numbers to represent what has been paid to debt service to date. So it's puzzling that for FY 2008 that the debt service jumps up to $46,977,024 plus $396,500 for Series 2006 B. Did the debt service payments just jump up at the end of FY 2007, or is something else on that PMg spreadsheet that should be included in debt service to date?

Put another way, what are your numbers for debt service through FY 2007?

(I'm also surprised that the debt service number doesn't tail off in 2017, since there are only eight months of revenue from the tax in FY 2017.)

Another apparent difference between PMg's numbers and yours: PMg shows, after May 2007, $45,362,099.18 in the sales tax trust fund, and in June all of it is transferred to a new cash projects trust account, in addition to about $2 million transferred to this cash projects trust account back in February. You show $39,093,695 as sales tax revenues held by County. I don't understand how those two numbers line up.

Another question has to do with when various expenses and funds might be realized. You show a balance to be funded of $104.5 million and about $69.3 million of cashflow from bond fund reserves ($39.4 million), net earnings on bond funds ($13.7 million), and net earnings on cash flow ($16.2 million). Has anyone mapped out, to the fiscal year, when these expenses and earnings will be realized?

Thanks again for your assistance,

Michael D. Bates

Here is Piercey's reply in full, clarifying the nature of his report and his role with Vision 2025 and Tulsa County:

Capital West Securities, Inc. official involvement with raising additional funds for Vision 2025 ended in the third quarter of 2006 with the completion of the funding of $31 million in parity and subordinate bonds which partially funded the $45.5 million approved by the County for the Arena and Convention Center. The balance of the funds for the projects increased budget will come from cash flow through the end of calendar year 2008.

My current involvement is as an unpaid monitor of the monthly sales tax receipts and the preparation of a semi annual update of the status of the financial condition of the program. The day to day management of the Program is performed by PMG and the funds administration is performed by the Bond Trustee in cooperation with Jim Smith, the County's fiscal officer. The summary that was given to you is the most current semi annual Update that I have done and is not a "financial plan".

The monthly PMG report provided to the elected officials and the Sales Tax Overview committee will differ from my evaluation simply because they are looking primarily at projects implementation and monthly cash flows provided to them by the Trustee and PMG. They will also differ as a result of the time frame that I used and the in and out of money that occurs weekly.

As I pointed out to John Eagleton in a prior correspondence, the debt service payments that are shown in the PMG reports are what the Trustee requires from sales tax receipts on a monthly basis. The difference between the receipts and the payment goes into sales tax trust fund. The sales tax trust fund is being used to fund Vision projects not funded by bond proceeds. It builds up over time as a results of primarily the City of Tulsa budget process which requires all funds to be in place and appropriated before project contracts can be signed.

The Trustee's debt service requirements given to the County differ from the debt service requirements on the bonds are a results of interest earnings on the construction funds held by the Trustee as well as interest earnings on the Bond Fund Reserve account of $39.09 million. Given the amount of proceeds raised early in the program those earnings were substantial in the early years of the program and decline as projects are completed. This will also be the case with the County's sales tax trust fund as the Arena and Convention Center is completed between now and the end of fiscal year 2008.

As for specific answers to your questions:

1. Debt service has risen annually since 2003 as a results of additional bond issues being done as projects became ready for implementation. Debt service has also risen as the amount of investment earnings have declined as moneys are spent.

2. The PMG debt service numbers are net of investment earnings.

3. All the bond issues, except series 2006B, are rated AAA. In order to get a AAA rating, a cash reserve of $39 plus million was funded early in the program and is held by the Trustee. The purpose of the reserve is have sufficient funds on hand to pay debt service in the event that sales tax receipts at any one time or length of time is insufficient to pay the debt service. The Reserve is released in the final year (2017) to pay most of the final year's debt service. This final payment assumes that no short fall has occurred.

4. The Series 2006 B bonds of $10 million are subordinate bonds and are unrated. The reason being that the requirements to issue more bonds on a parity basis could not be met. The $14.5 million in cash flow for the Arena and Convention Center was also the results of not being able to issue more debt without increasing the costs of the debt and the risk that other projects would have to be postponed or possibly eliminated if sales tax receipts declined.

5. The Vision 2025 program included $575 million in specific projects with specific dollar allocations. Of that total 83% were funded by bond proceeds or in the case the Aquarium annual payments were contracted for. The balance of approximately $100 million (excluding the rebate) are being funded by sales taxes and investment earnings remaining after debt service is paid monthly. With the exception of the River Projects which were matching funds, cash flow schedules have been reviewed and PMG schedules those projects as they become ready and/or funds are available.

6. As I have noted in the past, I see no excess funds being available for new projects or increases for approved projects until after 2012-13. I hope that my forecast is too low. The bulk of any future surplus will occur in 2017 as the $39.1 million in bond fund reserve is released.

John Piercey

There's a lot to digest here. I'm putting it all here for anyone who cares to analyze it and comment on it.

One of the discoveries in all this is that there are actually four pots of money. In addition to the bond proceeds and the sales tax receipts, there is a bond repayment trust fund held by the bond trustee (the Bank of Oklahoma). When Jim Smith tried to explain to me how it worked, I compared it to an escrow account for paying taxes and insurance on a mortgaged house, which Smith thought was a good analogy. The bond trustee then repays the bondholders from this trust fund. Every six months, the bond trustee recalculates the payments they need from Tulsa County's sales tax receipts to enable them to pay the bondholders.

Here's my paraphrase of Piercey's explanation of the difference between the payments to the bond trustee (found in the Vision 2025 monthly reports) and his schedule for repayment to the bondholders: The county began paying money into the bond fund as soon as the tax began to be collected, but well before they had to begin to repay the bonds. Those early funds earned interest, which reduced the amount the county had to pay to the bond trustee in order to keep the bond trustee's fund at the required level.

Without the details of the ins and outs of the fund being managed by the bond trustee, there doesn't seem to be any way to correlate the sales tax payments to the bond trustee (in the Vision 2025 monthly reports) with the payments to the bondholders (in Piercey's financial summary). The Vision 2025 monthly reports don't cover the balances and transactions in the bond repayment trust account or in the bond proceeds pot of money. (It just now occurs to me that those two pots may actually be a single pot of money.) There are individual monthly project expenditures in the report, which you can infer are payments from the bond proceeds, but it isn't explicit, and transactions like interest earnings are either not reported or perhaps just not obvious to me. It would be good to have a spreadsheet for the bond proceeds fund that spells things out as clearly as the sales tax spreadsheet does for that fund -- the balance at the beginning of each month, all the income and the outgo, and the balance at the end.

I mentioned that there's a fourth pot of money. The June 2007 Vision 2025 monthly report shows that in February, $2,093,676.40 was transferred to the Cash Projects Trust Account, and in June, $45,961,778.85 -- pretty much the entire sales tax reserve being held in the county's accounts -- was transferred to the Cash Projects Trust Account. A memo included in one of the monthly reports says that this account is also being managed by BOk.

I still don't see a way to answer my five questions from the information available. If I were a County Commissioner or a member of the Vision 2025 Sales Tax Overview Committee, I would insist on putting that information together and updating it on a monthly basis to serve as Tulsa County's financial plan for the Vision 2025 program.

It looks to me that John Piercey, PMg, and BOk each possess different pieces of the puzzle, but that no one has actually put all of it together into a complete picture, a complete plan that would permit exploring different scenarios that would allow the use of Vision 2025 funds to complete the dams that were promised as a part of that package.

There's another aspect of this that needs to be explored, but it's late and I'm tired. I'll just point you in the general direction. On the front page of Piercey's summary are three columns: "Pre-Request," "Arena Increase," "Revised Totals." The difference between the first and third columns tell quite a story.

Over at the TulsaNow public forum, in a discussion about the river tax plan, Kirby Crowe, program manager for Vision 2025 had this to say about the availability of information about those projects (he uses the handle Vision 2025 on the forum):

Despite what some say, Tulsa County goes farther than any other governmental agency that I know of in providing transparency on sales tax projects. Vision 2025 has an independent Sales Tax Overview Committee who is provided timely detailed reports identifying all expenditures and the revenue received....

Projects for Vision are reported on the web and the detailed monthly reports are provided to all project sponsors and are on file at the Central Library and each year a newsletter style report is delivered by direct mail and multiple distribution points to the voters of Tulsa County.

I responded with a compliment and a question. I'm crossposting it here to see if someone here has the answer. So far no one has answered it over there:

The monthly Vision 2025 reports are quite thorough and fairly straightforward. Do you think they could be posted on the vision2025.info site?

Anyone looking for them at Central Library should be aware that there are now five binders containing the reports, but (as of a couple of weeks ago) only two are on the local government shelf. The most recent three are in the reference workroom, and you have to ask at the 4th Floor reference desk to see them.

One thing the reports don't contain is the financial plan to which John Piercey, financial contractor on Tulsa County bond issues, has referred in recent public statements.

This plan would include sales tax revenue projections and expected expenditures -- debt service, pay-as-you-go projects (e.g. Oklahoma Aquarium), projects that have yet to be funded (e.g. American Indian Cultural Center), and anticipated administrative fees (e.g., payments to PMg and attorneys).

In other words -- how much money you have on hand, what you expect to come in, and what you're already committed to spend it on, as well as when you expect the money to come in and when you expect to spend it.

Piercey's revenue projections from August 16, 2006, were included in a spreadsheet in the end-of-June Vision 2025 report that PMg prepared. Piercey's projections plus actual receipts through June 2006 come to a grand total of $750,274,016.33. What the Vision 2025 monthly report lacked, something Piercey's plan apparently has, are the details of bond repayment schedules and other anticipated expenses.

I asked Kirby Crowe by phone if he had a copy of this plan. I'm not sure if I made my meaning clear, but I came away from the conversation with the impression that he did not have a copy of Piercey's financial plan.

I called Jim Smith, the County's fiscal officer, and asked if he had a copy of the financial plan. I thought he might, since his name is on the monthly memo in the Vision 2025 report listing tax receipts, the monthly wire transfer from the sales tax fund to the trustee, and the interest earnings on the sales tax trust account.

Smith said he didn't have the financial plan, but suggested I call John Piercey. Mr. Smith could tell me what the payment to the trustee would be for the next six months, at which point it would be recalculated, but couldn't tell me anything more about future expenses.

I called Capital West, and they gave me John Piercey's number. I called John, and he was very gracious. He said he'd e-mail it to me that evening or the following morning. He said something about recalculating based on more recent tax receipts. I'd really be happy seeing the most recent version, whatever he's been using as the basis for his statements about Vision 2025 surpluses.

That was a week ago Monday, the 20th. I gave him a reminder call on the 28th -- got his voicemail and left a message. Haven't heard back yet. I'm sure he's quite busy.

Can anyone suggest somewhere else I could find this information?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Mike at Okiedoke has been closely following the latest news of the possible relocation of the Seattle SuperSonics pro basketball franchise to Oklahoma City. Here are a few thoughts on what he's gleaned.

So Oklahoma City voted for the MAPS sales tax in 1993. Construction on the Ford Center began in 1999. The Ford Center opened in June 2002. When New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, Oklahoma City cleared the calendar to allow the New Orleans Hornets to play their 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 seasons at the Ford Center.

A group of investors from Oklahoma City bought the Seattle SuperSonics and plan to move the team to Oklahoma City. Because one of the owners didn't keep quiet about that intention, he's been fined $250,000 by the NBA. Seattle has been given an ultimatum -- give us a bigger, better place to play or we're gone.

But surely Oklahoma City, with its five-year-old arena which spent two seasons as host to an NBA team, won't need to build a new facility to be the worthy home of the NBA Oklahoma SuperSonic Bacon Cheeseburger Toasters, right? Right?

Wrong. Hypothetically speaking.

When asked by a SuperSonics employee why the ownership team would consider forsaking the bigger and more prosperous Seattle market for Oklahoma City, chairman Clay Bennett listed the incentives Oklahoma City had offered to the SuperSonics:

• Any legal fees involving the team’s fight to break the KeyArena lease.
• Whatever the settlement is to the Seattle Center to buy out the lease.
• All relocation fees the NBA would force the team to pay other owners.
• Costs of physically moving the team’s staff and offices.
• Costs of upgrading the city’s current arena, the Ford Center, to make it NBA-ready.
• Costs of building a new arena, and when it’s finished, keeping the old facility running.

The Ford Center's not even good enough as a temporary home without modifications, and evidently no upgrades will suffice to qualify it as a permanent home.

Bennett covered his tracks with the NBA by saying he was answering the question hypothetically.

So how is Oklahoma City going to pay for all this? With the extra revenue generated by all the economic growth that occurred because of the MAPS projects, they must have money to keep their streets in excellent repair and plenty left over for incentives to the SuperSonics, right?

Right?

Wrong.

This December Oklahoma City is going to be asking its voters to approve a $760 million bond issue for street repairs and basic capital infrastructure, nearly twice the rumored amount of a 2008 Tulsa street bond issue. Mayor Mick Cornett is even considering levying an impact fee to cover the additional cost to the city of serving new development. (That's not a bad idea, actually.)

At least Oklahoma City voters will be able to vote on necessities prior to having to make a choice about a tax for a new sports arena to replace its five-year old facility.

There's been an interesting discussion over at the TulsaNow forum, looking ahead to the river tax vote in October, and looking back to the Vision 2025 tax vote back in 2003. There were persistent rumors that certain major companies blasted e-mails to their employees, urging them to vote yes, and that one company in particular, the Bank of Oklahoma, pressured employees to allow the vote yes campaign to put signs in their yards. BOk was one of the largest donors to the vote yes campaign, and a subsidiary of BOk Financial Corp., Leo Oppenheim, got half of the Vision 2025 revenue bond business.

In the course of the discussion, a user identifying himself with the handle "bokworker" was denying that there had been any sort of pressure on BOk employees to support Vision 2025, but he finally acknowledged this much (emphasis added; "Oil Capital" and "FB" are other participants in the discussion):

Oil Capital, as I recall the "incident" in question, there was an article posted on the banks' internal intranet informing employess about the Vision 2025 initiative and that the bank, as an entity, supported the initiative. The article stated that those employees that also supported the intitiative could ( note, it said COULD not WOULD) have a sign placed in their front yard to indicate their support. Those that did not want a sign or were not in support of the issue could "opt-out" by clicking the attached link and it was done. There was no effort in opting out besides a finger click. I will agree that I am not good at reading the minds of thousands of BOk employees any more than FB is. I can relate however that the so called "implicite coersion" was not felt by me or any of my co-workers. Is it possible that one or more employees felt uncomfortable in opting out? I suppose, but I did not.

Could the bank have worded the intranet article in a manner that you had to "opt-in" to get a sign put in your yard? I suppose but since I didn't feel like the bank was doing something that put my future with the organization at risk by "opting-out" I didn't give it a second thought. My angst with FB was that the banks actions were some sort of a conspiracy on the part of management to force the actions of its' employees to follow the company line. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It's 2003, and Tulsa has lost over 25,000 high tech jobs in the last two years. You go to work, sit down at your desk, log into the network, and you see an article telling you the company supports the Vision 2025 tax increase, and if you don't support it or don't want a "vote yes" sign in your yard, you can click a link and opt out. Would you click that link, knowing that there will be a record made of your decision?

Or would you suddenly remember your friend at that oil company who opposed the Tulsa Project and was fired after the election? Would you decide that it's not worth it to rock the boat?

There may be an honorable situation for forcing employees or subscribers or customers to "opt out" instead of allowing them to "opt in" but I can't think of one. At the very least Mr. Opt Out is hoping you'll forget to uncheck the box. Or maybe he'll set it up so that opting out requires checking a box, with the hope that you won't read closely enough or will just overlook it.

What BOk did, if this employee's story is accurate, is far worse. If you disagreed with your company's position on the tax, you had to conspicuously identify yourself as an opponent. Making the signs opt-in would have allowed opponents of the tax to blend in with those who just didn't get around to requesting a sign.

While I haven't heard this kind of story yet in this campaign, I am already hearing about pressure being applied by supporters of the new tax to shut down opposition. I've already heard of a neighborhood leader is being pressured not to allow an opponent of the tax to share the stage with a representative from the county at their neighborhood meeting. This is a sign of insecurity on the part of the proponents. If they believe their spin won't stand up to cross-examination, they'll refuse to debate someone who is able to use facts and reason to rebut their claims.

You tax supporters: If this is such a good deal, let it stand on its own merits. You shouldn't need to use threats, either explicit or implicit, to win support.

First thought when I read this was, "This makes sense." Instead of demolishing the Maxwell Convention Center arena, they're going to keep it in place and instead expand the exhibit hall to the north into what is now a surface parking lot between 3rd and 4th, Houston and Guthrie.

As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure I suggested this four years ago -- but minus the building a new arena part. If the point was to improve our convention facilities to appeal to conventions, that could be done without a new 18,000 seat arena, which only might be useful to a handful of conventions that would actually want to meet in Tulsa. Tulsans could have been given two independent choices on the ballot in 2003 -- whether or not to build the arena, whether or not to improve the convention center.

Second thought was that this makes the BOk Center even more of a white elephant than it already was. This move is bound to increase the operating deficit on the combined center.

The reason for this proposal has nothing to do with the pointlessness of the BOk Center. The theory is that we'd have a better shot at the Big 12 Basketball Tournament if we had two arenas in close proximity, one for men's games, one for women's games.

It is possible that the old arena might host other events that would otherwise have to go to the Mabee Center, the Pavilion, the Reynolds Center, or the UMAC.

Even though the old arena is more appropriately sized for minor league sports, expect the convention center management to force the Talons and the Oilers to play in the BOk Center to reduce the number of open dates on the new arena's calendar.

Someone needs to keep a running tally of how many days the BOk Center has an event and how many days the old arena has an event, and what the attendance is at each. We can then use those stats to decide whether it might be more economical to mothball the BOk Center.

MSNBC.com has the story of the completion of Boeing's first 787. It worth looking back four years ago to when Tulsans were told that this event might happen here.

Back in 2003, as part of Vision 2025, Tulsa County voters approved $250 million in loans and $100 million in grants to Boeing to try to lure the final assembly plant for the 7E7 (as it was then known) to Tulsa. The local $350 million package was on top of a secret amount of state incentives. Although the Boeing corporate welfare tax was a standalone proposition, the urgency of Boeing's decision (which was ultimately announced in December 2003) was used as a pretext to put the "Vision" tax package on the ballot, including the twice rejected arena. The Boeing proposal lent a thin veneer of plausibility to the claim that Vision 2025 would fix our unemployment problem in the short-term, even though the jobs that had been lost -- over 20,000 high-tech telecom jobs -- wouldn't have been replaced if Boeing had brought 800 factory jobs to town.

Lacking a deep-water port, direct Pacific Ocean access for aircraft components being shipped from Japan, and a corps of tens of thousands of experienced Boeing assembly workers, Tulsa was never a likely site for a Boeing final assembly plant, but the slight possibility served the interests of those who wanted at long last to get their new downtown arena. Tulsa County residents were worried about the future of Tulsa's economy, and 60% were willing to "do something" -- anything -- in hopes it might help, so they voted for all the propositions without considering the long term effects of a large, mostly empty arena on already strained city budgets. The outrageously large subsidy per job and the unlikelihood of the subsidy winning Boeing's heart didn't make a difference to a majority of the electorate.

This week's UTW column topic: The Mayor's proposed FY 2008 budget has been released, and it includes some unpleasant surprises. As the old arena is converted to ballroom space and the new arena isn't open yet, convention and arena revenues will vanish for the year, while start-up administrative costs appear with a vengeance. The net result: A $1.7 million hole in the General Fund, which the Mayor proposes to plug by shutting down 27 holes of golf and cutting a police academy, resulting in a net loss of officers. (The suggestion that golf savings will be funding northside pools is a smokescreen. The Mayor didn't actually say that that would happen, and in fact one fewer pool will be open this year than last.)

There was a typo -- my fault -- in the section of the column about the pools. Last year nine pools were open -- four funded by the city and five by private sponsorships, not four.

Also this week, a few thoughts on the result of Oklahoma's vote for a state quarter design. How did we miss out on an American Indian theme?

One of the images I suggest might have been a better choice is Willard Stone's sculpture "Exodus". Follow that link to see a picture of it.

Elsewhere in the current issue, Brian Ervin has a story on the problem of sinkholes caused not by geology but by aging underground sewer and stormwater pipes. (Take a look at the downtown stormwater management master plan -- it's in the government documents section at Central Library -- and note the section on "subsurface voids." That's where there's a gap between the relatively thin layer of concrete and asphalt and the solid ground beneath.)

The second installment to UTW's guide to summer events and activities is in this week's issue. Here's a link to the first installment.

Also, nominations are in order for Urban Tulsa Weekly's Absolute Best of Tulsa awards. Click the link to enter your choices online, or pull a ballot out of a paper copy and mail it in.

I was happy to read that, for the first time in six years, AMR, parent of American Airlines, Tulsa's largest employer, turned a profit in 2006, $231 million on revenue of $5.39 billion.

It's funny to think, back in 2003, Tulsans were told that American Airlines needed our tax dollars in order to keep their maintenance facility in Tulsa. We voted to tax ourselves over 13 years to give AA $22.3 million.

Compare that number to AMR's annual revenues: It's only 0.4% -- four thousandths -- of AMR's 2006 revenue. That gift to AA was the equivalent to giving $200 to someone who makes $50,000 a year. It's not nothing, but it's a drop in the bucket, not even two days' revenue.

This week's column in Urban Tulsa Weekly is about The Channels proposal to dam the Arkansas River and build three islands in the middle of it, at a cost to the taxpayers of $600 million. I suggest that the $100 million in private funds could be used more effectively using Roberta Brandes Gratz's "Urban Husbandry" strategy -- identifying positive signs of urban life and building on those, rather than trying to create something out of nothing with one big Project Plan.

And over on The Voice of Tulsa forum, I've posted another topic related to river development: When you say you want river development, what exactly are you after? You're invited to click the link and speak your mind.

Anyone else think it's curious that Bing Thom, the architect/urban design consultant consulted by Tulsa Stakeholders, Inc., in the development of "The Channels" plan, hasn't been heard from in connection with last week's unveiling or since?

For something like this, it's typical to parade the designer around town and make him available for interviews and a press conference. For example, Cesar Pelli came to Tulsa to promote his design for the new downtown arena. Why do you suppose that sort of thing hasn't happened for this project?

Has this become an Alan Smithee project?

* Sorry for the title, but I've been listening to The Goon Show rather a lot lately, and the architect's name fits nicely into a novelty song and catch phrase of theirs.

Just received, over the transom, a copy of the weekly report of Rodney Ray, City Manager for Owasso, to the Mayor and City Council of the City of Owasso, dated September 1, 2006. Here is an excerpt:

TULSA “CHANNELS” PROJECT:

The long rumored Tulsa River Project, championed by the Warren Foundation, has been announced by a story in the Tulsa World. Mayor Cataudella and I recently met with the project’s proponents for a discussion of the project (meetings were held with all Tulsa County Mayors and City Mangers). The project is ambitious and uses about $500 to $600 million dollars in public funding as a basis for construction of the necessary infrastructure (an additional $500 to $700 million dollars of private investment in office building, residential space, and retail is planned in addition to the initial investment). The proposed initial funding for the project consists of a private-public sector partnership of which $100 million dollars would come from private donors and approximately $500 million dollars from a proposed 4/10th of a penny sales tax that Tulsa County voters would be asked to approve.

As this proposal is more fully discussed, there are several issues that will become the focus of those discussions. Those issues are predicted to be: 1) Corps of Engineers participation and permitting (it appears that the Corps input to date is minimal, but a briefing with Corps officials is scheduled for next week), 2) Coordination of the three separate River Planning Projects currently underway (the study funded by a ten million dollar gift from George Kaiser, the Vision 2025 River Masterplan done by INCOG, and the Warren Foundation Planning Project), 3) River flow issues on the Arkansas River as they will affect navigations, 4) A substantial amount of the project funded through sales tax; and, 5) the economic impact of Tulsa and regional communities.

There will be numerous meetings, thousands of dollars paid to consultants, and tons of paperwork generated over the next few months; but, the final decision will be left to the voters. The project’s proponents want the County Commission to call for a special election in December to decide the public funding question. However, others are counseling the County Commission against calling such an election before critical decisions can be made regarding fundamental development issues. It should be noted, that if the County Commission decides to call for a December sales tax election, that action would have to be taken in an October Commission meeting (only giving the Commission the month of September to have basic questions and concerns addressed).

As the discussion relating to this proposal develops, I will keep you informed.

Over at The Voice of Tulsa forum, I've just posted a topic to gather reaction to the unveiling of The Channels, the $700 million plan to dam the Arkansas River. Head over there, read my brief take on the topic, and weigh in with your comments.

UPDATE: Chris Medlock was at the unveiling and reports that there's no point in trying to change "The Channels." The project is already in "educate" and "persuade" mode. He says that there were twice as many negative questions from the assembled multitude as positive.

In earlier entries, Chris correctly read the portents and omens of County Commissioner Randi "Ado Annie" Miller wading in the Arkansas River for a Tulsa Whirled photo and had some reliable inside info on the proposal ahead of the Whirled's "scoop".

David Schuttler asks "Are you willing to give up this view?" and he offers some video from the Mayoral campaign, reminding us of what Kathy Taylor and Randi Miller said about taxes and the river when they were seeking our votes.

Paul Romine asks if this is welfare for the wealthy:

Here's an idea, spend your own money! quit soaking the population for you little whims, you got your arena, and we are going to pay for it in more ways than one, the river is not for you to hijack, like you hijacked "the people's vision".

And finally, here's the official website for The Channels. Not much substance yet, but there is this from today's press release:

Estimated to require $600 million in some form of public financing, the group committed to raise $100 million as a gift from the private sector to the Tulsa region. Through the sale of energy created by the project’s hydrodam and other renewable energies, an additional $88 million dollars can be financed, for a total of $788 million.

$600 million is about 20 years of a 0.4% county sales tax -- I'm assuming that they will go after the sales tax that was approved for Boeing's 7E7 plant, but which never went into effect.

Rather than have you wait for me to moderate your comments, you'll find an environment more conducive to give and take at The Voice of Tulsa -- post your comments there. Registration is free and easy.

AND MORE: Chris Medlock counts the skyscrapers in the Channels marketing video and wonders about the market viability of all that new space.

(Added retroactively on June 3, 2006, to complete the column archive.)

This week's Urban Tulsa Weekly column is about corporate welfare, connecting the dots between news that the Great Plains Airlines tax credits are being repaid with money that should be repairing roads and bridges, an effort to extend similar tax credits for the restoration of Shangri-La resort on Grand Lake, former Mayor Bill LaFortune's favorable concessions deals for the Tulsa Talons and Tulsa Oilers, and the biggest example of corporate welfare around -- the $200 million BOk Center.

Bids are in on the bulk of the cost for the new arena (BOk Center). Chris Medlock has details. Will there be any money left for the convention center?

National Review Online has a story today about eminent domain abuse in Sand Springs, Oklahoma. Centennial Baptist Church, located in the historically African-American neighborhood across US 412 (and years ago, across the Katy tracks) from downtown Sand Springs, is being condemned to make way for a "power center" -- a collection of big box stores like Home Depot and Bed, Bath, and Beyond. This is a classic condemnation for private benefit of the sort that was green-lighted by the U. S. Supreme Court in last year's Kelo v. New London case.

This condemnation is part of the Sand Springs Keystone Corridor Redevelopment project, Sand Springs' piece of the Vision 2025 pie. (That link has a couple of clickable aerial maps showing what's currently within the target area and what is planned to replace it. The target area is bounded by Highway 97 on the west, Main Street on the east, US 412 on the north, and Morrow Road on the south.)

Vision 2025, if you're not from around here, is a 13-year 6/10th of a cent county-wide sales tax, funding a downtown sports arena and a variety of projects across the county -- $535 million all told. In order to win the support of each of the smaller towns for the big sports arena in downtown Tulsa, each town got to pick a project for funding. Money to acquire the old African-American neighborhood for retail redevelopment was the City of Sand Springs' choice.

The NRO story makes the point that many property owners in the neighborhood are willing sellers and that a couple of the neighborhood's churches have moved to Tulsa. But Centennial Baptist wishes to stay and to continue its ministry. The entire target area isn't being cleared -- a fast-food restaurant and an auto parts store are being allowed to stay. Centennial is on Morrow, on the southern edge of the area. If Centennial were allowed to stay, there would still be plenty of room for new development.

An initiative petition is being circulated which would limit the use of eminent domain for private benefit, but it will come too late for Centennial Baptist Church. The only hope for the church is for the City of Sand Springs to relent. From the City's point of view, anything that replaces the church is better than the church because it will pay more property and sales tax than the church, which is exempt.

I've written a couple of entries about this neighborhood in the past -- the first was a call for someone to interview Harlem Globetrotter great Marques Haynes, who grew up there, as part of documenting the neighborhood's history, and the second was an e-mail from Ruth Ellen Henry of the Sand Springs Cultural and Historical Museum about the history of the neighborhood. One interesting fact in Ms. Henry's e-mail -- the area was donated by Charles Page, the philanthropist and industrialist who founded the town, as a refuge to blacks taking refuge from the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot.

There's an interesting discussion over in the TulsaNow forums about the new Office Depot at 15th and Lewis. It sits awkwardly in the middle of the lot, roughly where the previous structure, a Safeway / Homeland / Alps supermarket, sat, but facing north, with a small parking lot to the north and another separate lot on the south side. The old supermarket had its main entrance facing Lewis, very near the sidewalk. The Office Depot also comes up to the sidewalk, but presents passers-by with a blank wall.

The discussion led to some questions about the relatively new McDonald's at 15th and Peoria, namely, "How could they build that plain ol' McDonald's there, right on Cherry Street?" I've posted an explanation and elaborated on what Oklahoma City has done to encourage good urban infill. Specifically, I talk about OKC's urban design districts, which are overlay districts that add some restrictions while relaxing others in order that new development fits the character of historic commercial districts like 23rd Street (west of the State Capitol, home to many Asian businesses) and Capitol Hill (a neighborhood south of the river which is nowhere near the Capitol).

In researching my response, which contains links to a lot of info about Oklahoma City, I found a link to a browsable zoning map of Oklahoma City. It would be awfully nice if Tulsa had something like that available online.

Dean Dennis of Global Spectrum, an unsuccessful bidder for the right to manage Tulsa's new arena and old convention center, flew to Tulsa on Thursday to ask a question: "How could they have more points on the scoring sheet for compensation?" "They" is SMG, the successful bidder, and the question refers to the fact that Global Spectrum made a lower (better) bid for compensation -- their management fees -- than SMG, and yet the committee that evaluated the bids ranked SMG higher in that category. No one answered his question. Chris Medlock has more on the story, with audio of the unanswered question. In this kind of a bid process, each evaluator ranks the bidders in each of several categories, and the ranking is added up for a total score. It's sort of like scoring a boxing match. It increasingly appears that the committee members tweaked their numbers in individual categories to make sure that SMG came out on top, even if SMG wasn't objectively the best bid in a particular category.

If companies don't think they'll get a fair hearing, who will want to do business with the City of Tulsa? I'm glad that Global Spectrum and Professional Bull Riders are making some noise about the way they were treated by Mayor Bill LaFortune, his staff, and his handpicked committee. Nothing will change until people are willing to speak out.

If you still have confidence in Tulsa Mayor Bill LaFortune's choices when it comes to our new arena and arena management, you need to head over to MeeCiteeWurkor's place and read how LaFortune punted away a major-league Professional Bull Riders event by insisting on scheduling a competing minor league bullriding event immediately before the PBR's scheduled and publicized event. PBR suggested some compromises, including rescheduling the minor league event after the PBR event, but LaFortune wouldn't budge. So we lose an event that "generated the highest gross ticket sales in the 41-year history of the Tulsa Convention Center," -- and we lose it to Oklahoma City, of course.

Here's the press release with all the details.

It's strange that LaFortune was even involved in a decision about events at the convention center.

Notice that Bob Funk, president of Oklahoma City-based Express Personnel was trying to do something nice for Tulsa:

"I asked the PBR a year ago to take a chance on Tulsa," said Bob Funk, owner of Express Sports. "I wanted another stop in Oklahoma. I knew Tulsans would support major league bull riding. I am stunned to learn the city had opted to enter into an agreement with a minor league competitor."

So don't expect Mr. Funk's help in landing future sporting events for Tulsa. Why should he bother? He had teamed with Jeff Lund of the Tulsa Oilers to put this together. Lund has to be wondering about his continued use of the city's facilities, when he could just as well move his team to the Fairgrounds Pavilion, with better parking and a size closer to the usual Oilers crowd.

Thursday's Whirled reported that the losing team in the "competition" to run the new downtown Tulsa sports arena and the convention center feels cheated and wants to know how to file a formal protest. You'll recall that the decision to hire SMG was made a mere 24 hours after the competitors made their presentations. SMG was picked because their estimate of how much money the arena could make was higher than Global Spectrum's. Never mind that SMG's fees are higher than Global Spectrum's would have been.

Just think about that: They won the contract because they made up a wildly optimistic number. It didn't hurt that SMG had done consulting work for Tulsa Vision Builders and that Bart Boatright, the program manager for Tulsa Vision Builders, was responsible for recalculating the financial estimates from the bids for presentation to Mayor Bill LaFortune.

To Global Spectrum: No, there is no way to submit a formal protest. King Willie the Weak had final say, and it appears he already had his mind made up before you even had a chance to be heard. The only recourse would be the courts.

When Bill LaFortune was arguing that the City should pay Bank of Oklahoma $7.5 million that the City doesn't owe, he claimed that not paying the money would make Tulsa look unfriendly to business, and companies wouldn't want to come to Tulsa. But it's these questionable deals we're seeing at the City and the County that will deter companies from wanting to do business with local government, perhaps even from coming to Tulsa at all.

It costs a lot of money to put together a proposal for a government contract. Companies make the effort because they believe their proposals will be considered fairly. If the job always goes to the firm with the political connections, other companies won't bother bidding, and that means higher costs for the taxpayer. Worse than that, if Tulsa gets the reputation of being a city where you have to pay to play, like some sort of banana republic, then even companies that don't do government business will choose to locate elsewhere.

So says Steve Roemerman after visiting the one in Indianapolis, and he's right. He's right about this, too:

Instead of trying to convert into something else, Tulsa should hold fast to the things that are uniquely Tulsan. [Councilor Chris] Medlock believes that Tulsa should focus its strengths, and I believe he is right. I have always been impressed with Tulsa; how it uniquely combines family values, with art and culture. What better way to express those strengths, than with an excellent children’s museum?

There have been a couple of attempts -- Hands On, which was in FlightSafety's old building on 38th Street west of Memorial back in the early '90s, and the Harmon Science Center at 41st and Hudson. We never visited the Harmon Science Center -- they publicized the fact that the center was only open to school groups and since our only child at the time was younger than school age we never got to go. Within a few years the doors were shut.

There are some great children's museums and museums with kid-oriented exhibits within a short drive of Tulsa. There's the Omniplex in Oklahoma City, the Sam Noble museum on the OU campus, and the Jasmine Moran Museum in Seminole. Wichita's Exploration Place -- which is on and partly in the Arkansas River -- has a fantastic room devoted to aviation and another devoted to weather. Little Rock has a good kids museum covering science, history, art, and nature, next to their River Market.

The Tulsa Zoo, the Oklahoma Aquarium, and the Tulsa Air and Space Museum each provide some hands-on exhibits in their field of expertise and they try to present exhibits in a way that is accessible and interesting to children, but it would be nice to have a museum that brings different fields of learning together under one roof.

For all the focus on attracting and retaining young professionals -- and that is important -- Tulsa should build on its strengths, too. Many of my contemporaries spent their twenties and thirties on one of the coasts, but when it came time to raise a family, they swam upstream back to Tulsa.

Steve Roemerman has been blogging about plans of the convenience chain Kum and Go to put a new store on the west side of Riverside at 101st Street. What little private development we have on Tulsa's side of the river turns its back to the river, unlike Jenks Riverwalk Crossing which takes advantage of its location. The two restaurants just north of the Creek Turnpike were built as if the river didn't even exist -- cookie cutter designs with the front toward the street and the grease pit and the dumpster toward the back -- toward the river. Steve points out the riverfront is a limited resource, and it seems a waste to use it in this way.

Oklahoma City has land use regulations in place to protect areas of the city that are important to its appeal to tourists and locals. One special development district is called the Gateway area, and it covers the intersection of I-35 and I-44, around the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, Remington Park, and the Omniplex, an area that acts as OKC's front door from the northeast. Other special districts include Bricktown and Stockyards City.

If we're going to get the most out of the piddly amount of Vision 2025 money designated for river improvements, Tulsa needs land use standards so that development along the river doesn't detract from the river's natural beauty, doesn't act as a wall between the riverbank and the rest of the city, but instead helps to link the two.

Dave Schuttler caught this on the City of Tulsa's redesigned website:

The heart of Vision 2025 centers on our $183 million BOK center. Tulsans and visitors alike eagerly await the completion of the new center -- Cesar Pelli's newest masterpiece. Groundbreaking was August 2005.

$183 million was the amount designated in Proposition 3 of the Vision 2025 sales tax election for the new arena and the upgrade of Tulsa's city-owned convention center -- $125 million for the arena, $58 million for the convention center upgrade. It's already been noted that Mayor Bill LaFortune has shifted $16 million away from redoing a facility that brings in new dollars from visitors to building one that simply redistributes the discretionary spending of Tulsans. Is this a subtle way of telling us that he decided to use all $183 million for the arena?

And as for the heart of Vision 2025 centering on the arena, that wasn't the way they sold the package. If anything the "events center," as it was euphemized during the campaign, was downplayed in favor of the university funding in the same proposition and the promise of jobs from a new Boeing facility.

To no one's surprise, Mayor Bill LaFortune selected SMG to manage both the new downtown sports arena and the convention center.

SMG is a joint venture of the Hyatt Hotel Chain and ARAMARK Corporation. The company manages 156 facilities worldwide, including 63 arenas and 44 convention centers. One of the arenas they manage is the Ford Center in Oklahoma City. So when a major concert tour is going to make one stop in Oklahoma, you won't have a competition between the two cities to get the show -- instead SMG will decide, based on their bottom line.

By the way, Mayor LaFortune said at his re-election announcement that if our arena had been in place, Tulsa might have gotten the refugee New Orleans Hornets instead of Oklahoma City. Remember that Katrina hit less than two months before the first game of the NBA season. There were other venues that competed to be the Hornets temporary home, but Oklahoma City a key advantage -- very few events scheduled over the course of the six-month NBA season. The calendar was already mostly clear; a few minor-league hockey games had to be moved to accommodate the Hornets schedule, which has already been set to synchronize with the rest of the league. So if we want a management company who can keep the arena empty most of the time, ready for when Montréal's dormant volcano erupts and forces the Canadiens to find somewhere else to play hockey, we've got the right team.

Joe Kelley is a quick learner:

I have an interesting challenge on my radio show. My interview segments vary in time from 90-seconds to about 5 minutes. Therefore, I have the responsibility of pulling answers out of my guests as quickly and efficiently as possible, lest I run out of time. I avoid niceties and small talk and get right to the heart of my questions. Yet, some guests, particularly politicians, understand that with my show and other LIVE radio and TV shows (like Meet the Press, et al) if they talk with long enough rhetoric, they can avoid actually answering the question at hand. In essence, they filibuster me; or, in sports terminology, they run out the clock.

What inspired this epiphany? Joe interviewed Mayor Bill LaFortune about the movement of Vision 2025 funding from the convention center refurbishment to the construction of the arena. Joe is very diplomatic about it all, but he's not going to let anyone off the hook.

Now, I don’t want to accuse the good Mayor of filibustering me, but I can tell you that he provided far more extraneous information and far less relevant information then I needed and my listeners deserved.

I will implement a new policy on my show henceforth: when the clock runs out without the requisite answers, I will kindly ask that the guest hold on and will record the rest of the interview with them during the commercial break for later playback. Let’s just call it "overtime."

Joe goes on to mention the impact of the hurricanes on the cost of a minor construction job at his house and wonders about the impact on the cost of the arena.

It's no wonder the Mayor would try to run out the clock. He and he alone had the final say on the choice of the arena location (which affected the cost of land acquisition and utility relocation), the choice of architect (and by choosing a starchitect, he pretty much guaranteed a very expensive arena), and the allocation of the $183 million between the arena and the convention center. The county had no role in any of those decisions, and neither did the City Council.

Shouldn't we figure out how much this arena is going to cost and go back to Tulsa's voters and ask, "Do you still want an arena at this price?" before we sink any more money into this pit.

An exclusive, positively retouched photograph:

Of course, this photo is utter fiction. If it were real, you'd see him hauling the cash in the other direction.

Ron W. at Route 66 News has posted the first in a series on the Vision 2025 Route 66 project. He points out that the $15 million in Vision 2025 for Route 66 dwarfs the federal $10 million fund.

He got a copy of the "Vision 2025 Route 66 Enhancements and Promotio