Tulsa Topics

I received an interesting email from Kent Morlan regarding his take on a new downtown ballpark. Here's his email in whole:

When Oligarchs Rule

By

Kent Morlan

An oligarchy is defined as a form of government where political power effectively rests with a small elite segment of society.  Historically, Tulsa has been pretty much run by a social and financial elite.  This was particularly true when our city had a commission form of government.  The mostly men who were elected to one of the city commission positions were white and rich or very closely connected to those who were.  Until the end of the oil boom in the 1980s, the rich decided how Tulsa was run.

As a result, there were things about Tulsa that were somewhat unique.  It was the largest city in the United States without a degree granting public university, without a public hospital and without free public access to the Interstate Highway system.  Tulsans sent their kids away to school or paid high tuitions to send them to TU.  They also paid for indigent healthcare for Oklahomans in Oklahoma City and the rural counties and paid extra for health care for themselves and Tulsa’s poor. Who cared, Tulsa was rich.

Tulsa has, over much of the last 100 years, been run more like a city state rather than a city.

Unfortunately, times have been tough for Tulsa in recent years.  It is no longer the Oil Capital of the World.  In addition, a number of circumstances have placed our city in a bad position financially.  The city government operates by and large on tax revenues produced by a two cent sales tax.  A regressive third penny that was authorized thirty years ago was supposed to be used for street maintenance and capital improvements.  Because Tulsa has a rather large geographic footprint, it has lots of miles of streets, storm sewers and other public improvements and it needs lots of police officers and firemen and women.

But things began to change when oil wasn’t worth pumping out of the ground in Oklahoma any more.  Tulsa morphed from a corporate headquarters town into a division office town and from white to blue collar.  Because Tulsa was at risk of being successfully sued on a civil rights theory for having a form of government that practically excluded anyone but rich white males, a number of concerned citizens took it upon themselves to re-jigger the city government into a strong mayor-city council form of government.  The council districts that were created effectively guaranteed that the council persons elected to the various seats would be a diverse group.  The Mayor would, of course, be elected at large.

Historically, Tulsans looked down their noses at Oklahoma City.  In recent years, however, more and more Tulsans have been referring to what Oklahoma City has done to its downtown, particularly the Bricktown area in the southeaster quadrant of their downtown.  The city fathers of Oklahoma City have successfully campaigned for and obtained the support of the voters for bond issues for hundreds of millions to build an arena, a baseball stadium and other public improvements that seem to have produced positive results.  Vision 2025 was supposed to do for our downtown what the Metropolitan Area Projects (MAPS) program was intended to do for Oklahoma City.  Whether Tulsa will get a similar result remains to be seem.

There are those who think that Tulsa has lost its focus.  We hired consultants to help us re-brand our city at a cost of $100,000.  Last I heard we remain the former Oil Capital of the World.  Some Tulsans say, not so factitiously, that Tulsa has become the gateway to Jenks.  There can be no doubt that Tulsa has been struggling for some time to re-define itself and its position in Oklahoma and nationally. Tulsa is the first major city that travelers encounter when they enter the American Southwest on I-44.  The skyline is great and the rebuilt Skelly Drive will make it very easy for them to drive straight through our fair city despite the fact that we have a lot of things that they should stop and see, not the least of which is the Gilcrease Museum.

Unfortunately, there is trouble in river city.  The voters do not trust the politicians.  Despite having paid an extra penny in sales taxes for thirty years to pay for capital improvements and having voted for Vision 2025, the city government does not have the money to pay to run the place.  Our streets in disrepair and are littered with trash and the grass on street rights-of-way is not being cut.  In addition, the City has collected millions in assessments over the last 30 years from the owners of properties located inside the Inner Dispersal Loop to fund the operation of our downtown and it is worse off today than it was when they started collecting assessments decades ago.

The Mayor and others have decided that we need to build a new baseball stadium on the north side of Archer between Elgin and Greenwood.  Millions in private donations have been pledged and will hopefully be forthcoming to support the project and the owner of the Drillers has said that if the team does not get a new stadium in Tulsa, the club will move to Jenks.  Because all of the City’s sales tax revenues are needed to run the city’s basic operations, no funds were available to cover the $25 million of the $60 million needed to acquire the land and build such a stadium.  The Mayor and her advisers apparently concluded that the voters would not vote to tax themselves to pay for a new baseball stadium downtown and the third penny sales tax revenues aren’t available either.

When all else fails, create a public trust.  They are such useful entities public trusts.  They make it possible for Oklahoma Cities to do all sorts of things without asking the voters what they think.  Need structured parking garages downtown, no problem, just create a parking trust, have it sell tax exempt revenue bonds and build parking garages.  Need an ambulance service, no problem, create the Emergency Medical Services Authority, borrow a few hundred thousand to buy ambulances and the other stuff you need and presto, you have a private public ambulance service.  Want an airline, no problem, just have the Airport Trust Authority borrow a few million secured by some property at the airport and, once again, presto Great Plaines Airline had the money that it needed to get up and running.  Need a new city hall, once again, no problem, create a trust, borrow the money, buy the building and rent it to the City on a year-to-year lease and the City has a new “razzle dazzle” high tech glass cube city hall and a moral obligation to pay millions of general fund budge money for decades to pay for it and all without a vote of the people.

Want a new baseball stadium? You guest it, just create a trust, borrow the money and build it. But who is going to pay for it?  There are almost 1,500 separate parcels of land located inside the IDL.  The various properties located inside the IDL are used for all kinds of private, governmental, charitable and religious purposes.  There is a lot of vacant land inside the IDL.  There are also residential properties, apartment houses, manufacturing operations, and commercial buildings to name but a new of the many ways the properties are used by their owners. Exactly who made the decision to try to burden the owners of properties inside the IDL is not clear. What is clear is that a lot of effort and money was expended by someone before the issue was ever made public in June.  Consultants were hired, recommendations were made, plans and specifications were prepared, private donations were solicited and pledged, bids were solicited and contracts awarded.  To convince City Councilors to vote to assess the IDL property owners, junkets for some City Councilors to Memphis, Toledo, Baltimore and Indianapolis in somebody’s jet or jets were paid for by some unidentified person or company.

Once all the ducks were appropriately lined up, the Mayor announced that she had to have a new assessment district created by July 10th to replace the existing downtown assessment district due to expire June 30, 2009.  The new assessment district would triple the amount of the assessments to be levied on the IDL properties for the next 30 years from less than a million to more than $3 million.  The Mayor basically asked the City Council to mortgage Downtown Tulsa to pay for the new stadium and to guarantee that she had the votes she gave a free ride on her jet to one of the City Councilors that she thought that she needed to assure that she had the votes to seal the deal.

A laundry list of Tulsa’s oligarchs decided that Tulsa should have a new baseball stadium and they, the Mayor and the City Council decided that property owners large and small downtown should pay for it.  Unfortunately, the assessment scheme that was instigated 30 years also to maintain the Main Mall could not just be renewed at triple the annual assessment because the commercial buildings that have been paying the most would see their assessment bills triple and the owners wouldn’t probably stand still for being tapped to pay for the proposed stadium so a different scheme had to be concocted.  Instead of assessing properties located near 5th and Main the most and those located the farthest away the least, a decisions was apparently made to assess all properties inside the IDL at 6.5 cents a square foot for land and 6.5 cents a square foot for improvements on the land.  While the assessments on the downtown commercial buildings might triple, the assessments on properties around the parameter would increase much more, in some instances, a thousand percent.

The rational for assessing the IDL property owners for part of the cost of a new baseball stadium was that the stadium would be the keystone in the new sports and entertainment district extending from the Maxwell Center on one end at 7th and Houston to the new baseball stadium at Archer and Elgin. The economic activity created by all the sports and entertainment activities that will occur in the various venues will be like a rising tide that lifts all ships. Happy days will be here again in Downtown Tulsa.  A few hundred thousand or million in additional taxes on warehouses, apartment houses, commercial buildings and vacant lots alike when everyone is going to get rich from the appreciation in the value of their properties. Never mind that the previous schemes concocted by the City government to fix Downtown Tulsa have not produced the promised results.  This time it is going to work.  Look at Oklahoma City.

Fortunately, the oligarchs and their minions do not have the absolute right to do just anything they want downtown or anywhere else in our fair city.  They are supposed to comply with the Constitution and statutes of Oklahoma and the United States and the courts are still open to hear the complaints of citizens to belief they are being treated unfairly and unjustly by the city government. My clients have chosen to seek the projection of the courts from what they believe to be unjustified and illegal assessments to pay for a public baseball stadium.  They do not belief that they will be “specially benefit” as the law requires by the baseball stadium.  They also do not believe that they have been benefited from 30 years of past assessments and do not believe that they will be benefited by even more assessments for another 30 years ago.  Time will tell if the protection they seek from the courts will be forth coming.  

It will be interesting to see if the oligarchs who will control the yet to be created public trust will start building the stadium this Fall.  How exactly a non-existent public trust hired consultants and architects, developed plans and specification, solicited bids and awarded a contract to build a public baseball stadium is a legal mystery but that is apparently what has happened.  Seven and a half million of the $30 million pledged by the oligarchs has probably disappeared down a bankruptcy rabbit hole.

The whole scheme concocted by the oligarchs and their minions to fund and build the proposed stadium just gets curiouser and curiouser.  Who pray tell, would buy bonds from a trust that does not have an assured way to get the money to pay them off with interest.