MAPS 3 ballot won’t detail individual projects
MAPS 3Council worded item certain way to follow law
BY JOHN ESTUS
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6
Published: November 8, 2009
The first MAPS ballot in 1993 listed each of the proposed projects in a single-question, all-or-nothing proposition, but that ballot may have been improper, according to numerous attorneys.
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A state law commonly referred to as the single subject rule forbids cities from asking voters to approve one tax for multiple purposes. Voters must vote on tax-funded projects one project at a time.
"Someone probably could have challenged the original MAPS as violating the single subject rule, but no one really did,” said City Attorney Kenny Jordan.
The law is why the MAPS 3 ballot will look dramatically different from its predecessors.
Oklahoma City Council members kept specific projects off the MAPS 3 ballot. They instead opted to describe the projects as general "capital improvements” in a single question, all-or-nothing ballot that asks voters to let the city to enact a tax to pay for those improvements.
The ordinance council members passed in September to set the Dec. 8 vote was bundled with a resolution outlining how to spend the $777 million the sales tax would be expected to generate. Resolutions are nonbinding and can be overturned by a city council vote.
Such an approach to a ballot is unusual in
Oklahoma, said
Andrew Spiropoulos, a law professor at
Oklahoma City University and director of the Center for the Study of State Constitutional Law and Government.
"It’s not the legal structure that’s unusual — it’s the fact that the city is willing to make such a commitment to such a big series of projects,” he said. "You would never do one or two of these things without the others because they don’t work without each other.”
Since the first MAPS, courts have generally ruled that a single subject of a tax can be broader than one single project, Jordan said.
The intent of the single subject rule is to avoid combining unrelated projects in a ballot, which can force people to vote for something they may not support in order to get something they do support, Spiropoulos said.
The city’s alternative to the all-or-nothing MAPS 3 ballot, Jordan said, was one that included each of the proposed projects as separate propositions requiring separate votes.
Mayor Mick Cornett has said council members decided against separate propositions for MAPS 3 projects because city voters are accustomed to the all-or-nothing approach, which was used for MAPS and MAPS for Kids.
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They do have some improvements I like such as more toilets and free shows that I don't remember like the lumberjacks and children's animal petting since I take my grandson. He enjoys it and would go every day if we would take him. Last year he got to ride a camel and a pony. The only thing that got his mind off it was "Walking With the Dinosaurs".Now everything is dinosaurs. I have an ankle ulcer. When he was watching me bandage it just after the show he asked," Grandpa,Did a Dinosaur bite you?"
I don't enjoy the fair anymore as it has seemed to have gone down hill ever since I started going almost 60 years ago.
When we voted for MAPS, we needed a baseball staduim. The Myriad was getting old, the Civic Center was getting old, couldn't tell you what the downtown liberay looked like, Bricktown barely existed. The North Canadian was just something that ran through the city.
What grew was simply amazing. Downtown was vastly improved. The Ballpark was cool, the Ford Center was better than expected, the Myraid was improved, the Fair looks better, the Oklahoma River is better than one could expect, the Libray is cool.
But what is the reward of having a big park?
It just seems that the city is throwing projects at us so they don't lose the revenue the never ending 1 cent sales tax has given the city.
But the problem is, it is still illegal as the article points out. Just as the original MAPS was illegal (but no one challenged it). This is an even more egregious example of log rolling. Slapping an extremely generic label of "capital improvement" and not listing the projects at all doesn't seem to avoid that. This is a $777M blank check.
The Mayor said at the MAPS 3 press conference we would be voting on the items individually, when he said: "Each of these projects is going to have to stand on its own."