Tulsa Mayor Asks For Tax Extension To Improve Public Buildings

Tulsa city leaders said public buildings are falling apart and make for bad working conditions. Plus, they said much of the fire department's equipment is outdated.

Mayor GT Bynum wants a four-year renewal of the city's tax called "Improve our Tulsa" that will generate $600 million.

Mayor Bynum said the city has spent the last several decades funding the newer parts of Tulsa, so the older areas have been neglected.

"If you look back at the City of Tulsa in the mid 1960s, the City of Tulsa annexed pretty much everything you would think of today as south Tulsa and east Tulsa.... the city tripled our geographic footprint overnight in 1966," said Mayor Bynum. "Those areas were the growth engine for Tulsa for the next 50 years. The tradeoff is the citizens of Tulsa spent the next 40 years building streets and stormwater infrastructure that could serve the newer parts of our city and not necessarily maintaining streets in the older parts of our city."

Mayor Bynum said when you're going all in on one thing, you aren't funding other things.

"From basically the 1980s through 2008, the overwhelming emphasis of the city's capital improvements programs was on building arguably the best storm water system of any city in the world. We are only one of two cities in the United States that has a class one rating for flood protection. It's important to note that at the beginning of that process we were rated as the worst city in America for flood protection," said Mayor Bynum.

The city said in the last 15 years, Tulsans have invested more than a billion dollars in fixing streets across Tulsa, but he said other projects also need attention.

"We will work to create a package that will provide funding for necessary public safety programs and projects that will ensure better quality of life," said Crista Patrick, District 3 City Councilor. "With your help, together, we will work to improve our Tulsa."

They said the list of needs is long.

"What we saw was a police headquarters where no one feels safe drinking the water and when our water department tested it, the led levels are at many times any safe level for a human being to drink [because of the pipes and utilities in the building, itself]. And yet that is what the senior command staff of our police department, everyone that works in our courts, every person that goes to that building, that's the water supply that they're asked to rely upon," said Bynum. "We saw elevators going up to our municipal lockup facility that breakdown so routinely that officers are concerned to get into them with inmates for fear that the elevator will break down while they're in the elevator with an inmate. [...] Municipal courts, where the judges now know exactly where to put the buckets on the floor to capture sewage that's dripping ceiling because it happens so often, they have the buckets ready where they can pull them out and lay them out, so they don't have to interrupt their court sessions."

Bynum said the Tulsa PAC has felt the effects of flooding and old pipes.

"We saw a performing arts center that had sewage break and dump human feces on cars in the parking lot just last year," said Bynum. "The effect of a waterline break that flooded the basement of the PAC."

Fire Chief Michael Baker said his department's headquarters is in a flood plain and when the water in the Arkansas River gets high enough, they put their furniture on top of desks.

"There's a traffic cone that hangs out of the ceiling because they need to funnel the water from one drip into a pan," said Chief Michael Baker, Tulsa Fire.

Firefighters have used old trucks that are 10 years past replacement and they need new equipment that's critical to keeping firefighters safe.

"We were so far behind that catching up is just beyond the capacity. We not only need something to catch the fleet up to a baseline of safety, but we also need something to sustain it. So, it's not just [let's] get some trucks in here and hope they work, it's how do we sustain that in the path, and this offers us a path forward to not only get caught up with our apparatus needs but also have a sustainability option," said Chief Baker.

Mayor Bynum hopes to bring the recommendation before the city council in March and then put it to Tulsans for a vote in August.