My City Needs Money for Street Improvements. Here’s Why I Voted Not to Give It to Them.
Earlier this month, Tulsans went to the polls to vote on, among other things, a streets bond issue. (The bond was part of a $639 million renewal of the $918.7 million Improve Our Tulsa program approved in 2013.) Like so many other American cities, Tulsa is trapped in a infrastructure deficit spiral, and that’s why I voted no on the streets bond.
But wait. Wouldn’t not passing the streets bond just make the deficits worse?
Before I explain, you should know that voters overwhelmingly passed the renewal package, including more than 85% support for the streets and transportation bond. Most voters want their streets fixed. I wanted to vote yes too, because our city has legitimate capital improvement needs. And yet I had to vote no on the streets package. There are five reasons why. I’m laying them out here because, if it’s too late for Tulsans to learn from our own experience, maybe people in other cities still can.
1. These policies haven’t worked for decades. So there’s no reason to think they’ll start working now.
When it comes to streets, “Improve our Tulsa 2” will do the same thing we have been doing for over 40 years but hasn’t worked. Streets have been widened and improved, but Tulsa is still no closer to ending our structural infrastructure deficit.
The land area in Tulsa grew dramatically in 1966 when the number of square miles in the city limits tripled nearly overnight. Anxiety about being “annexed in” by surrounding towns, allowing no room for Tulsa’s geographic growth, drove a hasty annexation with no plan for how to pay for the new infrastructure that would be required. While this massive annexation allowed for a population increase and caused the City to capture sales tax revenue from the booming suburban growth to the south and east, it also created demand, particularly for new street infrastructure, that has yet to be met. The solution was the creation of a “temporary” additional penny sales tax for capital improvements that was enacted in 1980 and has been renewed periodically ever since.
For a while, as the growth periphery continued to largely be in Tulsa’s city limits, sales tax dollars continued to increase. Sales tax revenue has been very important for Tulsa as it is almost entirely reliant on it for funding operating expenses. Unlike cities in nearly all other states, which receive property tax revenue for government operations, the Oklahoma Constitution prohibits cities from using a property tax for anything other than capital improvements. However, over the last 20 years, as the growth periphery has moved beyond the Tulsa city limits to now booming suburbs like Jenks, Bixby and Broken Arrow—the once small towns that Tulsa once worried would annex it in—growth in sales tax revenue has slowed dramatically. At the same time City operating costs just to maintain the same level of service have routinely outpaced available tax revenue, resulting in a deterioration in city services. After rapid growth until the early 1980s, the population of the city of Tulsa has been around 400,000 many years.
Now Tulsa is faced with not only having to add infrastructure just to catch up with all the neighborhoods developed long ago, but also having to rehabilitate infrastructure built in the 1960s, 70s and 80s that is largely worn out. The primarily streets general obligation bond issue that passed was for $427 million and included $64 million for additional street widening. But this was just a portion of what’s reported to be needed. The current capital improvement needs list is estimated to be in the billions. This is occurring as the city is no longer growing in population, sales tax revenues are flat, and operating costs for the City of Tulsa are increasing faster than tax revenue.
2. The current growth patterns that have been fueled by Tulsa’s street infrastructure investments aren’t sustainable.
The reality is that Tulsa cannot continue to invest in street infrastructure that does not more than pay for itself, funding its replacement with regular sales tax revenue. Otherwise, it will never get caught up. By continuing the cycle of investing in more of the same infrastructure, Tulsa is following the path of many American cities by facilitating suburban development that will not adequately pay for the cost of this infrastructure.
Joe Minicozzi, Principal and Founder of fiscal, development and tax analysis firm Urban 3 was quoted in a 2012 article for Atlantic Cities (now CityLab), saying “Low-density development isn’t just a poor way to make…tax revenue. It’s extremely expensive to maintain. In fact, it’s only feasible if we’re expanding development at the periphery into eternity, forever bringing in revenue from new construction that can help pay for the existing subdivisions we’ve already built.”
This describes the situation in Tulsa accurately. The only way to fund all this street infrastructure and even possibly get caught up is to dramatically increase sales and property taxes. This is largely viewed as being politically unfeasible and, as I argue below, is economically unwise.
3. Infrastructure should generate additional wealth for a city, not create additional tax burdens.
The property tax value of downtown Asheville, NC. Developed by Joshua McCarty of Urban3. Image credit.
Minicozzi and Chuck Marohn, founder and president of Strong Towns, have created models showing the amount of property tax created per acre for different types of development. They have shown that while everyone thinks a big Walmart on a suburban site will generate an enormous amount of tax revenue, because of the infrastructure required to service such a large site, the amount of property tax revenue per acre is much lower than traditional development found in downtowns and older urban neighborhoods. Since the City of Tulsa is dependent on sales tax, not property tax, revenue to fund operations, locally the Urban Data Pioneers civic group attempted to do a similar analysis of Tulsa development patterns based on sales tax revenue in 2017. The picture was largely similar.
Thus, for example, when considering street improvements, Tulsa needs to look at more than just traffic counts or the pavement condition index. It needs to consider what type of development will this facilitate and will it generate additional tax revenue that more than covers the cost of the improvement and provides replacement cost funding.
4. Determining which street projects to tackle require more than just an analysis from traffic engineers.
As I currently understand it, the City’s traffic engineers maintain the list of needed capital improvement projects. Street projects are reviewed and ranked to determine which have the greatest need based on traffic counts, age, pavement condition index, etc. However, what’s missing is the level of economic activity (tax revenue) likely to be generated, and whether it is the type of development that helps create the city Tulsans want. With a few exceptions, Tulsa’s traffic engineers largely control the capital improvement process.
The most recent gauge of what Tulsans would like for their city was the Tulsa Comprehensive Plan, which came out of PlaniTulsa. It represented the views what thousands of Tulsans said they wanted our city to look like. Citizens strongly preferred a more walkable, less auto-dependent city with several districts and neighborhoods of mixed-use development. However, the infrastructure projects favored by the City’s traffic engineers are encouraging more auto-dependent development, not less. Currently, the plan is administered by the Tulsa Planning Office housed at the regional planning organization, the Indian Nations Council of Governments (INCOG), and they have no formal role in determining which infrastructure projects the City will fund. This should change with infrastructure projects being seen as way for the City to help achieve this vision Tulsans desire.
Besides opening the process up to the Tulsa Planning Office, there should be an independent economic analysis done for projects to determine whether they generate additional tax revenue or economic activity that exceeds their original and replacement costs. Ultimately, a project selection committee should be formed that makes the final recommendations on projects based on these criteria to the Mayor.
5. The City has done a poor job managing and completing construction on existing capital improvement projects that have already been funded.
Tulsans have expressed frustration with continual street construction. Bumper stickers have been spotted that say “Tulsa: Finish Something. Anything.” or “Welcome to the City of Road Construction.” I realize that construction is often the price of progress, but can’t Tulsa figure out a way to do it better? Other cities don’t seem to have as much constant construction as Tulsa does.
There were plenty of capital improvement projects, including streets, that had been approved by the voters but have yet to be completed before the election this past Tuesday. Now there will be more. Instead of continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting different results, can’t Tulsa rethink its capital improvements approach and consider the economic impact and type of development encouraged by them before selecting proposed projects in the future?
Tulsans deserve better. It should have started on November 12, but didn’t. Maybe it can start now.
Editor’s Note: A version of this article originally appeared on the blog Batesline. Top photo of Tulsa is via Jon Grogan.
About the Author
Brent C. Isaacs, AICP, is an urban planner in Tulsa and member and supporter of Strong Towns. He is passionate about seeing his hometown of Tulsa thrive. Brent worked for HUD for many years and currently works for a non-profit developing affordable housing for persons with special needs. He has also lived in Oxford, England, Kansas City, Indianapolis and Cincinnati. He describes himself as an urbanist. You can connect with Brent on LinkedIn.
In this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck responds to a recent Substack column that criticized the Strong Towns stance on the Suburban Experiment and infrastructure spending.