Talks break down between city, county on tax proposals after city rejects compromise
By ZACK STOYCOFF World Staff Writer on Aug 20, 2013, at 6:02 PM Updated on 8/20/13 at 7:55 PM
Local
For more than a generation, this rural community has been haunted by a mystery: What happened to a group of teens who disappeared in the early 1970s after heading to a high school football game?
Jimmy Nazario Jr. was scheduled for trial on a second-degree murder charge in October — but defense attorney Kenneth Rhoads was killed in a motorcycle accident in July.
Separate city and county proposals for a 0.167-cent tax are likely headed to ballots Nov. 12 after an apparent breakdown in talks to combine or stagger the initiatives, officials said Tuesday.
Leaders from both sides met privately at least four times this month to brainstorm a compromise that would prevent side-by-side 0.167-cent proposals — a scenario they feared would endanger both, either by confusing voters or by raising the possibility of a tax increase for Tulsans if both pass.
Mayor Dewey Bartlett and city councilors on Tuesday rejected the most significant compromise stemming from those meetings — sharing a 0.167-cent tax, which Finance Director Mike Kier warned would force the city to compensate by lengthening its proposal and thereby diluting its effectiveness.
Tulsa County Commissioner Karen Keith, meanwhile, said the council’s consolation offer to include in its proposal $5 million for the county’s proposed $50 million juvenile justice center would not keep her from pushing for a new countywide 0.167-cent tax for the project.
“I feel like the city has done everything we can while respecting the process that we’ve gone through to make sure that we’re spending public money in a responsible way,” said Councilor G.T. Bynum, who chairs a task force helping to assemble the city’s proposal.
“What Commissioner Keith is asking us to do is just throw around tens of millions of dollars on the fly with no public input and no scrutiny, and that’s not responsible.”
Keith, who said her first goal was to get the city to abandon the 0.167-cent tax altogether, said she was “incredibly disappointed” by the apparent failure of the talks, noting that the council’s offer wouldn’t cover a meaningful portion of the project.
“I’m not sure $5 million is a generous offer or even genuine,” she said. “That is not who we are in this community, where we say to one government entity that it’s OK to starve another government entity when we’re all pulling from the same tax pool.”
Local
For more than a generation, this rural community has been haunted by a mystery: What happened to a group of teens who disappeared in the early 1970s after heading to a high school football game?
Jimmy Nazario Jr. was scheduled for trial on a second-degree murder charge in October — but defense attorney Kenneth Rhoads was killed in a motorcycle accident in July.
