The Oklahoma Gazette published in yesterday's paper a letter I wrote about the MAPS 3 proposal. They kept it pretty much in tact, about which I was surprised and appreciative but, as with any newspaper op-ed, they cut chunks out to save copy space. So here is the complete version:
A couple of years ago, I assigned a class of college freshman writers a chapter of Mike Davis’s book City of Quartz which discusses a crime prevention program in the city of Los Angeles involving the construction of concrete roadblocks in certain parts of the city, supposedly for the purpose of hindering drug traffic between drug infested neighborhoods and neighboring middle class areas. But the roadblocks also had the effect of holding undesirables in certain parts of the city, separating them from better policed, more affluent parts of the city, thereby creating privileged spaces where the upper-middle class didn’t have to fear, or even see, LA’s urban blight.
I asked my students if Oklahoma City has such privileged spaces and, after considering the question, they inevitably mentioned Bricktown, but they seemed to feel a sense of superiority over LA, since we at least didn’t have concrete barriers. But when we looked at a map of Bricktown, we stumbled across borders just as real as any barrier in LA. To the east, I-235 nicely separates our middle class playground from the long neglected, racially segregated lower east side. On the south, the renamed “Oklahoma River” provides a natural barrier from the poverty stricken south east side, and to the west, the elevated railroad tracks are a literal wall between Bricktown and the transient infested downtown area (of course, with the arrival of the Thunder, we should perhaps move that boundary to the Greyhound station).
To protect this privileged space from the urban blight which surrounds it on all sides, the City of Oklahoma City built a brand new, fully-staffed police station responsible for the five or so square blocks that Bricktown encompasses, leaving four stations to protect the other 664 square miles of Oklahoma City. In a recent radio interview, Fraternal Order of Police President Gil Hensley said that, in order to staff the Bricktown station, officers were pulled from districts serving the rest of the city. While Bricktown has added interest and vitality to the downtown area, it has also increased the workload of the OCPD, and it has not hired more officers to help support this workload. President Henley’s counterpart in the Fire Department’s employee group, Phil Sipe has seen a similar increase in workload and has actually had nearly fifty positions cut from his department so that OCFD now has two empty fire stations. So, while it can certainly be argued that the Bricktown development has greatly benefitted our city, it has done so at the expense of the citizens who live in underserved, less affluent areas of the city.
Now the mayor would like the people of Oklahoma City to pass MAPS 3, an extension of the Maps tax already in place, which has already been extended once with MAPS for Kids. The new MAPS tax will build a third convention center downtown, a downtown trolley system, and a downtown park. So who is left out of this new MAPS? With no funding in the plan for new police, fire, or roads, the manpower needed to protect and maintain these new projects will have to come from somewhere. Likely, it will come from already underserved areas of the city. The projects will be paid for, not just by the Edmond, Norman, and Moore residents who come to the city to enjoy these amenities, but by those citizens who will never be able to afford the ticket prices to the new convention center, the bills in Bricktown restaurants and so on. They will not be able to come into downtown to ride the trolley because the famously bad Metro Transit Authority will not see a cent to improve its slow routes and unreliable service.
Thus, the people who are left out of the new MAPS improvements are the people who are most in need. Those of us in the upper middle class will have another nice party destination and we will no doubt feel safe and protected by the platoons of public servants we will see inside our barricaded safe-haven. But people who live just outside our barricades will continue to live with such dilapidated roads that they cannot drive a car down their street, such as those who live just blocks from downtown in the 2200 block of SW 8th, whose street cannot even be called paved. People in the rural areas of the southeast side will still have no fire hydrants, and the police station that serves them will still be twenty miles away. People who live in less desirable neighborhoods in the city will see the police and firemen transferred away to fill the needs of visitors downtown, leaving them unprotected, because the tax that built these new downtown projects didn’t provide for the manpower needed to protect them. Without a doubt, the new projects proposed in the new MAPS are worthwhile projects, but if the primary responsibility of government is to protect its citizens, then the new MAPS neglects its primary responsibility. It neglects those who most need protection. It robs the poor to give to the rich.
