Define Irony
I’m sitting here covering the Business Improvement District meeting, and I’m bewildered by what I’m hearing. For nine years areas like Automobile Alley were able to pool their project assessments year to year and go for one big project, like the gateway at NW 6 and Oklahoma Avenue. But now the city attorney’s office has concluded that this is no longer legally possible. No, the law didn’t change. Interpretation of the law, however, did. And now projects must be funded by whatever funding is available in one single year.
So if, let’s say, Bricktown wanted to build a small welcome center building (this is not being proposed, just a hypothetical) in front of the AT&T Bricktown Ballpark, they could not do so because it would be considered a major capital improvement.
Tulsa, meanwhile, has it’s own interpretation of the same law, and they’re actually building an ENTIRE BALLPARK funded by multiple years of business improvement district assessments.
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Comments
Sounds like our attorney fits in better with the Tulsa crowd and their attorney first in better with ours. Perhaps we should arrange a trade? 
@Plate: I think he means the intersection at 6th and Walnut where you get off the highway.
@Blair: I don’t see who could benefit from forcing the BID money to be spent annually as opposed to saving it up. Who could it be?
oh, I’ve been there and done that with our state government. Sat across the table from a gentleman at the tax commission who told me the commission would not certify a project unless the expenditure and the profit were both made in the same fiscal year. . . even if the profit was guaranteed to be 10 times more than the expenditure but would happen 16 months later, it would be considered a loss.
gah!
Any idea who asked the city attorney to taken a “fresh” look at the law and offer a new opinion? These legal opinions always seem to come out at a time that just so happens to be incredibly beneficial to somebody.
Of course, I am no familiar with all of the inner-workings of the BID, perhaps that is not the case here.