District 5 Councilor Miller responds to mayor, explains his opposition to Improve Our Tulsa 3

TULSA — Tulsa District 5 City Councilor Grant Miller told KRMG Monday that he “just doesn’t agree with that characterization” after hearing Mayor G.T. Bynum’s comments regarding Miller’s opposition to the Improve Our Tulsa 3 package on the KRMG Morning News with Dan Potter.

The opposition to the general obligation bonds and tax extension, Bynum said, consists of “generally just folks, like Councilor Miller, who object to things for the sake of objecting to them.” (You can hear the entire conversation with the mayor HERE.)

[You can hear the KRMG In-Depth Report on Councilor Miller’s opposition to Improve Our Tulsa III HERE]

Miller told KRMG late Monday morning that the mayor has invoked his name four or five times on his KRMG “Mondays with the Mayor” segment, and he felt it was time for him to respond.

“He’s going to say and whatever it is that’s going to get his package through, and I get that, and I respect that that’s the type of politician he is,” Miller said. “But after, you know, four or five times of him just completely characterizing my positions, it’s like hey - I should have a bite of the apple here to explain my side.”

He has real objections, he said, not so much about the needs addressed by IOT3, but rather to the process of determining how best to meet those needs.

“Don’t get me wrong, there is no doubt that there’s much work to be done,” he said. “There’s a lot of deferred maintenance that needs to be done. There’s a lot that wasn’t taken care of in previous packages.”

But he points to the Gilcrease Museum project as an example of what he calls a “bait and switch” by the city.

“They took the $65 million of Gilcrease money to a vote of the people, got them to commit that hey - we want to renovate and expand the Gilcrease Museum for $65 million. And then they come back and do a Brown amendment, bait and switch, and now it’s all of a sudden ‘oh, we need to tear it down and we need to rebuild the Gilcrease Museum,’” at a cost of about $140 million.

While a lot of that cost overrun will be met by private donations, Miller says he doesn’t understand why they didn’t know from the beginning that repair or renovation wasn’t an option.

“I think the fact that we needed to tear that down and rebuild was entirely foreseeable,” Miller said.

He thinks the Zink Lake project may also run in to massive cost overruns, because of the need to abate any chemical spills or other environmental damage caused by nearby industries before it can be rendered safe for public use.

“It’s not like we don’t know that there’s a big chemical mess over there right on the bank and most likely protruding into the river,” Miller told KRMG. “We know that that’s the case. The only question is, how much is it going to cost to clean that up? And when we get into the project, what are we going to run into with that problem that prevents us from being able to do it, or that costs us a boatload more money to get it done?”

Miller feels like the city has a history of putting such projects before the public without a lot of details, then adding a lot of public safety spending on police and fire departments to ensure public support for the entire package.

And, he doesn’t feel like the 63 days he was given to fully vet IOT3 before it went to a vote was nearly enough time to grasp all the complexities and ramifications of an $814 million spending package.

The vote for Improve Our Tulsa 3 is scheduled for Tuesday, August 8th.