There are six weeks left to submit Vision proposals to the City of Tulsa.
Councilors have agreed on Sept. 10 as the cutoff date for accepting ideas.
"We're really looking at an end of 2015 deadline for us to have the package ready to present, and we know we're going to need to give the engineers and the finance guys a couple of months to look through what we've put together and really help us to make sure our numbers are right," said Vision task force Co-chair Blake Ewing.
Ewing said city engineers need to verify or adjust the price tags on projects new to the city. Otherwise, an idea could be included in the renewal package but turn out to cost far more.
So far, $851 million worth of projects have been pitched. That figure does not include the river, public safety or councilors’ ideas.
Councilors are moving to formalize a proposal to set aside 0.05 percent of a 0.6 percent Vision renewal for the county. Councilor G.T. Bynum said other Tulsa County cities have already done so or are just waiting for Tulsa to do it.
"This isn't something that, you know, we at the City of Tulsa just came up with off the top of our heads and put in a resolution," Bynum said. "This is something we've been discussing for months with our colleagues in other cities and with the county commissioners."
Tulsa city leaders estimate the county’s separate Vision renewal would generate around $5.9 million a year over 10 years. County commissioners are still evaluating projects and haven’t staked out a position on the cities’ idea.
Tulsa's Vision renewal would bring in more than sales tax for the city, too. The city would pick up an equivalent percentage of use tax, the self-reported tax from online shopping.
There’s some room for creativity with that money.
"Oklahoma City has said their use tax that they collect off the MAPS program is going to go solely for public safety capital items," Bynum said. "I think that's a great idea and something we need to discuss, but it's a whole dimension of this discussion that we haven't discussed to date."
The city currently gets about $25 million a year from use tax collections. The amount gained from use tax under a 0.55 percent Vision renewal would be around $4.4 million.
