How a Sales Tax Helped Oklahoma City Get a Piece of the Summer Olympics

Editor’s note: This story is part of Governing’s ongoing Q&A series “In the Weeds.” The series features experts whose knowledge can provide new insights and solutions for state and local government officials across the country. Have an expert you think should be featured? Email Web Editor Natalie Delgadillo at ndelgadillo@governing.com.



You probably know that Los Angeles is gearing up to host the 2028 Summer Olympics, with big plans to improve its airport, expand public transit, and renovate its convention center. You might not know that Oklahoma City, more than 1,300 miles away — about 19 hours by car — is also playing host to the 2028 Games.

Softball and canoe slalom will be held at venues in the Oklahoma capital, pending approval by the Los Angeles City Council. It’s the only city outside California that will host Olympic events.

Why is this happening? For one thing, Oklahoma City has the largest softball stadium in the world, Devon Park, with capacity for 13,000 fans. Oklahoma City also has one of the most sought-after whitewater kayaking and canoeing facilities in the country at Riversport OKC. The facility is built on the Oklahoma River, a seven-mile stretch of river that was only named in 2004 amid heavy engineering to create a recreational amenity for downtown Oklahoma City.

Once a desolate place, downtown OKC only has facilities like these because of a program called MAPS, Metropolitan Area Projects. The MAPS program is a one-cent sales tax first approved by voters in 1993. It was designed to invest in quality-of-life improvements around the city: Stadiums, arenas, parks, canals, trails, libraries, a streetcar and lots more. Most famously, the program was responsible for creating the Paycom Center basketball arena, which helped lure the Oklahoma City Thunder NBA team from Seattle in 2008. The program has been reauthorized by voters three times since the original vote, most recently in 2019, shortly after David Holt took office as Oklahoma City mayor. Last year, voters also approved using the one-cent sales tax to fund another new arena for the Thunder when the current MAPS program expires.

Governing recently spoke with Holt about the legacy of MAPS. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The first MAPS tax was passed in 1993. How was the program pitched at that time? 

The roots of it are a city whose downtown was dead, following arguably the worst Urban Renewal process in the country. We as a community hired the architect I.M. Pei to design a downtown of the future for us in the late ’50s and early ’60s. And then we tore down all our buildings throughout the ’60s and ’70s and then we never did anything else.

So our downtown was just really dead, and then in the ’80s on top of it we went through an economic depression. We had a big oil boom in the late ’70s and early ’80s and then we had a massive oil bust. We were too reliant on one industry. We paid a price for that.

In the early ’90s our mayor at the time, Ron Norick, was chasing a major United Airlines facility that would have brought thousands of jobs. We didn’t get it. They went to Indianapolis. That was disappointing on many levels, and the mayor called United, and the story we tell locally is, the CEO of United said, “Well, mayor, you didn’t know this, but we sent some of our executives and their spouses to Oklahoma City to spend a little bit of time and experience the city. And it was awful. We couldn’t imagine making our employees live there.”

So what we really embraced through MAPS in 1993 — it’s entirely quality of life. MAPS is not water pipes and police stations. It’s arenas and canals and all these quality-of-life things that are arguably not necessary for human survival, but they are kind of necessary for a city’s survival. For business growth, we can have a conversation about tax and regulatory policy and all those things. But if these job creators just don’t want to live in your city, none of that is going to make a difference.


You’re in the fourth iteration of MAPS. I’ve heard you describe it as sort of like a blank slate in terms of the types of projects that each successive iteration can achieve. How has the pitch for this tax evolved in the last couple decades? 

Each MAPS has had a different mayor. Each mayor kind of passes the baton to the next mayor, and that’s been going on now for nearly 40 years, whereas in other cities, it kind of sometimes feels like the next mayor’s first job is to undo everything that the previous mayor did. Here, there’s a lot of continuity in philosophy.

So we’ve had four mayors pitching four different MAPS. The second MAPS really kind of deviates from the mold. To tell you the truth, I think it was kind of borrowing the brand, which at that point had become popular, to fix up our school buildings. The mayor at the time said, “OK, the school buildings are not under our jurisdiction, but we’ll use the city’s political capital to fix these buildings that the school district has been unable to address.”

I would say that MAPS 3 and MAPS 4 have been a return back to the original model of rolling up a lot of different kinds of projects. Not hundreds of projects, but a limited number so that you can be transformative in those areas. MAPS 3 built a $120 million urban park, a $300 million convention center, a downtown streetcar that links all of our amenities downtown, and something that feels now like one of our most significant projects but at the time didn’t: Our whitewater facility.

I should point out that MAPS 1 put dams on the river just so it had water in it. It was really just an aesthetic thing: Let’s have a river instead of a ditch we have to mow twice a year. What happened after that was that this rowing community popped up and it got support from the corporate community and they built some boathouses. So when MAPS 3 came along they said, “Hey, if we really want to be strong in paddle sports, if we really want to own this, we need a whitewater course adjacent to the rowing on the river.” That’s what we did in MAPS 3. And now that whitewater course has secured the Summer Olympics for us.

But when I came along in 2018, we had a very inclusive process using all the modern methods of doing civic engagement. That ultimately brought us to 16 projects, a $1.1 billion initiative, but a little bit different. We’d kind of done all the things we needed downtown, at least we thought. We felt that people wanted to see more around the city and they also wanted to see things that hit on different socioeconomic levels. When we polled people, things like mental health popped to the top, things like a diversion hub project where we’re giving a one-stop shop for people engaging with the criminal justice system to get job training and substance abuse treatment and mental health support. These are the kind of projects that were polling really high. Not the kind of things from the past like arenas and stadiums. There’s a little bit of that in MAPS 4, but 70 percent of the dollars really go to these human needs, neighborhood needs.

But again, at its core, we’re investing in our city. Here in Oklahoma City I get to break ground and cut ribbons every week.

Dream job for a mayor. 

And this has been true of Oklahoma City mayors for three decades. Sometimes I tell my fellow mayors, it almost doesn’t even matter what you’re investing in. Just invest in something, building your city. Every year in this city for three decades we’ve been putting $100 million of construction out into the city for quality-of-life improvements. And I can talk casually about all these projects we’re doing and I realize my colleagues are kind of green with envy. All these things are going to open in the next few years. We built this amazing model. The first one got 53 percent of the vote, but the last one got 72 percent. It’s popular. We’re trusted. And it’s opened the doors for some other things. The arena that we’re building that we just passed in December is not technically a MAPS project but it feels like MAPS to a lot of people and it got 71 percent in a country that almost never passes arena initiatives.

There has been this growing skepticism about the benefits of using taxpayer money for sports arenas and entertainment centers. Oklahoma City actually owns some of these arenas. How has the public discussion about those types of spaces evolved there?

It absolutely comes down to, in my view, what is your leverage? What’s your market size? Is this going to happen or not without you?

We’re the 42nd largest metropolitan market. But because of MAPS, we’re the 20th largest city. We’ve grown a lot — we were the 37th largest city in the United States, I think, when I was born 45 years ago. So the growth is awesome in the city. But when you pull in the suburbs and you start ranking markets, it’s a different story. NBA teams care about how many people live in your market. There, we fall a little farther down the list. We’re 42nd. And every one of the leagues has 30 or 32 teams. So if the free market were allowed to dictate where those teams are, they wouldn’t put them in the 42nd largest market.

A group of our business leaders bought the Sonics out in Seattle, and there’s a whole tortured story about how that happened. We made an investment in ’08 in our arena that we had built through MAPS to secure the relocation of the team. So we got a team. But the battle never ends when you’re the 42nd largest market. You’ve got to hold onto it.


How do you pitch the benefit of that to people that are skeptical? What is the economic benefit of having those teams there? 

For us it was kind of easy. The team hasn’t been here so long that people don’t remember what it was like before. The closing argument of that campaign is, “Do you guys remember Oklahoma City before the Thunder?” “Yes.” “Do you want that again?” “No.”

You can show the numbers, the tremendous population growth, the tremendous economic growth, and of course there’s a lot to go into it. But it’s this foundation that being a major sports city creates that’s easy to take for granted when you’re living in Philadelphia or New York. When you’re in a place like Oklahoma City, that’s kind of your ticket to the big time. That was how you got elevated to an upper-tier city. It’s a conversation starter that opens doors in all these other areas as well. People immediately give you credibility because you have a major-league sports team. And if you don’t, they don’t. Our residents could largely see that.

The ones who voted "no" were just anti-tax, or some of them even understood the reality of it but they still didn’t like it. They think the owners should pay. And I say, it doesn’t matter what people should or could do, what matters is what they’re going to do. As the mayor I’ve got to live in the real world. And in the real world, no one is building this arena but us, because we’re the 42nd largest market.

You said that to some degree it doesn’t matter what you’re investing in, because you’re building projects around the city and it’s putting money into the economy. Have there been any MAPS projects that have proved to be a waste of money, or that didn’t pan out how you hoped?

Our first MAPS, they wanted to build a streetcar, and they didn’t get the federal grants that they needed, so they ended up buying rubber-tire trolleys, and those went away years and years ago. It’s not a bust, but it’s kind of a dud. It wasn’t the transformational project of some of our other things. I can’t think of any project where it was like, oh, that was a disaster. But some of them are more memorable and bigger winners than the others.

Why is this a pay-as-you go program? Why not bond against this revenue? 

The pro of bonds is you get your money faster. I don’t have to wait for eight years of sales tax collections to come in. I can go ahead and sell my bonds right now. The downside is, I have to pay that money back with interest. If you do that you eat away at your spending power. Some of your money is going to end up being paid to banks instead of on the projects. And it can be something that's hanging over you. When the Sonics relocated to Oklahoma City, their arena was still paying debt for the previous renovation they'd made two decades before. That was clearly hanging over their heads, the fact that their NBA team was about to leave an arena that wasn't even paid for yet.

Tell me how these MAPS investments played into the Olympics announcement. 

The investment in the whitewater is a MAPS 3 project. MAPS made that possible. The investment in the softball stadium was not MAPS. That started without it initially, 40 years ago almost, as we sort of emerged as the softball capital of the world, thanks to the enthusiasm of some people who wanted to invest in that.

We began seeing the fruits of that when the Women's College World Series exploded in popularity and we had had that event since it was nothing. ESPN started showing it and it became a big deal. We actually had a bond issue in 2017, mostly streets stuff, but we had tucked in there some major refurbishments to our softball stadium to bring its capacity up to about 13,000, to make it the largest softball stadium in the world by like two-and-a-half times. There's not a lot of softball stadiums in the world, and they're usually 1,000 or 2,000 seats, so for ours to be as big as it is was the result of a bond issue.

We ended up having these two venues — the best softball stadium in the world, the only whitewater facility west of the Mississippi — that L.A. doesn't have and they need. It was just fortuitous. Even though one is MAPS and one is not, they're both examples of cities and voters being willing to invest in themselves and seeing the results of that.

What else do you want to share? 

To go from 37th largest city to 20th largest city, you don't see that kind of movement up or down in the top 50 cities unless somebody discovers gold or something. But in our case we just discovered the power of investing in ourselves.