Why I'm voting "no" on MAPS 3

On Tuesday, I'm voting against Oklahoma City's MAPS 3 proposal because the tax used to fund it -- the sales tax -- falls hardest on poor and working class people, who will benefit least from the projects that the tax will pay for.

MAPS stands for Metropolitan Area Projects.  The Oklahoma Gazette has a summary of the current proposal. MAPS 3 is a big, $777 million Christmas tree with something for everyone. It seems to have been constructed with the obvious hope of  getting people who have different beliefs about which projects are appropriate to vote for the whole proposal in order to get the parts they like.

Some of the proposed projects include a downtown park, a downtown streetcar system, bicycling and walking trails, 70 miles of sidewalks throughout the city, and aquatics centers for senior citizens. Other projects include improvements to the Oklahoma State Fairgrounds and new boating and recreational facilities on the Oklahoma River. I would be inclined to vote for many of those projects -- although I'd rather see public transit dollars spent on improving the transit system citywide, which is currently almost unusable.

But in order to get any of those projects, I would also have to vote to fund a new $280 convention center, which I consider a silly and offensive waste of money. It's a gift to wealthy downtown business owners from the rest of us, who can't really afford it. In the short term, this project would create some construction jobs. In the long term, it would create low-end minimum wage jobs with few or no benefits. And this one project would take up more than a third of the entire amount of money raised by the proposal.

I'm figuring that any one who is reading this blog post probably cares what I think about this topic, but I'm also figuring that you might like other sources of information. Here are some sources that I checked out:

About.com has an interesting history of MAPS, which began in 1993 with a "temporary" one-cent sales tax. The tax has never expired, because voters have repeatedly approved extensions of the tax for new projects.The first set of  MAPS projects has often been credited with revitalizing Oklahoma City's downtown in the 1990s. MAPS for Kids was approved in 2001, and the sales tax collected under that proposal for seven years seems to be funding much needed capital improvements for metropolitan area schools. Most recently the tax has gone for renovations to the Ford Center in order to draw a professional basketball team to town.

To read arguments in favor of MAPS3, you can go to yesformaps.com or mapsfacts.com. Propents have also produced a fairly tedious YouTube video.

Several groups oppose the extension of the one cent sales tax. There is the Campaign Against MAPS, which links to a website called Kill the Maps Tax. There is a Facebook page for Not This MAPS. Some opponents of MAPS seem to come from the extreme-right "teabagger" perspective. The blog for Kill the Maps Tax links to the site of radio talk show host Mike Shannon, who also seems to represent a hard right-wing perspective.

One piece of information that made a big impression on me was something not directly related to the MAPS controversy at all. This report from the OK Policy Blog, describes the way taxes in the state of Oklahoma affect different groups of people. That blog post links to an article from the Tulsa World, which shows that poor people are the ones who pay the highest percentage of their income in sales taxes, while better off people pay a higher percentage of their income in income taxes.

I do have a small amount of ambivalence about my "no" vote on Tuesday. Some of the projects are worthwhile. I don't trust the organized opposition to the tax extension, much of which is based on a far-right political perspective that I don't want to support. But the Christmas-tree approach to the sales tax measure is bad public policy. And the sales tax used to fund the proposal would force poor people buying the necessities of life to subsidize wealthy developers.

I would be willing to vote "yes" on a property tax or a graduated city wage tax to fund projects that benefited the entire population, but I'm voting "no" on MAPS 3.

How women got the vote in Oklahoma

In a recent post, I noted that Oklahoma voters passed an amendment in November 1918 granting women the right to vote in this state. You might well wonder, how did women in a conservative state like Oklahoma win the suffrage before passage of the federal amendment?

Oklahoma's history is more complicated than you might imagine, but that's a story for another time. For the moment, suffice it to say, an account of the Oklahoma suffrage campaign can be found in Eleanor Flexner's Century of Struggle:The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States. This campaign took place in the context of the difficult final campaign to win the vote for US women, which finally gained victory on August 26, 1920.

According to Flexner, after suffering through "the doldrums" during the years 1896-1910, the movement to gain the vote for US women gained new life in the second decade of the 20th century. The old National American Woman Suffrage Association had stagnated, limited, in part by the refusal of the (white) members of its southern affiliates to support a federal amendment because that would interfere with "states rights."

The upstart Congressional Union, led by Alice Paul, began a militant campaign of demonstrating and lobbying for a federal suffrage amendment. This spurred NAWSA, now under the leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt, into new effectiveness. Catt developed a "winning plan" that involved working for both the federal amendment and state amendments.

In the November 1918 elections, NAWSA targeted four anti-suffrage US Senators for defeat, and managed to remove Republican Weeks of Massachusetts and Democrat Saulsbury of Delaware. Flexner writes that  this election also "saw four state suffrage referenda come up, of which threee were victorious, South Dakota, Michigan, and Oklahoma, while the fourth, Louisiana, lost by only a few thousand votes, a showing of some consequence in a southern state."

Flexner describes what happened in Oklahoma on pages 305-306 of Century of Struggle.

The difficulties encountered by the suffragists in Oklahoma referendum probably represented the worst in unprincipled opposition in any suffrage campaign. There were innumerable special local problems, not the least of  which was a complete breakdown of the state suffrage organization after the campaign was underway. This was particularly serious because the Oklahoma state constitution required that the number of votes in favor of an amendment must exceed the total, not only of the negative votes, but also of  those ballots not marked either for  or against. The Governor, Attorney General and Secretary of the State Elections Board left no stone unturned to defeat the suffrage amendment. They even went to such lengths as printing only half as many ballots on the amendment as regular ballots and withholding them altogether from soldiers voting in the army camps in the state. The National kept two of its best  organizers,  the Shuler mother-and-daughter  team, in Oklahoma for months and spent more money on the campaign--nearly $20,000--than in any other state. Flagrant efforts were made after election day to count out what was clearly a suffrage victory, and the last National organizer did not leave Oklahoma until December 3, one month later, when the Governor finally surrendered to the facts of life and proclaimed the measure passed.

As her source for this information, Flexner cites  pages 529-535 of the History of Woman Suffrage.

I've quoted from the "enlarged edition" of Century of Struggle published in 1996 by Harvard University's Belknap Press. Ellen Fitzpatrick is listed as co-author of this edition. Having read an earlier edition of the work, it appears to me that Fitzpatrick's contribution to this volume consisted mostly of writing a foreward and afterword, which do provide interesting information about Eleanor Flexner, the creation of the book, and the relationship of the first wave of US women's rights activism to the contemporary feminist movement.

Moving forward

Today is International Women's Day, and also, in most of the United States, the beginning of Daylight Savings Time. Did you remember to set your clock forward an hour?

Here's a fun fact for today. Did you know that Oklahoma was one of the states that granted the vote to women before the passage of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution?

According to the Oklahoma Historical Society's online Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, activism to gain votes for women began in Oklahoma Territory as early as 1890, when the Women's Christian Temperance Union organized in the territory. Prohibitionists believed they needed the vote in order to be effective in their work. By 1893, women in the territory had gained only the right to vote in school elections. By 1895, the WCTU had allied with the National American Woman Suffrage Association to further their struggle for the vote.

Suffragists from Oklahoma and Indian territories met in 1904 at Oklahoma City and established the Woman Suffrage Association of Oklahoma and Indian Territory. With Kate H. Biggers as president, the joint association adopted a pro-statehood resolution declaring that no law should be enacted "restricting the right of suffrage on account of sex, race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

Despite a well-organized suffrage campaign the 1906 Oklahoma Constitutional Convention denied the vote to women. Not surprisingly, this convention also passed a number of restrictions on the rights of African Americans. Nevertheless,

As a favorable climate toward enfranchisement increased nationwide during World War I, Oklahoma suffragists, led by Pres. Adelia C. Stephens, lobbied the legislature in 1917, which submitted the matter as a constitutional amendment to be decided at the next general election. A splinter group of the national suffrage movement, the Congressional Union or National Woman's Party, was also active. In 1916 they sent Iris Calderhead of St. Mary's, Kansas, to Oklahoma to enlist support. Unlike the NAWSA, this organization was restricted to female membership and took a more militant and radical strategy. The Suffragist, the Union Party's official organ, encouraged women to paste literature on farmers' wagons, picket and parade, and shout from boxes at county fairs, picnics, and tent meetings. The most vocal of the local officers was Secretary Kate Stafford, who was unable to assume her duties until she had served thirty days in a Washington, D.C., jail for picketing the White House.

On November 5, 1918, Oklahoma voters approved State Question 97, which extended suffrage to women (emphasis added). A ratification committee, chaired by Katherine Pierce of Oklahoma City, helped ensure passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in the state legislature. When Oklahoma ratified the Nineteenth Amendment on February 28, 1920, the Oklahoma Woman's Suffrage Association disbanded and the state's League of Women Voters formed.