A chapter of the Move Weight Foundation
Oklahoma City
The Question · Oklahoma City, OK

Where the MAPS money actually lands

Oklahoma City's MAPS programme is a voter-approved sales tax that has moved well over a billion dollars through successive rounds, and the state capital runs the largest economic-development incentive book in Oklahoma. The structural question is not whether the projects happened — it is which contracts, change orders and incentive agreements carry the spend, and those are records the City holds.

This is a question, not an accusation

No one at this Foundation has alleged that anybody in Oklahoma City has done anything wrong, and nothing on this site should be read that way. Chapters are opened on structural risk — large capital programmes, fast growth, a single dominant employer, a utility or authority that meets away from the council — because those are the conditions under which decisions get made with nobody watching. That is a statement about attention, not about anybody's conduct.

Naming a city next to an accusation we have not documented would be precisely the thing this project exists to oppose. So the page you are reading names the question and the record that settles it, and then we go and ask for the record.

The record that answers it

MAPS contract and change-order files, and the economic-development agreements approved by resolution, requested by date range from the City Clerk.

How this gets resolved

  1. Ask. A request goes to the City of Oklahoma City under 51 O.S. § 24A.1 et seq.. The City has prompt, reasonable time.
  2. Publish what comes back, whole. Released public records go up unredacted. We do not summarise a document in place of showing it, and we do not redact what the government already released.
  3. Publish what does not come back. A missed deadline, a refusal with no statute cited, an estimate that prices a resident out — those get published too, with dates. Silence is a finding.
  4. Rewrite this page. When the documents are in, this page stops being a question and becomes what the records showed — including if they showed nothing. A chapter that only ever reports wrongdoing is not doing arithmetic, it is doing marketing.

What you can do right now

You do not need us. The statute is yours, and a request from a resident of Oklahoma City is harder to wave away than one from a nonprofit two states over.

Build the letter → Where to send it → Send us something anonymously →