Shadid claims city and Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce officials were not honest with voters before the 2009 MAPS 3 election, particularly with the convention center project and a related convention center hotel. The convention center could cost taxpayers an estimated $250 million, but the hotel would not receive MAPS 3 funding. Voters approved […]
funding
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POP goes the funding?
In the latest episode of Anything That Costs the Government Money is Bad, Oklahoma GOPers are stifling the development of the OKPOP museum — a 75,000-square-foot art and culture museum slated to be built in Tulsa — by withholding the necessary appropriations from the state’s 2015 fiscal budget. Clearly, they can’t comprehend the facility’s potential […]
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Dotted line
Fallin hasn’t directly opposed the initiative petition drive, but she doesn’t plan to endorse it either, according to her spokesman, Alex Weintz. Instead, the governor has commented that money used for storm shelters will reduce funding for other educational needs. “She’s just trying to inject some form of realism here,” Weintz said. However, storm shelter […]
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Federal grant helps fund disease research
Photo by Mark Hancock Grant funds will create the Oklahoma Shared Clinical and Translational Resources program, which creates partnerships between the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF), Native American tribes and physicians across the state. “This gives us access to people and data immediately,” said Courtney Montgomery, Ph.D, an […]
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Bright future
Photo by Mark Hancock “Today, we think of billboards as this rectangle thing on a pole,” said Kathy Anderson of the the Bethany Improvement Foundation. But in the heyday of Route 66, billboards were often lower to the ground, displayed hand-painted art or art deco design and sometimes even were three-dimensional structures with people inside […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Do it yourself
In the metro, current projects on Kickstarter and Indiegogo include post-tornado documentaries, a web series produced in the comfort of a traveling RV, EPs galore, a beef jerky food truck and a silo-sized mural. Local synthpop band Kite Flying Robot set up its Kickstarter campaign June 4 to fund its new, full-length album. The $3,500 […]
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Reel jobs
On May 24 — the final day of this year’s session — the state House voted against extension of the Oklahoma Film Enhancement Rebate Program, which provides incentives for qualifiying film productions that spend money on Oklahoma goods and services. Before the vote, House Democratic Leader Scott Inman of Del City called the Democrats in […]
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Darts at arts
OK Mozart is among the programs likely to be impacted by the federal sequestration. As a state agency, OAC receives funding from two sources: state appropriations and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant. While state dollars account for 85 percent of its budget and will remain at the current level of $4 million, […]
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Take shelter
The emergency youth facility is housed in a corner of the Alan Couch Center. Credit: Mark Hancock The county annually has provided a portion of the support for the 12-bed shelter, which opened in 1969 and is believed to have been the state’s first such shelter for at-risk youth. Each of the last two years, […]
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A taxing question
Fred Mogran Credit: Shannon Cornman A coalition of business groups headed by the State Chamber of Oklahoma support passage of SQ 766, which is on ballot Tuesday, asserting that its failure could spur a vast expansion of state taxes on items as varied as retirement benefits, professional licenses, hunting leases, and even copyrighted song lyrics […]