Skye and Ben – I think you both bring up excellent points. Really appreciate your thoughts and comments. Hopefully, these your ideas and those of others will be considered before rushing forward with what may be a poor decision for the city.

Your blog is really great.

If the convention center is built, there is much to be done before it is constructed. Otherwise, OKC will have convention goers cut off from downtown by the crumbling crosstown bridge (or construction of the boulevard).

Our next MAPS should focus on walkability.

Sidewalks, sidewalks and more sidewalks.
Streets that don’t have grass growing up through the cracks in them
ADA compliant crosswalks
Express bus service to the airport from downtown.
Decent basic bus service.
Bike lanes on the city streets

Your logic looks completely sound to me. I think what you write is all very well put. I would much prefer Oklahoma City to be so attractive that the city itself outpaces our convention facilities, but we have a long way for that to be true if we building the proposed convention center.

Great to hear from you and glad you are taking an interest in the City’s development.

Shane –

This is exactly my fear: “Direct quality of life components will hopefully be the largest part of MAPS 3, but I don’t think there’s any stopping the convention center idea.” Yeh, I hope so too, but I am not hearing any guarantees. It is not that the convention center should definitely not be built, more it is the fact that our city leaders speak as if the decision has already been made. A decision made without a transparent process, without any public discourse, and without providing any legitimate evidence as to why it is being made.

The fact that we could use a bigger convention center does not mean that we must build a bigger convention center. Our city could use a lot of things and there is no reason that the convention center should get a free pass to the top of the priority list.

I tend to agree that economic development yields better quality of life (in the same way that better quality of life yields economic development). Direct quality of life components will hopefully be the largest part of MAPS 3, but I don’t think there’s any stopping the convention center idea. At least Mayor Mick demonstrated the difference between direct quality of life and “indirect quality of life” in the form of economic development in his speech.

I stumbled onto your blog a while back and have been perusing it since. I don’t know if you remember me, but we went to high school together. I’m glad to see your still concerned and involved with our city despite living out of state.

Anyway, your post was well informed and thought provoking. Kudos. My concern with a new convention center is the reasoning behind it, at least the reasoning that was presented on the evening news. It was reported that the reason Oklahoma City needed a new convention center was because we were only a regional draw and not a national draw; i.e., a new convention center would make us a national attraction. That reasoning is just, well, . . . sloppy. What makes Oklahoma city attractive (or what will make it) is everything around the convention center—the community. A convention center is subsidiary to that. Is it not? What the report assumes is that the surrounding community has reached the level of being nationally attractive, but I disagree. While there is much excitement with the NBA and anticipation for C2S, those have not come to full fruition. The downtown community still needs to develop more before it can sustain a national convention center and until it does we need to continue to invest in the downtown community–not an unsustainable convention center.

I’m curious for your thoughts. I have only recently become involved/interested with the downtown development of Oklahoma City.

Ben Daxon
bdaxon@gmail.com