Metropolitan Area Projects Plan

MAPS, or Metropolitan Area Projects Plan, is a multi-year, municipal capital improvement program, consisting of a number of projects, originally conceived in the 1990s in Oklahoma City by its then mayor Ron Norick. A MAPS program features several interrelated and defined capital projects, funded by a temporary sales tax (allowing projects to be paid for in cash, without incurring debt), administered by a separate dedicated city staff funded by the sales tax, and supervised by a volunteer citizens oversight committee.

In some ways, a MAPS program is similar to a Local option sales tax. However, taxes collected by a MAPS program do not go to a city's general fund, but are instead deposited into a trust dedicated to the specific projects identified in the taxes' enabling ordinance. Additionally, MAPS programs are only indirectly controlled by a city's elected governance body; a citizens oversight committee provides direct oversight, which is also established by the enabling ordinance.

The key features of the original program were designed to provide accountability to the citizens of the community as well as provide a funding mechanism for capital projects without using a city's general revenue funds, and included:

A common challenge of "pay as you go" programs such as MAPS is that, because the lead-up time while accumulating the needed funds can be lengthy, specific projects of the program "are often are scuttled when administrations change and new leaders want their own signature projects... Oklahoma City was able to avoid this pitfall ‹because the city› changes mayors, but not strategies." Because the voters approved a multi-year temporary sales tax that was dedicated to multiple specific projects that together had significant public support, and because the infrastructure to support the program and its projects was also temporary with dedicated funding from the sales tax, a change in elected officials has not been sufficient to change the scope of the program.

A key to success is the feature of multiple projects; while each project taken individually might not have sufficient support for individual funding, when taken as a group, the package has sufficient support for funding. Said another way, it is important to "bundle projects to enhance community buy-in." Another benefit of multiple projects is that by staging the projects, citizens may have their confidence level increased by being shown staggered "early results ‹with less expensive projects› ... by experiencing a string of groundbreakings."

In many ways the early 1980s recession in the United States began in Oklahoma City with the collapse of the Penn Square Bank. This subsequent collapse of the state's energy business and failure of additional financial institutions, lead to a significant out-migration and excess capacity in real estate. The resulting lack of infrastructure investment in the inner city proved to be a factor in the city's inability to attract new business. In the early 1990s some Oklahoma City interests were concerned about what they perceived as civic decline. In 1992, after the city lost a contract to house a new maintenance facility for United Airlines to Indianapolis, Indiana because the airline considered Indianapolis to have a better standard of living and quality of life, then-mayor Ron Norick and the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce proposed MAPS as a measure to improve the city's economy and attractiveness as a tourist destination.

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