
Over the past several weeks, City Manager John Feary has been hosting a series of town hall sessions to discuss the proposed one-penny public safety measure on the April 4 ballot. A video of his presentation is available online at www.claremore.com/onepenny for those residents who have been unable to attend a meeting, but are interested in learning more.
If you prefer to join in person, one final town hall session remains on Thursday, March 30, at 6:00 p.m. at the Claremore Community Center.
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Thank you all so much for your engagement! To ensure we do not miss any questions, please direct all inquires to citymanager@claremore.com. John will be monitoring this address for all presentation related feedback.
What’s the plan on our streets and railroad crossings? With the exception of a handful our city streets and railroad crossings are terrible and do damage to our vehicles daily. I’m all for having great public safety officers but when will infrastructure become a priority?
Thank you for sharing this. This is really good information. I have not been able to go to a meeting. I do have a question. Is this a permanent penny or is a renewable one? If that was mentioned and I missed it, my apologies. John Feary
I watched the entire presentation. John shares some good information, but he fails to demonstrate exactly how the funds will be used. Overall it's mostly an emotional appeal urging constituents to vote yes, "Because we need more officers." I find it insulting that the presentation tells me how much money the tax could potentially cost ME per $50 meal, but completely avoids what the expected annual increase in funds for the city is. Why hasn't any of the literature or presentations explicitly stated, "The City expects to see $xxxxx increase in revenue from this sales tax increase, from which, we will add XXX number of officers, which are hired at a starting rate of $xxxx per year." It's vague in both the literature in the presentation, so I'll ask: Has Claremore only hired 2 new officers since 2000 (hired in 2022)? If not, how many new officer positions have been created since 2000? How do these positions correlate with the growth of population and overall city budget? Why isn't there at least one chart demonstrating population growth year-over-year? Could we not correlate that data with the data of police calls, response times, etc to demonstrate causation for the tax increase? John discusses the increase in population with the construction of large apartment complexes, stressing that we need more money to hire officers to help with this population influx. But with population increase comes additional sales tax AND utility revenue - where is this additional money going? I'm disappointed that as constituents we are expected to vote on important matters with no information. We have no idea how much revenue this tax will bring the city or what they're going to do with it. Can we not see a budget or an action plan? At this point I'm not even sure there is one.
Vote no
Head out to the Claremore Expo Center this Friday and Saturday for the Claremore Home and Garden Show! This long-standing event attracts approximately 5,000 guests from across the region to connect with vendors on home improvement, gardening and other projects.
Learn more at bit.ly/Claremorehomeandgarden.
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