City Council approves $945 million FY 2023 budget

Before the vote, about two dozen members of the public rose to speak about the proposed funding package, with most objecting to a $2.55 million allocation to the Tulsa Police Department for a Real Time Information Center.

They repeatedly argued that the video technology at its heart would be used to surveil minorities and the poor, whose neighborhoods, they said, are already over-policed.

The speakers also picked up on Councilor Vanessa Hall-Harper’s concern that if the city is going to fund such an enterprise, independent oversight of the Police Department should come with it. Such an oversight program has an estimated cost of approximately $500,000.

The fact that city councilors failed to include that funding in the budget was the reason Hall-Harper gave for voting against it.

She was the lone dissenter on the nine-member body on the budget vote. Councilor Kara Joy McKee was not at the meeting.

“We continue to talk about all the other cities that have a Real Time Information Center,” Hall-Harper said. “But it seems like it just rolls off that these cities, most of whom have some kind of oversight, some years before they instituted these Real Time Information Centers, but we want to continue to ignore that.

“And I don’t think that is right.”

Before calling a vote on the budget, Council Chairwoman Lori Decter Wright made a motion to fund the Real Time Information Center out of the city’s dedicated permanent public safety sales tax to free up funding in the general fund that could be used for animal welfare, neighborhood improvements and housing.

The motion also sought to allocate $5 million from the public safety sales tax fund balance to be used for Fire Department salaries and staffing, subject to the department’s collective bargaining process with the city.

Wright said she was making the proposal, which ultimately failed, because she did not feel comfortable doing what has always been done, “which is: Receive something; kind of ask questions; be repeatedly told, ‘We’ll look into it, we’ll look into it’; and then we miss the opportunity,” Wright said. “I don’t want to miss the opportunity. Even if the opportunity fails, at least we tried.”

Speaking after the meeting, Mayor G.T. Bynum explained the rationale for funding a Real Time Information Center, which is a fraction of the Police Department’s $148.7 million FY 2023 budget — an increase of $26 million from the current fiscal year.

Bynum said Police Chief Wendell Franklin has been advocating for the RTIC since he became chief in part to help compensate for the shortage of officers.

“We have had such a surge in retirements in the last two years, and combine that with difficulty in hiring, and we’ve actually lost ground,” Bynum said. “We were up to 850 officers a year ago, and we are back to about 800 right now. …

“We are going to keep funding the staffing to hire, but in the interim, we still have a crime problem in Tulsa and a violent crime problem in Tulsa. And when we asked the Police Department leadership, ‘In the near term, is there anything we can do to make better use of the staff you already have?’ they told us, ‘A Real Time Information Center.’”

Bynum said he did not see the discussion surrounding a police oversight program as a funding issue.

“We have already funded it historically in the past,” he said. “The issue with OIM (Office of the Independent Monitor) is no consensus among the 10 of us who are elected policy makers at the city as to what it ought to look like.

“That is why it has repeatedly failed to get enough votes to be adopted.”

The budget approved by councilors Wednesday is approximately 18% higher than the original budget approved for the current fiscal year.

March 30 video: Citizens comment on an Office of the Independent Monitor