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City of Bartlesville
Posted: Jan 26, 2026 10:26 AMUpdated: Jan 26, 2026 10:28 AM
CITY MATTERS 1-26-26
Tom Davis
Assistant City Manager Laura Sanders, City Enigineer Michah Siemers and Visit Bartlesville's Maria Gus appeared on KWON Radio's City Matters program on Monday to talk about the February 10 City Election.
Micha Siemer said "Election Proposition one is 1.6 million dollars. That's for general obligation bond public safety, and in the bond side of that, really there's one project. There's one piece of equipment-- It's a fire truck." He added, " This one will be big enough to service our skyscrapers if there's a fire."
Proposition number two is a general obligation bond. This $13.5 million in GO bonds goes for streets and bridges. Siemers said, "When we looked at this with our update in our payment condition model and making recommendations for how much money to put towards our streets each year, the correct all option over a five-year period is like $20 million a year that we'd have to put towards streets. Right now we're talking about 13 and a half over five years for GO bond. Again, we just, we have so many streets in town, there's no way we can address them all with one package."
Proposition number three is parks and recreation. According to Siemer, "We're not trying to do new parks, new things like that. We're really trying to put money back into what we have. Playground equipment deteriorates. There's certain guidelines you have to follow as far as safety for parks, equipment, and things of that nature. So you'll see things like that in here."
If aproved by the voters, the city will have $2,850,000 for Parks and Recreation in the GO Bond. The largest project in that proposition is $1.2 million for Price Fields. Part of the plans is to put artificial turf on four of the fields at Price Fields. This will just be on the infield area.
Proposition 1 will be $1.6 million for General Obligation Bond Public Safety. That's that one piece of aerial fire equipment.
Proposition Number 2 is $13.5 million GO Bond for streets and bridges.
Proposition Number 3 will be $3 million for Parks and Recreation.
Proposition number four is 1/4 cent economic development sales tax.
Maria Gus with Visit Bartlesville said, "Every five years, this is one that we're voting for again. We have renewed this economic development sales tax for seven times. So it is one that the community keeps supporting. That money goes to the Bartlesville Development Authority. But when they passed this, it was created to go to a portion of tourism and marketing Bartlesville as a tourism destination."
Maria added, "As my good friend Chris Batchelder at the BDA knows, tourism is the front door to economic development because it all starts with a visit. Any of these companies that have come here, it all started with a visit. They came to Bartlesville. They saw that the streets are getting improved and we've got all these parks. We want people to not only come here for a visit, we want them to come and spend money and then leave, but we also want to be attractive and appealing to people that are interested in relocating, that are wanting to move a business here or maybe retire here or any of those kinds of things."
While the economic development sales tax is mostly on primary job creation and diversification, and stopping the retail leakage, It is also designated to go to visit Bartlesville for tourism marketing efforts.
"Basically, what we're doing at Visit Bartlesville is we're promoting Bartlesville as a destination. We want to attract visitors from outside the community to come here. We want to support those events, tours, the tournaments," said Maria.
The City of Bartlesville Election is February 10 with early voting of February 5 and 6.
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