Mayor G.T. Bynum and the Tulsa City Council are formulating plans for a massive tax increase for more improvements in Downtown Tulsa.

No details on the actual cost will be sought have been released to the public.

Bynum, who is registered as a Republican, unveiled an 160-page document that calls for millions of dollars in new taxes – presumably sales tax – that must have voter approval. City councilors and chamber officials have supported every new tax increase that Bynum has proposed during his term as mayor.

Most of the money primarily will be spent around Denver Avenue, Third Street and Boulder Avenue in Downtown Tulsa.

It includes plans for more public parks downtown and reconstruction of the Civic Center Commons downtown. It outlines a 30-block district between the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad, Boulder Avenue and 11th Street. Publicly funded green space, retail shops, restaurants, apartments and more projects are planned.

The plan is to enhance the area around the downtown arena and civic center with public funds. Extra money for streets may be added.

Three main projects are a 400-600 room hotel; tearing down the Page Belcher Federal Building and building something else there, and replacing the bus station on Denver Avenue with a “mixed use transit center.”

Part of Bynum’s plan is a Tax Increment Financing district, which would be at least partially used to help build a privately owned hotel that would cost at least $50,000,000.

The plan calls it a “public-private endeavor.”

City officials hope to get all of the projects financed but they plan to work on each aspect as a separate project.

“As I can attest, Tulsa’s new evolution as becoming a globally competitive city is being noticed by people from around the country and around the world,” Bynum said in a press release. “This is the competitive landscape for cities in the 21st Century, and Tulsa is striding across it.”

In 2018, Bynum began implementing the “Downtown Master Tax Increment Financing (TIF)” to help privately owned companies build in Downtown Tulsa. That included bank projects and housing projects.

Bynum also reiterated what he considers the biggest moral problem in Tulsa.

“The second area in which we focused on making Tulsa a globally-competitive city is in making Tulsa a city of opportunity for everyone,” Bynum said. “To do this, we launched the Resilient Tulsa strategy – the first comprehensive plan to address the great moral issue of our time in Tulsa: racial disparity.”