High court won't reconsider MAPS 4 decision

The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Monday denied former Oklahoma City Councilman Ed Shadid's request that it reconsider his arguments challenging MAPS 4.

Shadid had sought to have the ordinance on the Dec. 10 ballot declared unconstitutional, arguing it violates a rule against legislation pertaining to more than a single subject.

On Oct. 15, the court unanimously said the ordinance met constitutional, statutory and city charter requirements but gave Shadid a chance to be reheard.

Voters will decide Dec. 10 on extending the 1-cent MAPS sales tax for eight years.

Shadid argued that proposing the extension as a general sales tax while listing the 16 MAPS 4 projects in a city council-passed “resolution of intent” skirted the single-subject rule.

He urged the court to look beyond the ordinance itself, taking into consideration the resolution and public comments by Mayor David Holt.

“The effect of the tax and thus the purpose will exclusively be to fund special projects that are found neither in the ordinance nor on the ballot,” his attorney, Jay Barnett, wrote in his petition for rehearing.

Barnett said Monday that Shadid was grateful the court t ook up hi s chall enge and “affirmed that city ordinances are subject to constitutional scrutiny.”

“We are clearly concerned that the city has fashioned and the court has not blocked a mechanism by which the single-subject rule may be circumvented and its protections denied,” he said.

He said Shadid, who served on the city council for eight years, choosing not to seek re- election l ast winter, “i s satisfied that he was able to draw the public's attention to the dangers of logrolling — the political coercion upon which MAPS 4 relies — and the purposes for which the framers of the state constitution and previous courts acted in the creation and preservation of the single-subject rule.”