OKC voters approve giving Thunder owner $850m for new arena in landslide of people who bothered to vote

While initial arena talks heated up in and around D.C., the people of Oklahoma City finished voting in a referendum on whether to give Thunder owner $850 million in tax money toward a new $900 million arena, and, uh, it passed by a little bit:

That is what’s called a landslide, which is pretty impressive for a deal that will extend a 1% sales tax surcharge for six years to pay for almost the entire cost of a new arena to replace one that is only 21 years old and was already renovated in 2008. Especially when nearly half of all sports venue funding referendums fail, and that includes ones where the team owner is putting up more than 6% of the cost.

So WTH happened? Let’s piece together what we can:

• 58,000 total votes is not a ton in a city of almost 700,000. State voter registration data is reported in such a confusing format that it’s not easy to tell how many of those are registered voters, but the turnout rate for a special election with not much else on the ballot clearly wasn’t high. That makes it easier for highly motivated voters — read: fans who were afraid of the Thunder leaving town, construction union members, etc. — to have a disproportionate impact.
• Mayor David Holt put on a full-court rhetorical press from the beginning, memorably arguing that the seven-year tax surcharge was “a temporary one-cent sales tax that will not raise taxes.”
• The Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce equally memorably declared that the Thunder are worth $590 million per year in economic impact, a figure so insane that it took until now for J.C. Bradbury to believe that’s what they were actually saying.

Regardless of the reasons, the peorple, or at least about 8% of them, have spoken, and Holt can now rightly boast that “Oklahoma City is and shall remain a Big League City” and have $850 million in bond payments to prove it. Truly we live in interesting times.