One thing that is not being discussed in this thread is that the aggressive timeline being proposed will require debt. MAPS 4 collections will continue until 2028, and the City and the team's ownership are striving to have the Thunder inside the building by the 2029-2030 season. Anyone who knows how money works knows that one years worth of taxes will not cover a billion dollar...err...$900 million (minimum) building. There is a cost for using other people's money; and when you are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in project costs you are talking about...a lot of interest.

There has also been a page turned recently in MAPS (and though this is not MAPS it's certainly MAPS-like or MAPS-adjacent). MAPS 4 projects all came with long term maintenance costs planned for. Failure to do this during the original MAPS projects has caused the City a lot of hassle within recent years while trying to scrounge up maintenance costs for aging projects. Not certain yet exactly how this is being dealt with in the case of this new arena, but I assume that the City desired for it to be a part of the planning and program, as they now do on all of these types of capital projects.

It will be interesting to see more detail on issues like these when this is presented to Council, but additional, even unanticipated tax receipts are a very good thing. There in fact was some money left over in previous MAPS funds, and I know that in multiple cases these funds saved the day when defensibly MAPS-related needs presented themselves years after the fact. Such funds can also be used to re-add items that were value engineered (cut to save money) during projects. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a surplus in this case, in my opinion. Would MUCH prefer there be one, in fact.