MUSKOGEE, Okla. — Muskogee County voters on Jan. 14 said yes to a new sales tax to better fund public safety services.
2 News Oklahoma’s Douglas Braff asked officials about putting those new dollars to use, which Muskogee’s deputy chief of police, Chad Farmer, said he was “super excited” to do.
Free ambulance rides, faster response times, and new tools and facilities.
The county will start collecting the new sales tax on April 1. While it’ll be just .849% when it begins, Laurel Havens told 2 News that the tax will dip to a half-penny after seven to ten years.
“Everybody in the county is going to benefit from this,” said Havens, the county’s EMS executive director. “We are going to be able to reduce our response times for EMS, specifically to within nine miles of anyone in the county.”
He said the first thing that tax money’s going toward is new radios.
“They're designed to work in austere environments,” he explained. “They have a lot of technology in them that allows us to communicate in situations that we can't now.”
He added: “The further you get away from Muskogee in the rural areas, and especially when you have significant topographical changes, we have a difficult time getting out. This will alleviate a lot of those because we can use multiple different systems in order to get back to the 9-1-1 center.”
After that comes 65 new police cars.
However, the biggest ticket item is a new public safety center, something Farmer said was “far overdue.” It’ll house county EMS, Muskogee police, and the 9-1-1 center.
The new center will replace the rickety police headquarters built in the 1930s, something which 2 News reported on previously.
“It was built for a department that was about half our size and obviously doesn't have the technology that we have now,” Farmer told 2 News.
Laurel Havens told us they will have enough tax money to spend on the first project by November.
On Jan 17, he said the public trust will meet to “start the process of setting timelines and calendars and making sure that we are as open and honest and transparent with the community as we can be.”
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