Citizen-Driven Economic Development in Norman, Oklahoma

Introduction

In February 2025, Cleveland County District Judge Jeff Virgin declared that a petition regarding two controversial tax increment financing (TIF) districts in Norman, Oklahoma, was invalid. Virgin found that the “gist” of the petition—the short statement explaining the petition’s purpose—ultimately misled voters. This petition, which called for a public vote on the TIF districts, had gathered over twice the number of signatures required to be put on the ballot. Proponents of the aforementioned petition appealed Virgin’s decision to the Oklahoma Supreme Court (Hancock 2025). Unfortunately, the Supreme Court ruled against this referendum in early February 2026 (Hancock 2026).

To understand the importance of the petition despite its ultimate failure, I turn your attention to the history and technicalities of this specific TIF project, which commits sales tax revenue to building out a currently undeveloped part of Norman. The Supreme Court’s ruling represents the latest development in a process that began back in 2017, when the University of Oklahoma (OU) Foundation suggested using public funds to construct a new arena for OU’s basketball programs (Slinkard 2025).¹ Basketball is a poorly attended sport at OU, with the men’s team seeing three straight seasons of sub-8,000 attendance averages (Leonard and Raser 2025).² After receiving negative feedback from the public, the foundation decided to shelve the proposal (Hutchinson 2025). 

Team Norman—a coalition of stakeholders including OU administrators, the Norman Chamber of Commerce, the Norman Economic Development Coalition (NEDC), and Cleveland County³—revived the foundation’s idea for a new arena in 2023. At that time, members of Team Norman claimed that 80 percent of the $1 billion in funding required for the arena and the surrounding entertainment district would come from private institutions (Sulley 2025). Now, though, Normanites know better. 

To construct the new 8,000-seat arena on land owned by the OU Foundation—a private entity—the City of Norman is expected to contribute up to $600 million in public funds (ORED n.d.a; Rogers 2024a). This amount will be paid for in part by the reallocation of sales tax revenue generated within one of the designated TIF districts.⁴ Ordinarily, these funds would contribute to the city’s General Revenue Fund. Under the TIF plan, however, the city is required to allocate 100 percent of the sales tax revenue generated in the TIF district to the arena project for up to 25 years (Hancock 2025).

Dedicating a chunk of these funds to the construction of an arena with rather dubious prospects for new revenue generation could harm Norman’s budget in the long run, according to opponents of the arena TIF (Hancock 2025; Jones 2025).⁵ These opponents also cite the apparent misuse of TIFs and existing development prospects as reasons for rejecting the TIF plan. They point to the fact that TIFs do not traditionally support “greenfield” (new) development; rather, TIFs are often used for the purpose of redevelopment in blighted areas (Leonard and Raser 2025). Additionally, the TIF district in which the arena will be built—which consists of prime real estate located just off of I-35—will likely be developed without the presence of an arena (Rogers 2024b). 

Proponents of the arena—including, of course, members of Team Norman—deny these claims. They believe that the entertainment district, which is set to include a 150-room hotel and over 600 housing units of varying densities, will fill a “unique niche” that would attract diverse audiences to Norman, thereby generating new sales tax revenue and contributing to Norman’s overall economic development (Hancock 2025; Jones 2025). OU’s President, Joseph Harroz Jr., has been particularly aggressive in his support of the arena TIF, even threatening to move the entertainment district outside of Norman if the city council did not approve the TIF proposal (Leonard et al. 2025). The intimidation tactics used by OU and other members of Team Norman have created new “town and gown” tensions between the permanent residents of Norman and the university. 

The exact number of valid voter signatures collected on the petition for a public vote on the arena was 10,689 (Hancock 2025). For context, that’s 58 percent of the number of people (18,452) who voted in Norman’s most recent municipal election (Pablo 2025).⁶ This data reveals an issue often masked behind debates over the economics of the arena TIF. Unlike the citizens of Oklahoma City—who voted to approve a sales tax funding the construction of a $900 million arena in 2023—residents of Norman have not been allowed to vote on the spending of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on similar infrastructure (City of Oklahoma City 2023). Clearly, engaged Norman residents want to participate in the decision-making process, yet they are currently blocked from doing so by institutions with significant financial resources and political capital. The arena TIF issue, then, represents a case study of a broader democratic issue: namely, the manner in which actors with outsized power have the ability to override the voices of ordinary Americans. This problem and its local implications beg the question: Which strategies can be implemented and/or used to foster citizen-driven economic development in Norman, emphasizing the agency and preferences of residents? Answering such a question will provide insights into how other local governments can similarly optimize citizen participation and democratic decision-making at the most intimate level of government.

Background 

Understanding Local Public Finance

Public finance generally refers to the raising and spending of government funds (Plehn 1921). The United States government operates under a system of fiscal federalism, in which responsibilities related to the spending and raising of public funds are split between the federal, state and local governments. The federal government funds national services, including the post office, national defense, and welfare programs. States and localities, on the other hand, are responsible for funding education, public safety facilities (i.e., police and fire departments), and other specific local services. In order to provide these essential services and public goods, municipalities must levy taxes. As of 2010, around 40 percent of state and local government funding comes from sales and property taxes (Stiglitz and Rosengard 2015).

The City of Norman offers public transportation, stormwater management, wastewater collection and treatment, traffic control, solid waste collection and disposal, public safety and emergency services, public recreational facilities, park maintenance, and street construction and maintenance (City of Norman 2024). Like other cities in Oklahoma, the City of Norman cannot levy property taxes to fund its operations due to restrictions established in the state’s constitution; instead, it must rely on sales tax revenue. This particular restriction can be quite problematic, as sales taxes are regressive—shifting the tax burden onto low-income residents—and are naturally volatile (Tax Foundation n.d.; Rogers 2011). 

TIF schemes commit sales tax revenue generated in a specified area to paying for development projects in or adjacent to that area. As mentioned earlier, TIFs are typically used in support of urban renewal projects, and may also be used to fund environmental cleanups. While TIFs can be a useful financing mechanism for supporting redevelopment in areas where private investment is unlikely to occur, these provisions can ultimately harm the larger community. 

Cynthia Rogers, a professor of economics at OU, points out that TIFs can result in sales tax revenue cannibalization (Rogers 2017). Shoppers may shift their consumption to businesses within the TIF district, so sales tax revenue that would otherwise be reserved for the city’s General Fund is instead earmarked for projects like—in the case of Norman’s most recent TIF—an arena. As the General Fund balance declines from cannibalization, the city could have trouble providing essential services—including public safety, transportation, and water services—to Normanites. No Norman resident will be able to avoid the consequences of such developments.

Typically, TIFs do not require a vote of the people, as these schemes do not levy new taxes. The arena TIF, however, plainly rejects the logic of a traditional TIF scheme. This TIF would dedicate $600 million in local funds to the construction of an arena in an undeveloped part of Norman under the assumption that significant private-sector investment will follow, according to Team Norman. Further, the arena would not be owned by the City of Norman (ORED n.d.a). It is no wonder, then, that Normanites want to vote on the scheme. 

Understanding Local Economic Development

Local economic development, as opposed to public finance, does not ultimately fund government services; rather, such development is traditionally pursued to create new jobs and wealth within a given community. Economic development professionals are often tasked with recruiting industrial employers to a municipality, fostering small business development, and catalyzing entrepreneurial endeavors (Malizia et al. 2020). While this conventional model certainly has its advantages, it lacks attention to equity and agency. I choose to instead focus on local economic development strategies that foster inclusive prosperity and community-self determination. 

In a 2024 report, Gabi Velasco and Samantha Fu at the Urban Institute investigated two local economic development frameworks that promote equity and agency: local and solidarity economies. They define a “local economy” framework as a development strategy that “shift[s] ownership and decisionmaking power from corporations to community members” (Velasco and Fu 2024). Under this framework, municipalities prioritize local business development over attracting corporate chains. Pursuing this strategy has concrete benefits for a local economy. For example, a study conducted by Civic Economics and the American Booksellers Association found that independent retailers in Salt Lake City, Utah, returned 52 percent of all revenue to the local economy, while chain retailers recirculate only 13.6 percent of revenue in local markets (Civic Economics 2012). In Portland, Maine, the Maine Center for Economic Policy found that money spent at local businesses generates as much as a 76 percent greater return to the local economy than money spent at corporate chains (Martin 2011). Supporting locally owned businesses can also lead to higher income growth and reductions in poverty rates while addressing rising wage inequality (Mitchell 2016). 

The “solidarity economy” framework focuses on cooperatively owned ventures and economic democracy. According to Velasco and Fu, worker-owned businesses lay off fewer employees while experiencing greater employee retention (Velasco and Fu 2024; Employee Ownership Foundation n.d.). Practitioners of this framework—including Cooperation Jackson, founded in Mississippi—have utilized cooperative strategies to put economic power back in the hands of minority workers throughout the Mississippi Delta (Akuno 2024; Velasco and Fu 2024). 

Toward a Definition of Citizen-Driven Economic Development

Like the traditional model of local economic development, “citizen-driven economic development” should be defined by both its objectives and its methods. Citizen-driven economic development, as I articulate it, shares the ambitions of the local economy framework described by Velasco and Fu (2024). This type of development should rely on the input of residents, providing them with more power to shape their collective local economic future. 

The methodologies by which citizen-driven economic development shifts power to community members can be divided into two categories: top-down approaches and bottom-up strategies. Bottom-up strategies are based in grassroots organizing; top-down approaches, on the other hand, involve changes to local policy—including, importantly, changes to public financing mechanisms—made by members of a city council. This brief focuses more on top-down strategies for pursuing citizen-driven economic development, described in the following section.

Advancing Citizen-Driven Economic Development in Norman

I propose two new policy solutions that can broadly advance citizen-driven economic development in Norman and provide justifications for implementing each policy. Additionally, I discuss alternative public financing mechanisms for the arena project that could have been used, which emphasize the principle of community-self determination. Although the fate of the arena is seemingly set—unless the TIF opponents choose to circulate another petition before ground can be broken on the development—these policies will hopefully prevent the abuse of TIF schemes in the future.

Policy Proposals

1. The City Council should establish a Commission on Locally Owned Business Development.

In speaking with Norman’s mayor, the Honorable Stephen Tyler Holman, I learned that Team Norman—the backers of the arena TIF—noticeably lacked representation from locally owned, non-chain businesses. The Norman Economic Development Coalition⁷ generally represents the interests of large industrial employers headquartered outside of Norman. The city’s Chamber of Commerce, another member of Team Norman, advances the priorities of corporate chains within the community. What we need in Norman, then, is an established commission of local business owners that can substantively influence local decision-making. Ideally, such a commission will be able to combat outside influences that threaten to undermine the prosperity of the community while simultaneously advancing citizen-driven economic development. 

I suggest that the City Council create a Commission on Locally Owned Business Development to provide independent business owners with a platform for influencing local policy. The mayor and city council can work together to recruit and confirm business owners from each ward. The Commission will then be tasked with reviewing proposed public financing strategies. By engaging in this review process, the Commission will be ensuring that the agency of residents is considered in the local policymaking process.

2. Future TIF proposals committing over a certain amount of Norman’s General Revenue Fund should be sent to a public vote.

TIF schemes generally run counter to the principles of citizen-driven economic development. Since they do not require a public vote, these strategies leave open the possibility of abuse, as we have seen in Norman. To prevent such abuse from occurring in the future, the City Council of Norman should pass an ordinance that requires TIFs committing over X percent of the City’s General Revenue Fund to be sent to a public vote. Establishing this regulation will provide Norman residents with greater power over planned economic development within the community.

For now, I leave the percentage unspecified as X, since I believe that the percentage should be determined by grassroots organizations like Oklahomans for Responsible Economic Development (ORED). ORED is a collective of Normanites dedicated to ensuring that all residents have a voice in Norman’s economic development trajectory. They organized the petition calling for a public vote on the arena TIF and are responsible for the appeal of Judge Virgin’s decision to the Oklahoma Supreme Court (ORED n.d.b). This group could develop and propose an ordinance specifying the threshold percentage of the General Revenue Fund that would send a TIF plan to a public vote. Two members of ORED—Paul Arcaroli and Cynthia Rogers—have already discussed such an idea with me.

Alternative Financing Mechanisms

The arena project did not need to be funded by a TIF; in fact, it could have been funded in a more democratic manner. According to Anthony Francisco, the chief financial officer of the City of Norman, Team Norman could have proposed the usage of a general obligation (GO) bond to finance the arena development. GO bonds raise property taxes and can be used for constructing publicly owned infrastructure. These bonds require a vote of the people to be issued.

A sales tax increase for quality-of-life projects also requires a public vote. In 2015, Norman residents approved the Norman Forward initiative, a 0.5 percent sales tax that has funded the construction of our Young Family Athletic Center and our Adult Wellness and Education Center (City of Norman n.d.). Team Norman could have proposed a similar sales tax to fund the arena and its associated infrastructure.

Conclusion

At its core, the arena TIF debate is about democratic buy-in. Normanites clearly want a say in deciding whether to commit $600 million in public funds toward an arena; I contend that we deserve the right to do so. Yet we must confront an unfortunate reality: Powerful stakeholders within and outside our community hope to keep us from engaging in democratic decision-making. In this context, I offer citizen-driven economic development as an alternative strategy for promoting local growth and inclusive prosperity. By elevating the voices of independent business owners and Norman residents, my policy proposals can prevent future misuses of public financing mechanisms while promoting greater trust in our local institutions. Similar strategies can be employed by other local governments to promote truly democratic decision-making.