By M. Scott Carter

Transcript Staff Writer

MOORE — Having lived through two natural disasters, city officials here want to be prepared for a third.

And it’s going to cost about $10 million.

With the city’s aging public safety system already outgrown by its population, city leaders are asking voters to help upgrade the system with a temporary, one-half cent sales tax.

“Our city’s infrastructure is underfunded,” Moore City Manager Steve Eddy said recently. “And while we are seeing lots of new dollars from a growing retail trade, those funds aren’t enough to make big purchases like a $3 million fire station.”

Eddy, speaking at a public forum about the tax proposal, said the funds from the tax increase would be “used solely to fund improvements to the city’s police, fire and public safety departments.”

Those changes, Eddy said, need to be made.

“We’ve used a lot of our growth revenue to pay for improvements to water lines, better streets and other issues. But we can’t fund these big purchases (police, fire and public safety improvements) out of growth revenue dollars.”

Eddy said city officials chose sales tax as the way to generate additional revenue so the city could take advantage “of the many, many thousands of others who would help us pay for it by shopping in Moore.”

The increase, he said, would cost residents about $4 extra per month and would push Moore’s total sales tax rate, including the state’s portion, from 7.5 to 8 percent. The tax would expire in 2011.

Moore Mayor Glenn Lewis — who voted in support of the proposal — said council members began discussing the need for a better public safety system “right after” the May 3, 1999, tornado.

Following that tornado, Lewis said community leaders grew concerned about possible damage caused by future storms. “We had several discussions about what would have happened if that storm had hit our police department. If that had happened it would have been huge; we wouldn’t have been able to respond.”

That discussion along with Moore’s rapid growth, pushed council members toward some type of revenue increase.

“We’ve outgrown many of our emergency facilities,” Lewis said. “Our police building is really outdated, it was originally built to hold 15 guys, and now we have more than 70.”