Lawton’s $40 million revenue note will fund projects ranging from road work to new aquatics center

A $40 million revenue note approved earlier this summer by the Lawton City Council will allow the city to continue addressing projects already in the works or planned.

Those projects range from an industrial bypass for the west industrial park and surfacing work on Lee Boulevard, to a new aquatics center in Elmer Thomas Park.

Council members approved the sales tax revenue note to finance “all or a portion of the cost of the acquisition, construction, equipping, renovating and improvement of certain public infrastructure and capital improvement projects for the benefit of the City …” according to the agenda commentary. Members of the Lawton Industrial Development Authority, which will actually issue the note, approved the measure at a meeting earlier in the day. The debt is to be repaid via sales tax revenue generated through the 2019 Capital Improvements Program (CIP).

City Manager John Ratliff said the funding is allowing for continuation of projects already planned.

“We’re not going to get all the revenue from the (current) CIP until 2034,” he said, of sales tax revenues produced from the 2.125 percent sales tax that the current CIP uses, as well as the CIP Extension approved by voters Tuesday (which expires in 2040).

The projects being funded are those the City of Lawton has plans for, but also ones where estimated costs have been driven up by inflationary factors, city officials have said. So obtaining the loan allows the city to receive the revenue up front to cover an entire project, rather than wait until it has amassed enough money from the program before even starting a project. It’s the same technique the City of Lawton has used for decades on its high-dollar water and sewer projects, where it typically secures a loan from the Oklahoma Water Resources Board so work can begin immediately, then repays the loan debt via CIP revenue.