Oklahoma City is implementing an unprecedented series of actions to slow sprawl, require developers to help pay for costs associated with growth and even potentially de-annex far-flung areas of the city to end what Mayor Mick Cornett and others see as an unsustainable status quo.

At 621 square miles, Oklahoma City is geographically bigger than any city in Texas. Excluding sparsely populated large towns in Alaska and Montana, Oklahoma City ranks fourth in the nation in size.

The strain is evident with each pothole-riddled street, the demand for new fire stations and a backlog of requests for traffic signals, road improvements and water lines needed to keep up with a population that has in the past 25 years grown from 403,040 to 581,688 and is expected to hit 810,883 by 2040.

“We’re an anomaly,” said Aubrey Hammontree, who as planning director oversaw the five-year effort completed this year to create Plan OKC, the city’s first new comprehensive plan since 1977. “There are cities as large as Oklahoma City. But there are just a handful of them, and they are structured differently.”

The only American city that tops Oklahoma City in terms of geographic size and population is Jacksonville, Fla., which had a population of 821,784 people spread out over 747 miles as of the 2010 U.S. Census update. But Jacksonville started consolidation with the county and other suburbs in 1968. Jacksonville has one police force and one school district.

The growth is big business for developers and homebuilders who seek out rural land they think will be the next hot spot. But rural residents like Jim Gill fear the worst when they see bulldozers on wheat farms across the street.

Gill and his neighbors in far west Oklahoma City met repeatedly and petitioned the city not to allow any disturbance of the property. They’re still not sure if they’ve won, despite success with the planning commission.

“It’s like we fought the war but they’ve left the artillery,” Gill said. “They’ll be back.”

For others like Andrew Peppers, the task of simply getting to a dentist can involve three transfers of the Embark bus system to reach his dentist.

The stresses of growth are more complex for Hammontree, whose job includes dealing with developers who gravitate toward building in the 26 school districts that surround the Oklahoma City Public Schools district, which itself encompasses 135 square miles and 43,000 students. State transportation officials are extending highways and building turnpikes in rural parts of the city. The city stretches into four counties and is a mix of dense urban living, suburban neighborhoods, shopping destinations, rural expanses and blighted commercial corridors.

When first elected mayor in 2004, Cornett reluctantly noted the only way to keep up with such growth was to not just accept but embrace the development of Walmart Supercenters and other big retail centers on the city’s fringe. A dozen years later, however, that status quo is seen as no longer sufficient. At City Hall, the questions became, can a new course be taken, or will services be cut or taxes raised?

It’s not that progress hasn’t been made in reviving the urban core.

The city invested more than $1 billion in and around downtown, making it more attractive for young professionals and families. The funds came from the original Metropolitan Area Projects, or MAPS, a dedicated sales tax approved by city residents in 1993. Voters also approved subsequent sales-tax funded projects — a makeover of city schools with MAPS for Kids and then MAPS 3. But Cornett worries those efforts are falling short in reversing the trend of building sprawling neighborhoods and clusters of apartments on the city’s fringe.

“It’s not a sustainable growth pattern to keep 90 percent of growth on the perimeter year after year,” Cornett said. “And that’s the trap Oklahoma City has fallen into.”

Erratic growth

The story of Oklahoma City’s unique start is well known; on April 22, 1889, about 10,000 settlers raced into what is now Oklahoma City as part of a land run authorized by President Benjamin Harrison.

When the city was incorporated in 1890, it was 15 blocks long and five blocks wide. But before long, founding fathers, including Anton Classen, were buying up farmland for future housing.

Classen built streetcar lines to link downtown to far-flung neighborhoods. One of the city's earliest bond issues paid for a loop around the city — Grand Boulevard. Critics claimed the road was too far out. But by the 1930s, development had sprouted along much of the corridor.

In 1947, long before sprawl became a buzzword, authors of the city's first comprehensive plan noted most new development during World War II occurred outside the city.

"The investments in a city are far too large to permit the continuance of scattered growth," the plan's authors warned. "If the community is to avoid eventual bankruptcy, there must be some reasonable limit placed on the area occupied by urban development."

Despite that warning, annexation continued in small increments through the 1940s, often following highways.

Some of the annexations took place to prevent development around new reservoirs, including land along Northwest Expressway and to the south of the new Lake Hefner in 1954. An annexation in 1956 targeted land abutting Tinker Air Force Base.

The annexations increased in size and pace, and in 1958, leaders from Shawnee, Norman and El Reno protested Oklahoma City was seeking to expand its metropolitan area definition with the federal government to a four-county area that included Pottawatomie, Cleveland and Canadian counties. The Greater Oklahoma City Chamber responded that civic leaders only wanted to be able to claim a population of 600,000 by 1960.

Subequently, annexations continued, the city taking in land in the surrounding counties. Dozens of square miles were added, first to the east and then to the northeast to the border of Luther. By the end of 1962, the city spanned 620 square miles, larger than Los Angeles.

The growth wasn’t without detractors. City staff wondered how they would pay to replace 100 wooden bridges in previously unincorporated areas. Police asked for 100 new officers. Then-Mayor Jim Norick unsuccessfully sought to merge Oklahoma City and Oklahoma County operations.

Aubrey Hammontree, planning director. Jim Beckel / The Oklahoman

The annexation, however, had powerful proponents at the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber and with developers and homebuilders who believed the “hamlets” that had arisen — The Village, Bethany, Warr Acres and Nichols Hills — were threatening to create a haphazard approach to growth.

City leaders in the 1960s argued that they saved the city from losing all the growth to surrounding towns. Indeed, suburbs like Edmond and Norman have boomed over the past 20 years, but Oklahoma City also has consistently shown healthy gains in population.

Development of the new land through the 1960s generally followed a pattern of outward growth. But with desegregation of schools and forced busing of students, development of new neighborhoods within Oklahoma City Public School boundaries came to a halt.

Wide swaths of land centered along Western and Santa Fe avenues between Hefner and Memorial roads sat undeveloped while new neighborhoods started popping up north of Memorial inside the boundaries of the far less diversified Edmond Public Schools District. The same dynamic took place along Northwest Expressway inside the Putnam City district.

Oklahoma City Public Schools, which topped 75,000 students in the 1960s, saw a steep drop in enrollment. In the past decade, Oklahoma City Public Schools' enrollment has moved upward, but not enough to stop the demand for new housing in sprawl areas of Oklahoma City that are served by Deer Creek, Moore and Yukon schools.

Builders such as P.B. Odom continued to build in far southwest Oklahoma City, outside of the city school district, and he was one of an array of developers who opposed a drive by city planners in the late 1990s to implement an impact fee to keep up with sprawl costs. Attempts to draft a new comprehensive plan in 2000 that sought to curb growth ended with the firing of then-Planning Director Garner Stoll.

The 1977 Comprehensive Plan, drafted in an era when sprawl was not a concern, was updated but otherwise remained in place.

Street sprawl

Then and now: Memorial Road and Pennsylvania Avenue in north Oklahoma City. Oklahoman Archive

Road expansions, meanwhile, added fuel to the city’s northward and southward growth.

When Mercy Hospital relocated from downtown to Memorial and Meridian in 1974, miles of farmland surrounded the area. But state transportation officials had set the stage for the area’s development a decade earlier with plans that included building a new loop around the city, including a highway that would parallel Memorial Road between Broadway Extension and Portland Avenue.

Some of the earliest residential projects planned along Memorial came to the Planning Commission in the late 1960s. In 1971, developer Tom Morris unveiled plans to build housing for 10,000 families, and a mix of apartments, homes and a country club on 590 acres near the future Mercy Hospital. That project, The Greens, became the first development to front Memorial Road, still a sleepy country road. More housing and apartments followed.

Bill Atkinson, publisher of the Oklahoma Journal and a homebuilder, bought swaths of land at May Avenue and Memorial at the same time. Quail Springs Mall followed in 1983, and as plans advanced to build the Kilpatrick Turnpike, the entire Memorial Road corridor was built up with big-box retail centers, fast-food restaurants, office parks and thousands of apartments — much of it on the farmland Atkinson bought up years earlier.

Hammontree and Public Works Director Eric Wenger acknowledge the city’s approach to this growth was to play catch-up, constantly struggling to widen roads and traffic capacity.

Meanwhile, a different dynamic took place in far southwest Oklahoma City. The Ward 5 councilman at the time, Jim Scott, politicked into bond issue elections the widening of two-lane streets into thoroughfares surrounded by farmland. It was along these streets, including SW 104, that builders like Odom built what are now the wealthiest additions in the city.

Once-rural areas on the edge of town were being built up with a level of density that before was limited to the urban core. The growth along Memorial Road and similar corridors provided a boost to the city’s sales tax coffers and delayed the emergence of similar corridors in Edmond, Moore and Midwest City.

READ: Oklahoma City apartment boom gives Edmond school planners trouble

As these new growth corridors were built up between the 1970s and 1990s, City Hall focused on vehicular traffic. They treated sidewalks and amenities oriented toward walking and biking as a waste of money. Even trees were frowned upon by the late public works director Paul Brum, who suggested “people don’t want trees.”

The city skipped building sidewalks for 40 years before changing direction in 2000, one of the few changes to result from Stoll’s efforts to change the city’s growth policies. In 2007, the city passed an ordinance requiring all new developments to include sidewalks.

A 2007 bond issue included funding for 275 miles of sidewalks. The passage of MAPS 3 in 2009 further committed the city to making itself more walkable by committing $18 million for more than 50 miles of sidewalks in areas built up during 1960s through the 1990s.

“People got to rely on the automobile, and civil engineers kept working on that direction,” Cornett said. “It was their inspiration to see how fast we can get out of downtown and onto the highways. We’ve built the city around the car, and now we have to build it around the people.”

Effects on transit, police

Then and now: The view of downtown Oklahoma City from Broadway Extension. Oklahoman Archive

For residents like Andrew Peppers, the decisions made over the past half-century still leave him relying on friends or the city’s Embark bus system to get from home to his job downtown. With no dedicated funding source, Embark relied on money from what was a largely uninterested city council until the past decade.

The city boosted the budget public transit, even returning evening service to some routes. Peppers likes the changes and additions made in recent years, yet he notes he still doesn’t enjoy walking two miles with his wife when they need to cover the gap from the closest bus stop to their dentist.

Another public transit user is City Councilman David Greenwell, who currently represents Ward 5 in south Oklahoma City. He combines biking and the bus to get between his home and office. As a member of the trust that governs the city’s public transit, he helped oversee an overhaul two years ago of the Embark routes that offset greater distances between routes with increased frequency of stops and expanded hours.

Many of the sidewalks being built, meanwhile, are designed to accommodate those walking to the route stops.

“Transit can work in a city like Oklahoma City despite how spread out it is,” Greenwell said. “I think Embark for the next few years will always retain the wheel-and-spoke approach. We won’t have the grid-type public transit.”

Oklahoma City Ward 5 city councilman David Greenwell. Chris Landsberger / The Oklahoman

For Police Chief Bill Citty, the rapid growth is resulting in shifting boundaries for police patrols.

“We normally keep the same districts for years and years and years and years,” Citty said. “I've been police chief for 13 years and we hadn't changed the boundaries at all until three to four years ago. And now we're going to have to change them again.”

Even in newer areas populated by more affluent residents, the demand for police presence is great, Citty said, because the population is a target for burglars and thieves.

The revived urban core, meanwhile, has also posed a challenge. The urban population is seen as putting less pressure on infrastructure as it is in an area with existing public transit, sidewalks, parks, police and fire stations.

“After 5 p.m., it used to be quiet downtown,” Citty said. “Even when Bricktown was developing and the canal was put in, all the activity was east of Santa Fe Avenue. Now you have residential downtown, people out walking their dogs, people out running and other activities.”

The number of visitors to the city, especially downtown, adds to the demand for more policing.

“There's a lot to do in Oklahoma City now,” Citty said. “It's becoming a destination point for people from outside our city, so we have a responsibility to police that. That adds to everything. A lot of it is centralized, which is good — it's easier to police. I'd much rather police a more dense population in a smaller area than that same population sprawled out over 621 square miles.”

Throughout much of the 1990s into the early 2000s, the city council skipped increasing the budget for police and firefighters. But as the city council began to deal with the city’s growth the past few years, it reversed course and added to police and fire ranks. But that comes with other costs.

“We've added over 100 people, so the fleet has to increase as you add personnel,” Citty said. “Those added positions were desperately needed, and they're still needed. The council is still committed. But what’s happening now is the sales taxes are not available.”

Difficult change

Then and now: The construction of Quail Springs Mall in Oklahoma City. Oklahoman Archive

In an age of internet commerce replacing large retailers like Macy’s at Quail Springs Mall, the city is dealing with its chief funding source, sales taxes, being more erratic than ever. A healthy increase during the oil boom has turned into dramatic drops during the bust that started last year.

The biggest battle in the city’s effort to change the status quo has been over the introduction of a building impact fee — a charge assessed in some cities to offset the costs of growth with a revenue source for catching up on past unmet needs for streets and parks.

In the original proposal debated in April, fees for parks had been estimated to bring in $2 million per year, and the traffic impact fee had been expected to bring in $6.7 million. But facing opposition from Nick Harroz, attorney for Crest Foods, and commercial brokers like Jim Parrack, the city council cut those fee scales in half.

“My biggest concern was how it related to retail,” Parrack said. “It’s bad public policy when your city is funded by sales taxes to put another tax on retailers for new development.”

Parrack told the council he had a developer looking to build a $10 million, 100,000-square-foot retail project in northwest Oklahoma City, which with the original proposal would have resulted in a $188,000 impact fee.

“If the developer was expecting an 8 percent return, the fee would lower this return to 7.3 percent,” Parrack said. “This represents a nearly 10 percent reduction in return to the developer. Will a 10 percent reduction in their return cause a developer not to do a project? I don’t know. But it makes sense that it would kill some projects.”

Harroz, meanwhile, warned the city council his store chain, a valued source of sales taxes for the city, was looking at moving one store to an adjoining suburb.

The debate ended in a compromise, the council cutting the impact fees between 40 and 60 percent.

The compromise helped, Parrack said, and cut the potential fee for the retail development from $188,000 to $100,000.

“I agree that in a city of our size, as spread out as we are, the city can use additional funds for street projects,” Parrack said. “Everyone in the commercial side has a different take. My complaint or concern is how they’re getting it. I would like to see a broader-based income source than an impact fee."

Harroz called the compromise “more fair” than was first proposed, but he warned it may still cause some developers and retailers to look at other locations.

Cornett, meanwhile, sees the fee as also being a way to slow development that is replacing farmland along the city’s north, west and southern fringes.

“I don’t think the fees were high enough, but it’s what we could get done, and it takes time to get people to buy into the changes,” Cornett said. “I wish we could do more to stop the growth of apartments on the perimeter. We don’t need that kind of density on the perimeter. It adds capacity to those school districts, to the roads, to police and fire and all we have to supply. It makes us more inefficient.”

A rural battle

When Jim and Susan Gill bought their rural spread at NW 10 and Cimarron Road in 1996, they were surrounded by wheat farms. Housing developments started popping up in nearby Yukon as the Kilpatrick Turnpike was extended to join up with Interstate 40.

The Gills’ area, however, is in an area declared as being in reserve as part of Oklahoma City’s newest comprehensive plan. The wheat farm across the street was sold to new owners who first sought to remove top soil from the property — a frequent first step to building new housing.

“They were talking about removing the top 12 feet of soil,” Gill said. “That’s like going down to OU stadium and filling the football field stadium with dirt that is as high as the stadium. And they wanted to haul that out with dump trucks.”

Gill and his rural neighbors successfully petitioned the planning commission to kill the application. Gill said more attempts at moving the dirt were made, and work briefly started again before being shut down by the city. The bulldozers remain in place, and the Gills wonder if it’s just a matter of time before their rural lifestyle is gobbled up by the same development forces that turned farms into sprawling neighborhoods in north Oklahoma City.

Planning Commissioner John Yoeckel is among those battling against such sprawl, and for years he has heard the pleas of developers that if they are not allowed to build on rural land in popular suburban school districts, they will build across city lines.

“It doesn’t make sense for the city, especially fiscal sense,” Yoekel said. “People bring a greater demand for services further and further away from where it is established. … The argument that if we don’t allow it in Oklahoma City or they will go to Edmond or the county, well, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”

Yoeckel is not worried about developers wanting housing or apartments in Deer Creek schools and building in Edmond.

“Because it’s then a city like Edmond that must provide those services,” Yoeckel said. “People across the street will be shopping in the same place. They will be going to Edmond, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to build densely on our perimeter.”

Canadian County home owner Jim Gill. Steve Gooch / The Oklahoman

The new comprehensive plan allows planning commissioners to block or restrict development on about 95,000 acres, or about 148 square miles, declared as urban reserve, agricultural preserve or open space.

Hammontree admits, however, the pressure to build on that land remains intact.

In some cases, the city is entertaining ceding land to suburbs.

City planners are reviewing an application by owners of about 1,000 acres to de-annex the land along State Highway 4 to adjoining Mustang. That proposal, Hammontree said, could prompt further discussion with Mustang leaders about expanding the de-annexation area because it is closer to Mustang services.

Hammontree also cautions not every far-flung part of the city is a candidate for ceding to suburbs. Some areas may prove to be a great future corridor for sales taxes.

Good sprawl

While sprawl is seen in a negative light by some, the consensus at City Hall is not that such growth is inherently bad. Developers such as Richard McKown, whose family owns Ideal Homes, are building neighborhoods with sidewalks, trails, parks and preserved ecosystems.

McKown and his family hope they are setting an example with what they see as sustainable neighborhoods that won’t be a drain on the city’s resources as has happened with sprawl that took place in the 1970s and 1980s.

Over the past decade, McKown has attended conferences across the nation, spent time at a 160-acre storm water-cleansing park in Maryland and saw how rain gardens could add to a neighborhood’s long-term value.

McKown's first attempt at sustainable neighborhoods, Valencia, at NW 178 and May Avenue, is a success story and was the most popular area for buying new homes for the past several years. Now Ideal Homes is building a similar project, but with more advances with lessons learned at Valencia, with the 470-acre Village Verde at Mustang Road and Northwest Expressway.

“We’ve spent time developing a neighborhood that is mixed use,” McKown said. “To make all that work, you need to master more than just homebuilding. If you sell off the corner to a commercial developer, they build a strip shopping center that turns its back on the community, you end up with an ice cream shop behind your back fence, but you can’t get there without driving down the section road.”

Greenwell, the first councilman to regularly use public transit in the modern history of the city, believes sprawl can be good — if managed smartly.

Richard McKown, real estate developer, stands next to a pond in the Valencia addition in Edmond. Steve Gooch / The Oklahoman

Phoenix is 516 square miles and just two ranks below Oklahoma City in terms of U.S. cities' land mass. But Phoenix has a population of 1.5 million and recently overtook Philadelphia as the nation’s fifth-largest city.

“They wouldn’t have achieved that if they had not early on expanded their boundaries,” Greenwell said. “They show you can embrace both a sprawling city and maintaining a focus on developing your downtown core. And the two do not conflict.”

READ: Strong Neighborhoods Initiative produces results in Oklahoma City

Greenwell adds that Phoenix also early on added development impact fees and other measures being attempted now by Oklahoma City to manage growth.

“All I hear are the voices who say sprawl is bad, that these developers are taking advantage of low-cost land,” Greenwell said. “And in Phoenix they say they work with it, and that’s what has allowed them to become the fifth-largest city in the country.”

The other risk, Greenwell warns, is to end up with a far smaller, restricted city where too much development takes place in suburban towns that sap the strength of the core city.

“If you do growth correctly, very intelligently, you can continue to grow in the outlying areas, and you can still retain a rural area with five-plus-acre lots for housing. You can create a great city if you do it correctly.”