Let’s make great places in our community and then connect them. Tulsa’s transit system funding and services fall well below the levels of many of our competitors. It is symptomatic of the urban sprawl and auto centric mindset which has prevailed in our community since the 1950’s. While our bus service has seen its better…
Do you agree Pubic Transportation should be considered a “core” service? Our comprehensive plan maintains unequivocally that an improved transit system can help us realize our vision for Tulsa because it enables the City to increase tax revenues without extending infrastructure and enables denser development because of a reduced need for parking and roadway widening.…
Vision 2…a massive FAIL Important lessons will hopefully be learned from the trouncing of Vision 2 on November 6th. It should serve as the mother of all wake-up calls for its advocates. And, it has to be crystal clear by now that we need to immediately change the way we operate around here. That said…
Transportation strategies, changing gears for the 21st Century Expanding the range of transportation options in the Tulsa area will require a radically different approach to the traditional, auto oriented facility planning and design strategies of the past which primarily focus on auto capacity and relieving traffic congestion. A high level of harmonization must be established…
A lack of public input will doom Vision 2. Vision2 is the most poorly conceived and strategically deficient tax proposal in memory, a desperately short-sighted and reactionary response to a problem whose solution has yet to be determined. Proposition 1 includes $386 million in airport industrial complex improvements, a closing fund and $80 million in…
Let our plan guide future transportation strategies. Tulsa’s road-building legacy and policies of the past have proven to be fiscally unsustainable. Prior to passage of the current Fix Our Streets program, Tulsa’s Complete Our Streets Advisory Council identified approximately $1.1 billion dollars in needed repairs to maintain the city’s streets over the next decade. That…
Living the dream. About five years ago the Mrs. and I began to consider a potential move to downtown Tulsa. Like many others nearing retirement age we were in the preliminary stages of trying to figure out the best housing options for our empty nester way of life. For over 40 years we had lived…
Poor timing, hastefully conceived, suspect priorities. All well-conceived capital improvement plans are necessarily tempered by fiscal realities that demand a rigorous evaluation and prioritization of candidate projects. The City of Tulsa is currently sitting on an unfunded capital improvement wish list in the range of $7 billion dollars, not including the Vision 2 proposals. Obviously…
Funding package ignores adopted plans. It is clear many Tulsans look at the Vision 2 proposal with a good deal of skepticism, mostly because of the way it was developed. Let’s consider what a truly responsible CIP planning process might look like for Tulsa in today’s challenging monetary environment. First, we can consider the benefits…
Planning Commission Decision is regrettable. PlaniTulsa’s Vision Document describes the kinds of places, economy, housing, parks, open spaces and transportation choices that the city’s policies should be designed to create. It was a product of unprecedented public engagement, developed with the guidance of one of America’s most prestigious planning consultants who led thousands of Tulsans,…
The Vision 2 proposal (extending the Vision 2025 sales tax to the year 2029) includes an economic development component and a quality of life component which begs the question… is there really a difference between the two… economic development and quality of life? The term “economic development” has often been used to describe the…
The people have spoken, why keeping asking questions? If we needed any evidence that the ‘Vision 2’ proposal was flawed by its very nature, it was made clear by comments attributed to Mayor Bartlett in another publication on August 16th: “We want to hear from the citizens of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the city of Tulsa, about…