Vision trek

Deconstructing the Vision 2025 gambit

How do you spin up the special sauce needed to fuel a hotter, more vibrant Tulsa? 

How do you spur our in-town venture runners, retain signature hometown artists and performers, and attract outside wizards and tech boffins to Green Country?

Market dynamics, geopolitics, and the kinetics of the country’s economy constrain all these queries. But active local plotting, emerging street and transit needs, equity and balanced growth imperatives, aging city assets, small-area planning opportunities and meeting local imagineers on their elevated grounds have a role to play as well.

During the LaFortune administration, in the early part of this century, elected officials and citizen activists cobbled together the Vision 2025 process–a voter-driven framework for picking and funding a passel of heavy, city-shaping projects. 

The iconic projects that have come from the Vision process are evident. Exhibit A: the BOK Arena, the Advanced Material Center at OSU’s downtown campus, the Morton Health Systems Campus and a bevy of major street and intersection efforts.

The Council is moving to slate voter approval for another round of projects in April of 2016.

The new round comes after a strange, loopy spasm of indecision by the mayor and city council, one framed by two problematic trial balloons: diverting Vision project funds to a massive police hiring effort and a questionable river-and-dam development gambit. On the latter, the last two weeks brought a new round of discussions for the multi-party $250 million project.

This new river project would be a heavy recipient of Vision 2025 funding, consuming as much as a fourth of available funds. The most recent see-if-it-will-fly effort is being circulated by Councilor G.T. Bynum, a newly announced candidate for Tulsa Mayor. Bynum has long been a stout advocate for river development and is the nominal leader of Tulsa’s River Development Task Force.

Key queries

How do you pick and sort tentpole projects from over $2.5 billion in submitted requests with funding less than half this sum?

The picking and choosing goes beyond the mundane by also looking at projects that impart small-place connectivity, design variety and street animation to the downtown and elsewhere. Other projects in review offer a springboard for Tulsa’s manufacturing, aerospace and service economies. Right now, Tulsa’s elected officials and a group of project advocates are vetting, deconstructing and rescaling the 142 submitted projects (it may be down to less than 50 as this is written). Many of these projects have the look, feel and texture that citizens pushed for in the PlaniTulsa meetings attended by thousands in the early aughts.

Another vantage

While there have been nearly a dozen public hearings and countless on-camera city council and sub-committee talkfests on the projects that should be in front of voters this April, there has been little effort to garner insight from anyone but elected officials and the usual “professional citizen” suspects. Bill Leighty’s Smart Growth Tulsa Coalition (SGTC) has broken this frame by publishing the results of a recently completed online survey, the results of which offer a different take.

Here is a partial summary from the SGTC web site:

“First, respondents tended to prefer initiatives that supported underfunded areas of the city’s general fund. This is reflected in the high level of support for dedicated funding for transit, parks and recreation and to a lesser, but still significant extent, public safety...”

SGTC’s survey also found heavy interest in creating a public wireless network, executing the now completed bike/pedestrian plan and the proposed Children’s Museum.

Some of my personal favorites: 

•Funding for Gilcrease Museum expansion. The stunning site plan could re-animate the entire Gilcrease neighborhood area and ramify the Museum’s already stellar position as a tourist attraction, as well as further bolster its reputation in anthropological and curation realms.

•Additional seed money for the under-defined-but-valiant effort to accelerate the 36th Street North/Phoenix Neighborhood.

•The RAW Space project—a visionary multi-use collaborative innovation space slated to be on the abandoned Evans-Fintube site just northeast of downtown. This is a very unusual agility-building development effort that could change the path of hundreds of firms and thousands of workers here in Tulsa. RAW would be a campus scale “co-work” space for savvy industrial outfits, tiny tech and precision manufacturing firms and lean design studios struggling to build and aggressively price complex products, providing access to next-wave tool arrays, outsized computing power and a bevy of methods previously available only to gigantic firms and a handful of universities.

•Tulsa’s new bike and pedestrian plan and some kind of enduring arrangement to expand the operating budget for Tulsa’s hard-pressed bus system.

•Seed dollars for spiking the grandeur that is the Union Depot, home of the fab Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame.

For more from Ray, read his article on gun-culture and racism in America.