A helmsman at City Hall

Build a vision and they will come?
Not on these sales-tax revenues

Microsoft recently replaced its CEO, trading veteran Steve Ballmer for Satya Nadella. The replacement was overdue, coming after stakeholders saw little movement in a space filled with innovation and tumult. Microsoft is a captive of its office suite and its operating systems, so dependent on revenues from these cash cows that there’s little room or psychic energy for making its way in a vastly transformed realm. Microsoft’s strategy — to mirror Apple’s iPod, iPhone, and tablet gambits — is not only not working, but it’s also incredibly boring. Excluding its success with Xbox, the Seattle giant’s attempts to reclaim its former glory and gain a toehold in mobile computing, telecommunications, and cloud storage have been spectacularly unsuccessful.

Tulsa, I’d say, is in a similar fix.

In the first one-fifth of the 21st-century, cities that have compelling identities and that are committed to openness and taking risks have an advantage over communities that do not.

Where is the energy, the imagination needed to secure a breakout, arguably revolutionary rail route to OKC?

How come we didn’t make Google’s list of 34 cities to get hyperspeed Internet?

Why can’t we have a championship pro-ball team like the Thunder?

Why are we experiencing a flash crisis in the machinery at City Hall?

It’s not a people problem. A range of national media and surveys say Tulsa is one of the most entrepreneurial communities in America. It’s in our DNA. And, our city is home to a driving, energized philanthropic community that is not only helping to revitalize downtown but has reanimated Tulsa’s spaces for arts, culture, and recreation.

But with the tremendous exception of our resurgent downtown, we seem to have lost our pluck. We can’t deliver an exciting response when asked, “What is Tulsa all about, and why would anyone want to entertain the place as a venue for transforming an entire industry, launching an audacious athletic team, or reinventing the film or music industries?”

I was recently in a private-project development meeting in T-Town, in a room packed with some of Tulsa’s top civic-minded, entrepreneurial, and media talents. In one voice, the group opined that our town is in a bad stall, especially when compared to our rival down the street, OKC—we even call it “The City.”

The benefits of its repeated success with MAPS, OKC’s ongoing, multifaceted capital project initiative, and the progress of Bricktown and the Thunder are palpable. OKC’s confidence is electric.

To get on a new trajectory, Tulsa needs a real strategy for replacing dying sales-tax revenues. And we need some indication of how comprehensive planning and the work done by thousands of citizens in the PlaniTulsa process will be honored at City Hall. Tulsa needs to hear how new jobs will come to Tulsa, and how we plan to compete in the face of emerging opportunities in aviation, advanced services, next-gen medical practices, artificial intelligence, and other technology. And we need to hear it soon.

As we look at replacing sales-tax revenues, we should scope out prospects for dramatically altering certain aspects of how basic city services are provided. How many fire stations do we actually need in the 21st century? Are there operations that our police and fire departments could provide jointly? Revisiting the wage-driving, college-degree requirements for police applicants is another track, since much evidence, from Chicago and New York, from recent military tasking studies and U.S. Army community development work in Afghanistan and Iraq, suggests degrees are not synonymous with quality candidates. Tulsa could look at a two-tier system that would allow the city to recruit highly experienced, non-degreed military veterans, who would bring diversity and a wide range of relevant experience to cop work in Tulsa. Too, high-school students and early-stage college students could do some policing and fire work while they continue their educations.

Another, complementary avenue: simply raise sales-tax rates. Then there’s the service tax, which could be applied to the most rapidly growing facets of our economy: legal, advertising, personal care, and other such offerings. Of course, the legislature would have to approve such a move, and so would the people.

The emerging, downright-scary situation: It’s not evident that the mayor and his senior crew have given anybody, including some very capable people who work in the building, a mandate to find the road ahead or to work with the Tulsa City Council, area economists, or any others on new revenue strategies for the city.

Current efforts to raise money by selling off part of our fabulous new City Hall are opportunistic. Those dollars aren’t sustainable. We need a path to new revenue sources that can support the city in 2050, or at least through the next decade. We need a core city service rethink that is defensible, imaginative, promotes diversity, and quashes inequality. This is easier said than done. Many of the revenue options that might be available to the City can come only through authorizations from the state legislature, a body which is no sensible person’s idea of an actual utility for any city that needs real solutions, as opposed to a medieval rhetoric or reactionary nonsense.

We need to know how we will build a city that’s competitive for jobs and as a prime spot for startups and already-in-place, high-yeild firms. We need to look at how incubators like the new supercomputing facility in One Technology Center and co-working spaces can be used to augment the capacity of enterprising academics, engineers, technology pros, entrepreneurs, and area musicians and filmmakers. Making advanced computing, 3-D production methods and other approaches available to small or early-stage players and to spark more startups could, if Austin, Silicon Valley, and other spots are any indication, make a huge difference in Tulsa. We already have Fab Lab Tulsa, the Helmerick Advanced Materials Center at the downtown campus of OSU, and some of the co-op music, dance, and performance spaces in the Brady District as spaces and models that can be put to work.

Zoning systems are rules, guidance models, and map overlays that determine what functions can go where and how intense development can be in any physical space within the city. An out-of-state law and zoning company has been at work on a re-look for months, and we are supposedly at the tail end of a sweeping review of the city’s zoning regime.

The work on the re-look, overseen by the Mayor’s office and a (very conservative, at least in my view) citizens oversight panel, should soon release a passel of draft recommendations that ought to more tightly align Tulsa’s zoning code with the new machinery and myriad aspirations outlined during the PlaniTulsa process. But it’s been well over a year. Why it has the work taken so long, and will the consulting firm produce anything worth reading?

We have the launch of a set of small-area plans — detailed planning exercises that call for accelerated change in specific neighborhoods — including a development corridor near the new Union/Tulsa Hills commercial district, as well as a rework of the hospital/medical corridor between 11th and 21st Streets. Then there’s the sparking of the old Northland shopping center enclave, a rollout aided by a several-million-dollar site improvement and infrastructure plan approved as a part of Tulsa’s voter-sanctioned capital-improvement process late last year. Will the mayor commit to finding ways to continue and execute these projects?

A round of righteous congratulations to area officials, including Mayor Bartlett, the regional chamber, INCOG, and a host of area mayors and local councils, for the role they played in securing the giant Macy transshipment facility, an Owasso-area project that could add as many as 1,000 jobs that are full-time equivalent to the metro economy and spark retail and commercial growth in parts of north Tulsa. Macy’s was no small feat. Competition between large-city governments, state governments, tribal organizations, chambers of commerce, and other organizations for such a facility is intense.

Perhaps a half-dozen of such opportunities come our way every 5 years. The regional chamber and some city officials are aware of this reality. But knowing about it and refocusing the dollars available for workforce upscaling, economic development, and stoking the city’s competitive position for start-ups and to retain promising maturing firms is a different matter altogether.