Background Information The current Tulsa County Vision 2025 sales tax will expire at the end of 2016. Vision 2025 is an unprecedented and highly successful countywide program of community enrichment and economic development projects. In late 2014, with the end of the Vision 2025 nearing, local officials began discussing the prospect of identifying new community…
I recently spent some time in East Tulsa, driving around, visiting small businesses, talking with proprietors, and cruising through a few neighborhoods. East Tulsa is the fastest growing part of our city and accounts for the major part of our recent population growth, modest as it has been. In spite of feeling like a racial…
Smart growth proponents see opportunities in the redevelopment of vacant, abandoned properties and brownfields sites. We observe that as development gets pushed further out from the core of our cities to the fringe of town, our main streets and central neighborhoods are often left neglected. There is enormous economic development potential in these abandoned storefronts…
If Planners plan, shouldn’t Leaders lead? It’s not like we really needed any more evidence to illustrate the leadership vacuum in the Mayor’s office; that has already been pretty well documented. However, recent events further illuminate the confusion that reigns on the 15th Floor of City Hall. The disclosure that yard waste intended for mulching…
Finally, recreational development along the Arkansas River bank. The Gathering Place, a $200+ million project paid for primarily by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, should silence critics who have for decades lamented the lack of transformative development along the Arkansas River and River Parks. For fifty years Tulsans have talked the talk about river development…
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…
vi•sion (v zh n) … a few popular definitions • Unusual competence in discernment or perception; intelligent foresight • The mystical experience of seeing as if with the eyes of the supernatural • A vivid mental image produced by the imagination • To think and plan for the future, using intelligence and imagination As Helen…