PLANiTULSA launch presentation

Here are the Powerpoint slides presented by planning consultant John Fregonese at last Tuesday's kickoff of PLANiTULSA, the city's first comprehensive planning effort in a generation. It's only the slides, unfortunately, and not the audio, but it will give you the gist of what was presented.

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I especially liked slides 29 and 30, which outline the traditional approach to planning, certainly the approach that has been followed in Tulsa: Decide, Educate, Announce, and Defend -- that spells DEAD, and you'll notice that there's no place in the DEAD process for public input. The enlightened make the decisions and then tell the public why they should approve what has been decided. The TCC bond issue and millage levy was the most recent example of this process at work.

The following two slides are in the same vein. We plan, fund, and build projects, but we skip what should be the earlier three steps in the process: Values (what do people want?), Vision (How will our city provide it?), and Strategy (How do we implement the values and vision?).

Mayor Kathy Taylor also spoke at the kickoff, and I was disappointed to hear her describe this process as one that began in 2007. In fact, this new comprehensive planning effort has its roots in Mayor Bill LaFortune's vision summit of July 2002 and the efforts of Councilors Chris Medlock and Joe Williams in 2003 to establish a Future Growth Task Force. Unfortunately, Mayor LaFortune cooperated in the degeneration of the vision process to the development of a laundry list of disconnected projects designed to generate enough votes to get an arena tax approved by Tulsa County voters. He also stymied the Future Growth Task Force, refusing to support it unless eight of nine councilors were also on board. (Art Justis, Randy Sullivan, and Bill Christiansen withheld their support.)

Nevertheless, it was during the LaFortune administration and with pressure from the Gang of Five that the new comprehensive plan was launched, with the initial development of the process included by the City Council in the TMAPC's work package for the 2005-6 fiscal year.

While Mayor Taylor deserves credit for keeping the progress moving, and a great deal of credit for putting the process under the planners at the City Urban Development Department rather than the land-use bookkeepers at INCOG, it would have been gracious for her to acknowledge the foundation laid by her predecessors at City Hall.

(Taylor also expressed pleasure in working with the City Council over "the past month" -- a back of the hand, hopefully unintentional, to departing Councilors Roscoe Turner, Maria Barnes, and Cason Carter who served with the Mayor during the first two years of her term.)