Tulsa Downtown: May 2009 Archives

Tulsa City Councilor Rick Westcott emailed me a short time ago to point out the bind into which downtown property owners have been put by Mayor Kathy Taylor's administration's insistence that owners had only limited rights to protest the assessment for the new Tulsa Stadium Improvement District, which will finance a new ballpark for the Tulsa Drillers. Now that the Oklahoma Attorney General has contradicted the Taylor administration, it's too late for property owners to file a protest, according to Taylor's timetable for getting the assessment roll approved.

There are a couple of points that no one seems to be making about the ballpark assessment and the Attorney General's advisory letter.

Since last July, the Mayor and the City Attorney have repeatedly said that the assessment on a piece of property does not need to have a relationship to the benefit which the property will receive from the ballpark. They have said that all downtown property can be assessed at the same rate, no matter how near or far it is from the ballpark. I have disagreed with the Mayor and the City Attorney on that issue since last July. I believed that state law was clear, that there must be a relationship between the assessment rate and the benefit which a piece of property will receive. The less the benefit, the less the assessment rate.

Now, the AG's letter says the Mayor and the City Attorney are wrong. The AG says that the assessment rate for a piece of property must bear a relationship to the benefit which the property will receive. The further away a piece of property is from the ballpark, the less the benefit and the less the assessment rate. Or, if the County believes that the jail will not receive any benefit from the ballpark, then the jail should be assessed as a lesser rate.

In April, the City Council was preparing to conduct a hearing on the assessment roll and approve the assessment for all downtown property. The Mayor and the City Attorney told property owners that, if they had not objected last July at the formation of the assessment district, then they could not object at the hearing on the assessment on their property. In fact, the City Attorney provided a lengthy, written legal opinion justifying her position on that issue.

The AG's letter says they are wrong. The AG says that a property owner could object to the amount of the assessment on his or her property, even if they hadn't objected to the formation of the assessment district.

But, based upon the assurances by the Mayor and the legal opinions by the City Attorney, most property owners did not file objections in April. They were told that they couldn't object, so they relied on that advice and they didn't object.

Now, the AG says that the Mayor and the City Attorney were wrong. The AG says that the property owners could have objected at the April hearing. But, since they relied on the Mayor's statements and the City Attorney's opinion, they didn't object. Now, the deadline has passed and they can't object.

And, now, the assessment roll may proceed.

The Mayor and the City Attorney misinformed people as to what the law was and what their rights were. The property owners relied on that advice. Now, the time to file an objection has expired.

But, the Mayor is spinning this as, "The AG says there's nothing wrong and the assessment can go forward."

I am not against the ballpark. I have never been against the ballpark. But, I have a duty to protect the citizens of Tulsa and make sure that all aspects of it are done legally and properly.

This week in Urban Tulsa Weekly, I've covered a variety of topics: First Presbyterian Church's exciting plans to replace a surface parking lot with a beautiful new addition to their downtown complex, whether the BOK Center should charge a per-ticket fee to cover Tulsa Police Department overtime relating to event nights, and a few parting thoughts on the PLANiTULSA process.

That's right: parting thoughts. This issue contains my last column for UTW, at least for now.

I had written a brief farewell at the end of the column, but it was edited out, presumably for space reasons, so I'll post it here:

And with that I'll say goodbye for now. I'm grateful for the opportunity to have been part of the UTW team for almost four years. Many thanks to the UTW readers who took time to read my words, who wrote in with praise and with criticism, and who voted my blog, batesline.com, Absolute Best of Tulsa two years in a row. Best wishes for continued success to the staff, management, and advertisers of Urban Tulsa Weekly.

I'm sad to be leaving but pleased to have made a significant contribution to UTW and, I hope, to the public debate. By my count, starting with the September 15-21, 2005, issue, I produced 194 weekly columns -- without a break -- plus several extra op-eds, cover stories on Tulsa bloggers, the 2006 city election, the history of our plans for the Arkansas River, and PLANiTULSA, and a few other feature stories and news items, and even a handful of photographs.

In the process, I've had the pleasure of working with some very creative and talented people, attended a dozen or so editorial meetings, met a lot of interesting Tulsans in many walks of life, spent a lot of time at the Coffee House on Cherry Street and Shades of Brown, and even handed out candy in the Boo-Ha-Ha parade. It's been fun, and there's a lot I'll miss about it.

It's no small feat to start an independent weekly paper and to keep it going for 18 years, and Keith Skrzypczak and his wife Julie (who oversees the paper's operations) are to be admired for their achievement. I'm thankful, too, that Tulsa's alt-weekly truly is an editorial alternative to the daily paper, publishing free-market and pro-life voices alongside the left-wing columnists and cartoonists more typical of the alternative press.

So why will I no longer be writing for UTW?

Recently UTW established a "freelancer's agreement," a standard contract for all freelance contributors, including writers and photographers. The agreement includes a "work made for hire" provision, which means that UTW would own all rights, including the copyright, to anything I submit for publication during the term of the agreement.

For many freelancers, that won't be a cause for concern, but to borrow a phrase from Roscoe Turner, "I've got a problem with that." By giving up all my rights, I could be setting up problems down the road should I want to incorporate into future projects any of the material I would write under the agreement.

In my weekly column, I've researched and analyzed current local issues and tried to put them into historical and political perspective. I've discussed urban design and planning concepts used elsewhere and applied them to Tulsa's circumstances. Beyond the immediate value of a column to the public conversation in the week it's published, I think there's some long-term value as well.

That value might take any number of forms, such as a book or a documentary on the history of Tulsa in the early 21st century or on Tulsa's post-World War II transformation. Such a project is many years in the future, I suspect, which is all the more reason for me to avoid agreeing to something now that creates obstacles for me in a decade or two. What if UTW is sold to a chain of weeklies or goes out of business? (God forbid on both hypotheticals.) Those possibilities seem very remote today, but a lot can happen in 10 or 20 years, and if they happened, who would own the rights to my work under the agreement? Would I be able to get permission to use my own work? Who knows?

At the very least, I would want to continue to retain enough rights for anything I write to be able to keep it accessible on the web.

There are no hard feelings here. UTW is doing what it deems prudent in requiring a standard agreement from all freelancers. I'm doing what I deem prudent by choosing not to submit work under those terms.

I will continue to post news and vent my opinions here at BatesLine on a fairly regular basis, along with interesting links (on the left side of the homepage) and the occasional tweet on Twitter. (My latest 10 tweets can be found on the right side of the BatesLine homepage.)

As for long-form commentary, I'm exploring some possibilities, but for the immediate future I will be using my now-free Sunday afternoons and evenings to catch up on chores around the house. I've been thinking about doing a podcast. (If that's of interest to you, let me know. I'm not much of a podcast listener myself, but I know many people prefer it to reading articles online.)

I wish the staff, management, and ownership of Urban Tulsa Weekly all the best for the future.

An edited version of this column was published in the May 28 - June 4, 2009, issue of Urban Tulsa Weekly. This was my final column for UTW, for reasons I explained in a blog entry at that time. The final paragraph was cut by the editor. The published version is available on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Posted October 25, 2022.

Cityscope
By Michael D. Bates

Notebook

Tulsa Police Chief Ronald Palmer has proposed imposing a security fee of 75 cents to a dollar per ticket to cover the overtime costs for extra police officers patrolling downtown during major BOK Center events. It's the least that the BOK Center can do to offset its impact on the city budget.

It's argued that such a fee would upset the promoters who book shows at the arena, putting Tulsa at a competitive disadvantage. If someone is willing to buy that ticket for a dollar more than previously, that's a dollar that could have gone to the promoter instead of the city. The argument goes that the BOK Center is generating sales tax revenue, and we shouldn't balance the city budget on the backs of these promoters.

In reality, the voters chose to subsidize those promoters to the tune of $178 million, and it will take at least a century for the arena to generate the same amount of local tax dollars that we put into it.

Here's the math: The BOK Center has remitted over $1.2 million in city and county sales tax revenues in the eight months since it opened. It's impossible to know exactly how much of that revenue came from Tulsans reallocating their disposable income from other entertainment and dining options, although it's reasonable to think that the vast majority of the revenue is coming from local residents.

In the six months reported by the Oklahoma Tax Commission since the arena held its first paid event last September, sales tax receipts in Tulsa County increased by 4.7% over the year before. But statewide, sales tax receipts for the same period increased by 5.5% over the year before, suggesting that the BOK Center didn't provide an added boost to Tulsa over and above the improvement to the general state economy.

But for the sake of argument, let's assume that all of the sales tax paid by the BOK Center represents new money. At that rate it would only take about 100 years for local taxpayers to recoup in city and county tax revenues the $178 million (not including interest on the bonds) that we put into the facility.

Former Councilor Chris Medlock, in his May 19 medblogged.com podcast, took debt service into account and calculated 122 years before the arena will generate as much local sales tax as was spent to build it.

My calculation and Medlock's figures both optimistically assume that the BOK Center will continue to bring in big acts and draw the same big crowds as it has during what Bolton has called a "honeymoon period," although Bolton himself has warned Tulsans not to expect that to happen.

No one can know for sure whether the BOK Center has increased local tax receipts over what they would otherwise have been. What we can say for sure is that popular music venues like Cain's Ballroom, the Marquee, and the Mercury Lounge haven't been subsidized by taxpayers to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The owners of those venues paid to rent or buy and to renovate their facilities. Those costs are passed on in the price of each ticket.

BOK Center management and show promoters should be overflowing with gratitude to the taxpayers of Tulsa County for giving them, at no cost to them, a brand new, state-of-the-art venue where they can put on their shows and make big profits. They shouldn't try to dump even more of their operating cost onto city taxpayers.

# # #

Anytime I hear about a downtown church expanding, I cringe. For many years, that has meant that another historic commercial building will fall to make way for more parking.
It's wonderful that our downtown churches, with their historic and beautiful buildings, have survived and continue to thrive, drawing congregants from all over the metropolitan area, but their hunger for surface parking makes them a mixed blessing.

First Presbyterian Church's approach to expansion, however, deserves praise and warrants emulation.

Rather than tear down the old Masonic Temple across Boston Ave., Tulsa's oldest congregation renovated it for use as church classroom and event space and offices for non-profit organizations. Now called the Bernsen Community Life Center, it serves not only the church but the whole community. Barthelmes Conservatory, for example, has its office there and holds its public concerts in the center's various performance spaces.
In the same spirit, First Pres is about to eliminate some surface parking and put something beautiful in its place. A new worship center and reception hall, welcome center, and educational building will fill up the half-block west of Cincinnati Ave between 7th and 8th Streets. The new additions will be in the same Gothic Revival style as the 1925 sanctuary. The buildings will form a U around a courtyard, reminiscent of a cathedral cloister.

The church has also acquired the Power House gym at 8th and Detroit, which served many years as Chick Norton (later Jim Norton) Buick - one of the few downtown auto dealership buildings still standing. Power House is the new home for the church's youth ministries, and it is already under renovation.

The congregation has pledged over $14 million toward a goal of $18 million, to be matched dollar-for-dollar by Charlie Stephenson, a co-founder of Vintage Petroleum, and his wife Peggy.

There was something else on the drawings that I found especially encouraging: A new parking garage on the southeast corner of 7th and Main, directly to the west of the Bernsen Center, taking the place of an existing surface lot. It's not clear whether this is part of the current fundraising drive or something for the future.

A parking garage would set a great example for other downtown churches, by accommodating more cars in a smaller area. It would be even more exciting if the garage included street-fronting retail spaces, which would help rebuild a pedestrian-friendly connection between the downtown office core and TCC and the south downtown churches.

# # #

I'm told that, after the first week of the PLANiTULSA survey, ranking four scenarios for future growth, only about 600 had been collected or submitted online at planitulsa.org. Planners are hoping for 20 to 30 times that number by the June 18 deadline.

Please take time to submit a survey: The more Tulsans participate, the harder it will be for city officials to ignore the results.

As it's my 194th and final weekly column for Urban Tulsa Weekly, here are three parting observations about PLANiTULSA:

1. PLANiTULSA is finally delivering what Bill LaFortune promised with his July 2002 "vision summit." 1100 Tulsans gathered to express their dreams for the city's future, but instead of the process leading to a comprehensive strategy and plan for Tulsa's future development, the result was a grab-bag of disconnected projects scattered around the county.

With the PLANiTULSA process, Tulsans are finally putting together a vision of the sort defined by futurist Glenn Heimstra at the 2002 summit: "A compelling description of your preferred future."

2. The results of the PLANiTULSA citywide workshops, represented by Scenario B, and to a lesser extent by C and D, vindicate the "Gang of Four" - Councilors Jack Henderson, Jim Mautino, Chris Medlock, and Roscoe Turner, who served together from 2004 to 2006 - as genuine advocates for the City of Tulsa's growth.

The four took a lot of flak from the development industry, which pushed the unsuccessful 2005 attempt to recall Mautino and Medlock. They were tarred as opponents of growth, but the quartet's real offense was working to focus Tulsa's resources on encouraging new, high quality, compatible growth within Tulsa city limits rather than fueling suburban expansion at Tulsa's expense.

Those efforts began in 2003, when Medlock and then-Councilor Joe Williams proposed a future growth task force to address the stagnation of the city's sales tax base as new retail followed residents to the suburbs.

The task force was put on the back burner by Mayor Bill LaFortune, but in 2004, the coalition won funding for a study potential big-box retail sites in Tulsa. The Buxton study identified US 75 at 71st St a prime location to capture retail dollars from customers in upscale suburban subdivisions. Medlock won approval of a Tax Increment Finance district for the area, which made possible the development of the Tulsa Hills shopping district.
The four, along with Sam Roop (for a time), held up the reappointment of two members of the Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority, the city's water board, over concerns that the TMUA's long-term water deals with the suburbs benefited suburban growth to the City of Tulsa's detriment.

This same coalition began pushing for a new comprehensive plan in 2005 and included funding for the process we now call PLANiTULSA in the 2006 Third Penny package.
Assuming survey responses reflect the same preferences on display at last fall's workshops, it will confirm that Tulsans share the desire that motivated these often-vilified councilors: to see new development in the City of Tulsa that respects existing neighborhood character, brings more people into the city, stimulates new retail development, and generates more tax revenue to fund basic city services.

3. In my very first UTW column, back in September 2005, I wrote of the importance of walkable neighborhoods for Tulsans who don't have the option of driving a car.
"Most of Tulsa is designed for the private automobile, but there ought to be at least a part of our city where those who can't drive, those who'd rather not drive, and those who'd like to get by with just one car can still lead an independent existence. At least one section of our city ought to be truly urban."

PLANiTULSA scenarios B and D would get us closer to making that goal a reality.

As you fill out your PLANiTULSA survey, by all means think about which scenario comes closest to the kind of city that would best serve your needs. But take a moment to consider which of the four scenarios would best serve those who by reason of age, infirmity, or poverty are unable to drive.

And with that I'll say goodbye for now. I'm grateful for the opportunity to have been part of the UTW team for almost four years. Many thanks to the UTW readers who took time to read my words, who wrote in with praise and with criticism, and who voted my blog, batesline.com, Absolute Best of Tulsa two years in a row. Best wishes for continued success to the staff, management, and advertisers of Urban Tulsa Weekly.

I had the honor of being the first interviewee on The Chris Medlock Show podcast. Chris and I talked about my column on the history and future of Downtown Tulsa Unlimited and other downtown development issues. Visit Chris Medlock's MedBlogged to download the current podcast and catch up on earlier editions.

An edited version of this column was published in the May 14 - 20, 2009, issue of Urban Tulsa Weekly. The published version is available on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Posted October 25, 2022.

Cityscope
By Michael D. Bates

Downtown Tulsa Unlamented

The departing head of Downtown Tulsa Unlimited (DTU) reflected with satisfaction on his 20 years of service. He told the business reporter:

"Our downtown is destined to be one of the outstanding downtowns. No other downtown association got into the nitty gritty. All our programs have been successful....

"We're no longer trying to save downtown....

"We needed to get the cheap joints out. We formed the old urban renewal authority and it has been effective. We cleared out the old, obsolete areas...."

Those words came from L. A. "Bud" Blust, Jr., who served as DTU's head from shortly after its inception in 1956 until 1977.

As his fourth successor, Jim Norton, leaves DTU this month after his own two-decade stint, it's a fitting time to look back at the downtown organization's history and its future, if any. DTU's policy successes ultimately led to the very result the group was formed to prevent: The collapse of downtown retail.

DTU was founded by downtown retailers concerned about growing competition from new suburban shopping centers, although from the beginning its membership included other downtown businesses and organizations.

In 1951, Froug's opened a branch in the new Eastgate Center at Admiral and Memorial. Utica Square debuted in 1952 as a middle-class shopping center, complete with a bowling alley and T. G. & Y. (For you young whipper-snappers, T. G. & Y. was a chain of five-and-dime stores, sort of like a Walgreens minus the pharmacy and food, plus fabric and patterns.)

In 1956, Sears Roebuck decided to move from 5th and Boulder to 21st and Yale, near new edge-of-town subdivisions like Lortondale and Mayo Meadow.

DTU deserves much of the credit - or blame - for what happened to downtown over the next half-century. The 1959 "Plan for Central Tulsa," initiated by DTU and developed by planners from California, introduced the notion of a Main Street Pedestrian Mall, closed to traffic, and a superblock office/retail complex, called Tul-Center, to replace several blocks of old retail buildings around 1st and Main.

The same plan endorsed earlier proposals to clear a mixed residential and business area west of Denver Ave. for a multi-block civic center and to create a loop of expressways around downtown to make it easy for drivers to come in from the suburbs.

DTU lobbied very effectively to get the city to use federal highway and urban renewal dollars to accomplish these "progressive" plans, although it took until 1981 to complete all the projects. By the time Tulsa finished, other cities had already begun to rethink and remove inner city expressways, pedestrian malls, and superblock developments.

A Sept. 23, 1984, Oklahoman story celebrated the state of downtown Tulsa, which seemed to remain healthy despite the oil bust that had begun two years earlier.

The expressway system made it easy for people to live in the suburbs and commute to work and church in downtown. But creating the IDL wiped out apartments and homes and blighted nearby neighborhoods. More people coming from further away meant greater demand for parking.

As new skyscrapers went up and as downtown churches drew members from all over the metro area, one- to three-story buildings came down to make way for surface parking lots. These are the same sort of old buildings that have served as affordable venues for unique new businesses in Cherry Street, the Brady District, the Blue Dome District, Brookside, and 18th and Boston.

Retail followed the commuters and their families out to the edge of the city and ultimately into the suburbs. Office workers were in their offices, working, not out shopping.

One by one, downtown stores closed. An indoor mall, the Williams Center Forum, lingered for a bit longer, before being converted to office space in the early 1990s.

In 1977, Bud Blust was happy to be rid of the "cheap joints" (a description that evidently included ornate downtown movie palaces like the Ritz, Orpheum, and Majestic). But those old buildings, however seedy their occupants, had the kind of character that new construction in the suburbs could never duplicate.

In trying to imitate suburbia, DTU failed to win back customers who still found it easier to shop Southroads or Woodland Hills than to navigate the confusion of a street grid that had been hacked to pieces by downtown "improvements." At the same time DTU discarded the uniqueness that made going downtown worth the extra trouble.

You might think that a downtown merchants' association would close down once most of the merchants were gone, but DTU stayed alive, thanks to the business improvement district (BID) that was put in place in 1981. The City contracted with DTU's subsidiary, Tul-Center, Inc., to maintain the Main Mall and downtown plazas and sidewalks, funded by an assessment on properties within the BID. (DTU's executive committee serves as Tul-Center's board of directors.) Tul-Center, in turn, contracted with other providers and with DTU to do the actual work. (That at least was the arrangement early on, according to news accounts of the time.)

As retail faded away, DTU seems to have into an office-building owners association. Critics say that DTU represents the interests of only a small number of downtown property owners, but city officials continued to treat it as if it were the sole spokesman for downtown.

The same critics note that most of the entrepreneurial initiative has come not in the center, where DTU's attention has been focused, but on the edge of downtown, in places that DTU either overlooked or hoped at some point to wipe out.

In 1981, planners hired by DTU recommended clearing the area we now call the Brady Arts District to make way for an "urban campus." One of the planners was quoted in an April 7, 1981, news story as saying, "There's not really much character left in the Old Townsite, so we see no reason to restore it, as some cities have done to their original site." Thank goodness they never found the money to make it happen.

If Tulsa voters had followed DTU's advice and approved the "Tulsa Project" sales tax in 1997, Hodge's Bend--the area around 3rd and Kenosha, home to Tiny Lounge, Divine Barbering, and Micha Alexander's Virginia Lofts, featured on the cover of UTW a few weeks ago--would have been bulldozed for a soccer stadium.

It angers and amuses me to hear anyone claim that downtown's problem is government neglect and lack of public investment. Quite the opposite: Downtown Tulsa has been nearly loved to death.

A report on Tulsa's downtown issued earlier this year by an advisory panel from the International Downtown Association (IDA) enumerates the many ways in which the planning fads of earlier years hurt downtown's vitality.

When the panel of four visited downtown last November--just before the Tulsa Run--it concluded that "Downtown Tulsa is stuck in a time warp":

"A first-time visitor to downtown Tulsa may be somewhat mystified. Streets and sidewalks are clean and well-lighted. A collection of handsome, even extraordinary art deco buildings adorn the office core. A strikingly designed arena stands dramatically on the edge of downtown, complemented by perhaps the most attractive new City Hall in America. Here and there, a café or coffee house lights the street. And yet... where are the people? ...

"There are few street level establishments of a retail nature. Windows facing the street are far too often dark. The hustle and bustle that today characterizes many downtowns across North America is simply absent."

We wish DTU President Jim Norton well as he moves on to his new position in North Carolina. I served with him on a couple of task forces and always found him to be courteous and congenial, despite our differences. To his credit, he has been an effective advocate for public funding for downtown infrastructure and incentives for residential development.

One could fault him for his opposition to modest historic preservation and urban design measures--the sort that most other cities our size, including Oklahoma City, have had for many years--but it's important to remember that he was merely representing the interests of those who control DTU, those who hired him and who had the power to fire him, and not necessarily the best interests of downtown as a historic urban center.
DTU's days may be numbered. Rather than continue the 28-year exclusive arrangement with DTU's Tul-Center subsidiary, the City is seeking competitive bids to take over public property maintenance services for the new Tulsa Stadium Improvement District, which will also fund the Tulsa Drillers' new stadium. Bids are due to the City Clerk's office by 5 p.m. on May 20. (You can find the invitation to bid and the detailed requirements for the contract at cityoftulsapurchasing.org. The bid number is TAC 843.)

Tul-Center is competing for the contract. If they lose, DTU could theoretically continue to exist, but that may not be feasible. According to the IDA report, "DTU relies on the BID assessment for its very existence. BID revenues constitute about 9 out of every 11 dollars passing through DTU each year."

In my opinion, DTU's time has long since passed, and, contrary to the recommendations of the IDA, there's no justification for giving it pride of place in a new "Downtown Coordinating Council."

A single organization representing everything within the Inner Dispersal Loop is at once too broad and too narrow. Within the IDL there are condo owners, small retailers, nightclubs, old apartment buildings, art galleries, and office buildings. No one group can adequately represent such a diverse collection of interests.

But if there is to be an umbrella organization to represent common concerns of those diverse groups, its coverage should extend beyond the IDL to include the surrounding neighborhoods. The revival of central Tulsa requires regenerating the connections that were severed when the expressways were built.

Let the winning bidder for the public property maintenance contract stick to providing exactly those services and nothing more. The City should not accord the winning bidder status as de facto spokesman for downtown. Instead, the City planning department should take the lead role, even-handedly weighing input from central Tulsa stakeholders-neighborhoods, associations, institutions--as they implement a new comprehensive plan.

DTU failed to serve its original purpose, and no longer serves any public purpose at all. Let it go on independently if it will, but fifty-three years of taxpayer-subsidized failure is enough.

Last fall, Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor asked the International Downtown Association to send a team to study our downtown, and in particular to look at the city's arrangement with Tul-Center, Inc., the arm of Downtown Tulsa Unlimited (DTU) that has handled downtown services since the current business improvement district was established in 1981. (The DTU executive committee serves as the board of directors for Tul-Center, Inc.)

Here's what the City asked the IDA team to do:

The City of Tulsa seeks to create an organization that can coordinate, plan, direct and manage a wide range of downtown revitalization functions, including the integration and implementation of downtown plans, management of downtown public/private partnerships, support for downtown business groups, and support and management of programs as designated by the City. Possible functions include parking management, management of downtown business improvement district programs, event functions, and other downtown operations.

The IDA Advisory Panel will examine and assess the current organizations, agencies and programs focused on the revitalization of downtown Tulsa, including the relationship between the City of Tulsa, Downtown Tulsa Unlimited and various stakeholders; discuss and compare best practices and successful strategies employed by other similar business districts in terms of organizational structure, functions, and programs, particularly with regard to functions within the scope of a downtown management organization; review and make recommendations regarding any appropriate organizational development strategies; examine advantages and disadvantages of collaborative planning and funding strategies, especially in business improvement districts; and recommend ways that programs, if initiated, can be sustained.

The team of four, including Oklahoma City planning director Russell Claus, came to Tulsa, Nov. 15 to 18, 2008, right before the Tulsa Run. A 27-page report was released in February 2009. (Click here to read the IDA Advisory Panel Report on Tulsa (PDF format).

The IDA team's report begins:

A first-time visitor to downtown Tulsa may be somewhat mystified. Streets and sidewalks are clean and well-lighted. A collection of handsome, even extraordinary art deco buildings adorn the office core. A strikingly designed arena stands dramatically on the edge of downtown, complemented by perhaps the most attractive new City Hall in America. Here and there, a café or coffee house lights the street. And yet...where are the people?

As a visitor spends more time in downtown Tulsa, other impressions emerge. There are few street level establishments of a retail nature. Windows facing the street are far too often dark. The hustle and bustle that today characterizes many downtowns across North America is simply absent. It feels like a time warp - as if it's 1988 in downtown Tulsa, not 2008.

Here's the IDA report's description of the current arrangement:

According to the DTID (Downtown Tulsa Improvement District) Summary Sheet, the downtown Tulsa district "was created to provide public improvements and maintenance beyond normal City services to help sustain, increase, and re-attract businesses as well as entertainment activities to downtown." According to the Summary Sheet, the City is the governing body and Tul-Center, Inc., a non-profit organization of Downtown Tulsa Unlimited, manages the daily services provided by several subcontractors."

The 2008-2009 contract of approximately $952,000 between the City of Tulsa and Tul-Center, Inc. comes from two roughly equal sources: assessments on property owners in downtown and the City of Tulsa itself. The current contract, approved by the Tulsa City Council in 1999, is in effect through June 30, 2009.

Part of the report deals with criticisms of DTU:

With more than 50 years of history, DTU is one of the oldest downtown organizations in the US. It has a track record of accomplishments during its existence. It has a board of directors composed of some of Tulsa's most prominent corporate citizens. And, through Tul-Center Inc., it has managed the business improvement district since it was established.

Like many downtown organizations today, DTU relies on the BID assessment for its very existence. BID revenues constitute about 9 out every 11 dollars passing through DTU each year. With the BID assessment, DTU manages a fairly standard menu of "clean and safe" services, and also promotes downtown with events like Mayfest and by installing , removing and storing holiday decorations.

The recommendations and observations are well worth reading. One highlight is the strong interest among young people in downtown and their desire to protect buildings that may not be "architecturally or historically significant, [but they] represent adaptive re-use possibilities for residential development, office space for small companies, and street level space for restaurants, clubs, and retail shops."

DTU President Jim Norton responded to the team's visit in DTU's December 1, 2008 newsletter:

One of their first recommendations was that the current custodial responsibilities, which DTU performs, are done as good as or better than anyone in the country. That's very encouraging news for us, and it tells us that what we've been doing for the last 30 years has been a tremendous success. They were very impressed with the cleanliness of Downtown and with the efficiency of our operations. They made suggestions that DTU needs to reach out to the surrounding neighborhoods and to other interest groups to include them in creating a vision for Downtown that everyone buys into. They also made other recommendations regarding the marketing of our Central Business District in creating lively activities throughout the year. These are items which we have totally embraced and look forward to making the future better for everyone.

The Downtown Tulsa Improvement District expires on June 30 and is being replaced with the Tulsa Stadium Improvement District. The City of Tulsa has issued an invitation to bid (TAC 843) on providing the public property maintenance services (Microsoft Word document) currently being provided by DTU/Tul-Center. The deadline for submissions is 5 p.m. on May 20, 2009. The base bid includes maintaining 215 miles of sidewalk (daily), 18 miles of alleys, 1320 trees, and 80 trash containers. Bidders also have to quote a price for sidewalk cleaning per square yard, sidewalk snow and ice removal per mile, special event sidewalk sweeping per foot, brick sidewalk paver replacement per square foot, general labor per man hour, mowing/landscaping per square yard, and additional trash service per can per month.

The specification is precise in requiring particular fertilizers and lawn treatments, and there are some other interesting provisions:

Personnel must be fluent in English, as they will be expected to provide information, directions and help to the public.

All paved sidewalk and plaza surfaces must be swept daily (with a complete cycle each week) using mechanical sweepers and/or manually. Mechanical sweepers, blowers, or power vacuum equipment will not be operated during the lunch period or at other times when large crowds of people are present. The paved sidewalk surfaces shall be inspected weekly and specific trouble spots, INCLUDING CHEWING GUM, cleaned with a power scrubber, high pressure sprayer or other means as needed. The standard of maintenance for this service shall be to provide litter free, clean sidewalks and alleys.

Water usage specifically for this area will be metered and recorded by a portable water meter obtained by the landscape contractor from the City of Tulsa Water and Sewer Department. CONTRACTOR shall pay the required deposit and all other costs associated with obtaining such metering device.

In preparation for an upcoming column, I spent some time last night photographing the Downtown Tulsa Unlimited vertical file at Central Library. Vertical files are newspaper clippings organized by topic, and they're often the best way to get a sense of the evolution of some aspect of the city over several decades.

I figured out sometime ago that it was cheaper and quicker and more portable to shoot a digital picture than to put a bunch of articles on the photocopy machine, and then scan the resulting copies into the computer. I can then review the documents as needed, even if the library is closed. (Accountability Burns strolled by and -- without stopping -- informed me that I would get better image quality if I photocopied the articles and then scanned them in.)

Skimming the articles as I photographed them was both amusing and depressing, as I read the various policy initiatives that DTU has promoted over the years. My tentative title is "DTU: ****ing up downtown for 53 years." DTU began with a focus on keeping retail downtown. Nearly all of DTU's key ideas came to fruition -- the Inner Dispersal Loop, the Civic Center (meaning the eight-block complex, not just the Assembly Center), the Main Mall, the Williams Center, and plenty more parking -- and they all contributed in some way to the demise of downtown retail.

Just as appalling are the plans they never got around to implementing. A Tulsa World business story from April 7, 1981, reports on a 10-year plan to redevelop the "Crosstown Sector" of the city's urban renewal plan, the area within the IDL north of the tracks. You probably know it as Brady Village or the Brady Arts District. Urban Design Group proposed replacing the 18 blocks of the city's original townsite with an "urban campus." (Emphasis added.)

[UDG's John] Lauder said the original Tulsa Townsite, the area from Denver to Detroit avenues and from the Frisco tracks to Cameron Street, could handle 250,000 to 300,000 square feet of new structures and could be the site of what UDG terms an "urban campus" with potential of several thousand students....

"The Municipal Theater, our Old Lady of Brady, could serve a purpose in the urban campus concept," Lauder said.

The original townsite has 12 1/2 acres of property which could be put to use for loft office buildings, retail stores and warehousing. This area would be screened from streets with low walls, trees and sidewalks.

"There's not really much character left in the Old Townsite," said Laur [sic], "so we see no reason to restore it, as some cities have done to their original site. We could just call it the Townsite, but we're open to names."

Urban Design started its survey and work on redevelopment of the Crosstown Sector last summer with a $62,500 block grant through the City Development Department handled by DTU.

The 1981 plan also recommended high-rises and garden apartments where the jail is now. (It was residential before demolition for the jail.) They also planned to move the Salvation Army from the southwest corner of 2nd and Cheyenne to "land adjacent to the residential areas."