Tulsa Zoning: December 2018 Archives

I am getting caught up on the local news after all the pre-Christmas busyness and was disappointed, but not surprised, to learn that Mayor G. T. Bynum IV has shut down our city planning department and outsourced the task of evaluating the future direction of city development to a quasi-non-governmental organization that is controlled by a board dominated by suburban city and county governments, the Indian Nation Council of Governments (INCOG). Bynum announced the change in October.

The City of Tulsa has only eight seats on INCOG's 62-member-board, so the planners making recommendations on City of Tulsa zoning changes and changes to Tulsa's comprehensive plan will be more accountable to the suburbs competing with Tulsa for residents and sales tax revenue than to our own elected officials.

Until this change, planners working for the City of Tulsa dealt with the city's comprehensive plan and small-area plans, while planners employed by INCOG evaluated applications for rezoning, variances, and special exceptions, providing recommendations to the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission (TMAPC) and City of Tulsa Board of Adjustment (BOA). Effectively, this meant that any long-term plan developed by city staff with the participation of Tulsa citizens could be undermined by INCOG staff at the point where planning is implemented, by recommending that the decision-making bodies ignore the comprehensive and small-area plans and approve zoning changes, variances, and special exceptions that violate those plans. Four out of the 11 members of TMAPC, which vets all proposed changes to the city's zoning map and zoning ordinances, are appointed by the Tulsa County Commission, with no accountability to the City of Tulsa's elected officials.

The new Tulsa comprehensive plan originally called for uniting long-term and short-term planning for the city within city government. From the Strategies section of the final draft of Our Vision for Tulsa:

Organization matters, and currently Tulsa's planning and development functions are spread between many agencies and departments. Development services and economic development functions reside in different departments. The city's redevelopment activities and programs are carried out by the Tulsa Development Authority, and staffed by the City's economic development and real estate management staffs. Neighborhood planning functions are a part of city government. While the city is leading PLANiTULSA, long range planning and zoning is staffed by INCOG under contract with the City, and the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission (TMAPC) with both county and city appointees is the key planning advisory body and is responsible for both zoning and comprehensive planning.

For PLANiTULSA to be successful it is critical that the city coordinate development-related activities so they work together to effectively address changes desired by Tulsans. The City of Tulsa should enhance staff capacity and technical skills and consolidate city development-related activities into a Community Development Department as well as bring the current and long range planning functions that are currently outsourced to the INCOG into this new structure. This would result in City staff providing the review and analysis of development requests as well as staffing the Tulsa Metropolitan Planning Commission. The City of Tulsa should continue to support INCOG's leadership role in regional planning and transportation. INCOG's support and regional leadership is critical to implementing the PLANiTULSA vision.

After fit-throwing by certain developers and INCOG, this was significantly watered down in the version that was ultimately adopted by the TMAPC and the City Council.

When Mayor Bynum was Councilor Bynum, he supported consolidating planning within the City of Tulsa as a matter of accountability, as reported by Urban Tulsa Weekly's Mike Easterling:

That's a question ["What's the problem with INCOG?"] Bynum seems happy to answer. He claims he has no beef with regional planning in general and strongly supports INCOG's lead role in compiling a transportation plan for the area. But he hasn't always been happy with what the city has gotten from the agency in terms of land use planning.

"Not so much a feeling that they don't provide good service as much as there is a lack of accountability," he said. "The situation that crystallized that for me was the situation with the Sonoma Grande apartment complex. That was built using a (planned unit development) that was something like 30 years old and had been approved by the previous form of government (Tulsa switched from a commission form of government to the current mayor-city council style in 1989.) That's how old it was."

The controversy over Sonoma Grande may well have proved to be a tipping point in the debate over zoning and development in Tulsa. Residents of a neighboring subdivision were furious about the height and proximity of the apartments, claiming they weren't adequately warned about it beforehand.

Bynum contends the INCOG planning staff presented the plan for the complex to neighbors as an innocuous project, and few of them bothered to show up at the Planning Commission's public hearing. It was only when the project was being built, and the size of it became apparent, that neighbors became alarmed. By then, it was too late, he said.

"So you've got people in a really nice neighborhood who had probably experienced substantial damage to their property values by this project," he said.

Many of those residents complained to the City Council, Bynum said.

"When we tried to raise this as an issue, the Planning Commission pointed at INCOG, and INCOG pointed elsewhere," he said. "Ultimately, no one could be held accountable for this terrible error that impacted those folks."

That experience left him with serious doubts about the current system.

"If we can have a system that makes accountability more clear and stayed within the city, I would be supportive of that," he said.

Bynum made a bolder statement, quoted later in the same story:

"...the city shouldn't have its land use in the hands of a bureaucracy that's not accountable to the public."

In that same story, several people (including myself) point out that the INCOG planning staff seemed to see their job as facilitating whatever a developer wanted, rather than evaluating a planning application in light of long-term planning goals and the interests of all affected property owners.

The complaints about INCOG's performance in land use planning go well beyond councilors' concerns about accountability. Other critics, including former Planning Commission member Liz Wright, believe INCOG planners don't take an unbiased approach to evaluating the development proposals that cross their desks.

"They're not neutral," she said. "They're not being fair to the citizens."

[Village at Central Park developer Jamie] Jamieson believes INCOG has developed an institutional bias on the side of developers at the expense of neighborhoods. That's not good for anyone, he said.

"Developers need to put the interests of neighborhoods first," he said. "Ultimately, you develop a better bottom line by doing that. And that's not to say there aren't some good people at INCOG, because there are."

The proper relationship between Tulsa and INCOG -- one in which the city is the client, with its interests being served -- has largely been forgotten in favor of that developer-friendly approach by INCOG, he said.

"It's been flipped on its head for too long," he said, a dynamic that has led to an endless series of disputes between developers and neighborhoods.

Bates believes the INCOG planning staff has simply grown too comfortable with the developers and attorneys they work with on a routine basis, and have concluded it is their job to facilitate what those developers want -- regardless of whether it's in the best interests of the surrounding area or the city at large.

He said that's not so much a case of outright hostility toward residents.

"It's more a case of misjudging the importance of public support," he said. "They operate in a world where the public's voice is seen as irrelevant to the outcome of a zoning or planning decision. That's kind of a foreign notion."...

Bates doesn't mince words when evaluating the job INCOG has done on the city's behalf.

"I think it's been bad," he said. "There are certain individuals who work for INCOG who have the ability to do real planning, but institutionally, there's not any real forethought. They'll make a zoning change and then go back and change the comprehensive plan to reflect that."

[Then-Councilor Bill] Christiansen shares Bates' contention that residents routinely get short shrift in such cases. And he said he can't do much to help them.

"In terms of zoning, the citizens have been at the back of the bus," he said. "It's hard for a councilor because we try to do the right for our constituents, and under the current process, it's very difficult."

Christiansen repeated Bates' assertion that a handful of zoning attorneys have grown too close relationship to INCOG's planning staff, some of them even working in the same building as the Planning Commission. That gives them a distinct advantage over the average citizen, he said, though he noted he doesn't blame them for exploiting that.

"They know the system and how to access it," he said. "The citizens don't know the process at all, and they wind up calling the council."

The alienation of power from accountability is by design. A certain element within Tulsa's development community wants to be able to Build Anything Absolutely Anywhere, without regard to the impact on surrounding property owners, and has fought against any changes that would protect Tulsa's interests in our competition with the suburbs. They like it when planning and zoning decisions are shaped by bureaucrats who aren't answerable to our own elected officials, and they work to defeat elected officials who try to legislate in the city's best interests.

For example, suburban property developers and their allies led the 2004-2005 campaign to recall Councilors Jim Mautino and Chris Medlock. Medlock, Mautino, and fellow councilors Roscoe Turner and Jack Henderson opposed the reappointment of Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority board members who had approved sweetheart, long-term water deals that seemed designed to fuel suburban growth at Tulsa's expense, and they opposed construction of a bridge across the Arkansas River for the benefit of new development in Bixby.

A city's land-use policy ought to support the interests of the city's residents. That's more likely to happen if all the decision-makers involved in the process are accountable to city elected officials. The 2010 version of G. T. Bynum IV understood that. You're welcome to speculate as to why Bynum IV, 2018 model, disagrees.