Vision 2025 Extension - Package Details

[Oil Capital]

Updates (as far as I know or can find sources on) for Vision 2025 stuff:

* The Pedestrian Bridge is held up and is far under-funded vs what the citizens voted on.
* The BMX construction on the Fairgrounds was completely botched and old usable stadium (for which there was income-producing demand for soccer games) was demolished to be a sinkhole of lawn maintenance and no prospects. The new BMX facility ended up costing around 50% more than what it was supposed to cost.
* Zink Dam seems nowhere near starting even though it was slated to be constructed in 2019 (http://kotv.images.worldnow.com/library/37be184c-5714-4df5-99b9-f600852ef67d.pdf)
* The cuts to 911 15 staff right after voters approved adding 16 positions (http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/government/city-officials-defend-cuts-to/article_c856782f-5f58-5fca-be53-c3e88ada47f4.html) (The ol' bait & switch with fund diversion)
* Public Safety: Has crime decreased at all? In any categories? I keep seeing Tulsa creep up the most dangerous city lists with astonishingly high violent and property crime rates. Looks like some neighborhoods are safe from violent crime but petty theft is common while other neighborhoods are drowning in crime. Do we even have more police or fire fighters than before 2016?
* Education: Once again no measurable or visible improvement. Families still flock to the suburbs while the majority of inner city schools are proving they cannot and will not educate students. Teacher retention kept dropping more and more over the last 4 years. Nothing about the teacher retention fund seemed to help. 

I haven't heard updates on most of the Vision 2025 projects. Are any of the big items being constructed yet? We voted for this stuff in 2016 and 4 years later there is almost no progress on any of the big items! This is pathetic. Tulsans were foolish to ever think giving the government more money would create any "big visionary" changes like we were sold before voting. One of the easier things to implement in the package (BRT) took over 3 years!


I guess the government wants to teach Tulsans an important lesson: Life sucks and then you die. Or more specifically Tulsa sucks and the city will keep throwing your money away to make sure it always will. And Tulsa will approve the next "VISION" package and then the one after that because Tulsans are suckers and voters are mostly ignorant fools educated by the horrible excuse for an education system in the place that loves Trump, Bynum and Stitt. Some people including probably most on this board pay attention and there are quite a few well-educated, but they're consolidated to a few areas, making the other areas that much worse.

If we don't spend a massive amount of energy and money to make education the #1 priority, our society will keep going the direction it has with worsening crime and poverty. It takes education first and then over a long time, the poverty and crime will decrease. The state government is doing its best to assure we will be a bottom feeding state in the future. O&G can't bail us out forever with all of its high paying low-education jobs.

Not to mention the Gilcrease cluster...

[TulsaGoldenHurriCAN]

If you're going to trust the government (city/state/federal) to actually manage projects to a budget and schedule you'll always be disappointed.  Those issues you raised are the same issues that are being dealt with around the country, and in many places it is WORSE or far more corrupt.  You're naive if you think that government leaders and their cronies don't line their pockets with taxpayer funds.  Imagine that (no pun intended).  

It's that Bynum sold himself as a new type of mayor who would do things differently. Besides the easy fluff stuff and big lists (so big, they're full of hardly-actionable items), the city government has been about the same as under Bartlett. 4 years and virtually no progress on most of the big items in that plan, almost all far behind the initially stated schedules.

I know it's common, but that doesn't make it any better. Seems straight forward to do the job we're paying you to do and use the massive amounts of money allotted to make these things happen, but the reality is the city "leaders" selling these pork-like projects have no idea how much any of it will actually cost to make or even if they're even feasible. As usual, the Vision plan was a big fraud to increase their own power and to line the pockets of their friends.

But Tulsa has proven they'll always vote yes even if you rip them off again and again, so Bynum will keep it up and Tulsa in 2023 or 2030 will look a lot like it did in 2015: high crime, low education, led by a lying mayor and counsel.

[TulsaGoldenHurriCAN]

Not to mention the Gilcrease cluster...

You're right. I added that (Originally added that list to the thread about Gilcrease). That is the Magnum Opus of failures in Vision 2025. If you wanted to write a script on how the major and city (and other parties) could horribly mess up every single thing as badly as possible, you would be hard pressed to write it any better (well, worse) than this.

Many Tulsans were so incredibly excited to finally get a chance to marvel at a large portion of the Gilcrease collection and for it to finally be what it could be: The largest and most valuable Western Art museum. Instead, it will remain an amazing collection the public cannot see and nothing more. It would've been something akin to the Gathering Place but for art. It would've been truly unique and renown. Instead we will get a more organized version of what we have now, but smaller.

Why can't they keep the existing museum as-is and add a new building next to it? The old building could be an overflow to display the extensive collection to the public while the new building could become the flagship Gilcrease collection. That seems vastly better than destroying it.

[DTowner]

It's that Bynum sold himself as a new type of mayor who would do things differently. Besides the easy fluff stuff and big lists (so big, they're full of hardly-actionable items), the city government has been about the same as under Bartlett. 4 years and virtually no progress on most of the big items in that plan, almost all far behind the initially stated schedules.

I know it's common, but that doesn't make it any better. Seems straight forward to do the job we're paying you to do and use the massive amounts of money allotted to make these things happen, but the reality is the city "leaders" selling these pork-like projects have no idea how much any of it will actually cost to make or even if they're even feasible. As usual, the Vision plan was a big fraud to increase their own power and to line the pockets of their friends.

But Tulsa has proven they'll always vote yes even if you rip them off again and again, so Bynum will keep it up and Tulsa in 2023 or 2030 will look a lot like it did in 2015: high crime, low education, led by a lying mayor and counsel.

Tulsans don’t always say “yes,” they voted down two pre-Vison 2025 packages and a river project.

The last Vision package seemed to have lost its vision and was too much of a hodge-podge of special interest projects.  More money for public safety was needed, but I thought then and I still think now it should not have been included in the Vision package.  This was supposed to be about big idea capital improvement projects that will jump start other investment in the city.  This is our one funding mechanism for game changing ideas, and now we are using it to pay salaries for police and fire personnel and can’t seem to follow through on the many other promises.

I suspect the next time they put a Vision package in front of the voters it will need to be a much better group of true visionary projects that have been much more thoroughly vetted if they want it to pass.

[swake]

Updates (as far as I know or can find sources on) for Vision 2025 stuff:

* The prized visionary item in Vision 2025: Gilcrease museum - $65 million expansion (with $55 million "matching funds" from TU) to nearly double size to rival Crystal Bridges, slated to begin in 2020. Now $83 million total budget which will completely demolish existing 134,000 square foot museum (which was just renovated with $28 million in 2014) and rebuild a new 89,000 square foot museum which comes nowhere close to the 217,000 square foot Crystal Bridges museum. Will instead meet existing scope of the base city museum with the vast majority of the collection to remain in a vault, rather than on display. No regional or national draw expected.

That $28 million didn't renovate Gilcrease, it built the Helmerich Center for American Research which is actually a separate building next to the public museum and not part of it. I've seen nothing that says that the Helmerich Center is also being torn down.
https://www.newson6.com/story/26462158/caffey

I can't find anywhere that TU promised $55 million in matching funds, just that there was going to be additional fundraising, which is still the case. And where did you find that "No regional or national draw expected"?

[heironymouspasparagus]

Had some hopes for Bynum.  Results just the same as the previous ones.

[SXSW]

Had some hopes for Bynum.  Results just the same as the previous ones.

The difference is he has done a better job than past mayors promoting Tulsa both nationally/internationally and on social media.  The OKC mayor is doing a similarly good job with this.  The end results may be the same but past mayors (especially Dewey) did not represent the city well.

[heironymouspasparagus]

The difference is he has done a better job than past mayors promoting Tulsa both nationally/internationally and on social media.  The OKC mayor is doing a similarly good job with this.  The end results may be the same but past mayors (especially Dewey) did not represent the city well.

But if it ends up being just all propaganda, that doesn't really help much.  At least not for the long run.

I also feel that we already have a lot to 'sell', so maybe his jawboning will help.  Tulsa has a lot going for it - just doesn't seem to get shown off in a way that helps a lot.  Plus we keep doing the ole, foot in mouth routine.  Open mouth.  Insert foot.  Chew vigorously!

[TulsaBeMore]

That $28 million didn't renovate Gilcrease, it built the Helmerich Center for American Research which is actually a separate building next to the public museum and not part of it. I've seen nothing that says that the Helmerich Center is also being torn down.
https://www.newson6.com/story/26462158/caffey

I can't find anywhere that TU promised $55 million in matching funds, just that there was going to be additional fundraising, which is still the case. And where did you find that "No regional or national draw expected"?

Re: TU promise - I found only this on the TU page for the TU-Gilcrease partnership:    "In conjunction with Vision Tulsa, TU launched The Campaign for Gilcrease, a $50 million endowment campaign for operations of the museum."