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.
* 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.