Anyone seen the Urban Tulsan article this week by Brian Ervin, "Who Runs Downtown?".
It describes huge failings and contractual favortism by/for DTU with regard to downtown.
If you wish to read it, you'll have to pick up an actual paper version since it does not appear in the online version of the paper, for some reason.
Page 12
Here's the online version:
http://www.urbantulsa.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A17682
Nothing new.
The Ed/Pub has had a long dislike for Jim Norton and DTU, and I have to say it's pretty justifiable.
Yeah, I thought it was kind of ridiculous to see they are paying $1,000,000 and $40,000 is being spent on security. And this "security" only works during morning and evening rush hours. So bums, hobos, predators, drunks, vandals, and burglars can roam free at all hours of the night since apparently that is not a focus of DTU.
Shouldn't the city itself take care of downtown though? Why give Jim Norton a million bucks of which he can take a third as "administrative costs" and divide the rest of it off into such small amounts in each category that they absolutely can not be effective? The city can hire its own street sweepers. The city can handle blighted tree cleanup and whatnot. The city has an operation, while not very well heard of, that could provide "security" for downtown called the Tulsa Police Department. A downtown police station/substation would be nice. Paying DTU seems like a cop-out to me. Probably because more money would need to be spent to be effective, and the DTU thing is just a token gesture of "taking care of downtown" while giving a sweet deal to another guy who probably comps government officials cars.
DTU is basically just like a neighborhood association. They're good for keeping the trashed picked up but that have no real authority and their membership is voluntary.
How exactly does an op-ed piece hit on a neighborhood association?
"Hey baby..."
"DTU's million dollar contract for fiscal year 2007 included $380,360 for management of the improvement district and "pedestrian amenity maintenance," $170,000 for the cleaning of streets, alleys and sidewalks, $98,170 for landscaping, $96,900 for shuttle bus transit service, about $40,000 for security, about $85,000 for "awareness and promotion," about $94,000 for "projects" and $47,500 for parking." Hmmm, I wonder who'll be getting the no-bid contract to shuttle city employees from their cars to One Taylor Hall?