Tulsa Vision 2025 sales tax initiatives for economic development projects

I just found out that Tulsa has a sales tax add on program, modeled after Oklahoma City's pathbreaking Metropolitan Area Projects program, which has funded a variety of placemaking, economic development, and infrastructure projects over the past 25 years ("Change isn't usually that simple: The repatterning of Oklahoma City's Downtown Streetscape").  

It took a couple of tries before the referendum was finally passed, which is not a surprise.  Early iterations called for funding specific tax incentive projects, like to retain an American Airlines maintenance facility. But later phases included funding improvements to universities and schools, and parks.

But it's not nearly as visionary as MAPS. But the most recent vote in 2016 made the funding stream permanent. And it's possible that over time, the vision component can grow.

-- Tulsa Vision 2025

The current slate of projects are more focused on creating civic assets with long term value ("Invested in downtown': Tulsa Arts District improvements among $816M in new projects," Tulsa World) such as the Oklahoma Museum of Popular Culture and the Greenwood Rising History Center, which recounts the sad history of the Tulsa white riot eradicating the Greenwood neighborhood in 1919.

In turn these investments are sparking private investment in housing, mixed use, and office projects, helped surely, by Tulsa's position in the fossil fuels economy.

Tulsa Remote Worker Recruitment Program.  Something I haven't written about but have been meaning to for a couple years is Tulsa's worker recruitment program ("Do you work remotely? This program could pay you $10,000 to do so from Tulsa," CNN, "The Great Tulsa Mobile Worker Experiment," Bloomberg), which was started before the pandemic. 

Not unlike the artist recruitment program in Paducah, Kentucky ("In Paducah, Artists Create Something From Nothing," NPR), the idea was to recruit workers who didn't have to work onsite, who might be attracted by Tulsa's lower cost of living, especially of housing.  Since then more communities have created similar programs.

Called Tulsa Remote, and funded by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, a locally-focused foundation with funds derived from oil and banking, it provides a $10,000 "move in" bonus, and a variety of support programs aimed at easing the transition, promoting new business development, etc.

While The Atlantic writes that such programs aren't particularly successful ("Moving Incentives Are Overhyped"), I'd argue that it doesn't cost much and it's always good to recruit people with talent to your community.  Of course, one challenge is then to be able to be open to their ideas and be willing to reshape the revitalization agenda accordingly ("Downtown Tulsa resident campaigns for food co-op," 2News Tulsa).

But it's true that not every place has the right conditions to support this.  People look at what Paducah did and say "people can work from anywhere."  But that's the wrong lesson.  Paducah focused on attracting artists who sell the bulk of their work at summer art fairs.  And Paducah is well located in the midwest, with great freeway connections within a day or two of many major fairs such as in Louisville, Ann Arbor, and Suburban Chicago.

---------

Best practice flooding mitigation. I have written about Tulsa's proactive response to its last major flood in 1984, resulting in 14 deaths--the city is centered upon the Arkansas River.  

They created an active disaster mitigation and resilience program, including buying out housing and other buildings located on flood plains ("Some innovative disaster planning initiatives in Tulsa, Santa Fe, San Francisco, and Davenport Iowa").  

Flood waters cover the parking area of River Spirit Casino Resort on the Arkansas River on Friday, May 24, 2019. TOM GILBERT/Tulsa World

Since then they haven't avoided flooding, after all the effects of climate change seem particularly pronounced compared to 1984, but the impact has been significantly reduced because of their previous active steps in disaster planning and management.  

Certainly, no deaths (cf. "2 dead, 20 missing after severe flooding in North Carolina," USA Today).