Michael Bates
for City Council
Tulsa District 4
News
Biography
Issues
Endorsements
Maps
Volunteer
Contribute
On the issues:
From Urban Tulsa Weekly,
September 2000
Letter to the Editor
Michael Bates
In last week's Urban Tulsa Weekly, Terry Simonson wrote that the decisions Tulsans will make on Election Day regarding the new Tulsa
Project "will be one of the most important in determining where Tulsa will be in the near future."
The decision will indeed be crucial to our future. On November 7, Tulsans will decide whether to continue our city's 40-year bad habit
-- gambling hundreds of millions of dollars on quick-fix downtown redevelopment fads -- or to reaffirm our 1997 rejection of that
well-intentioned but ineffective approach to downtown revitalization.
No one wishes for a revived downtown more than I do. It's one of the reasons I ran for City Council in 1998, it's why I joined this latest
task force, and it's why -- hard though this may be for some to accept -- I opposed this project the last time it was on the ballot and I
oppose it again.
In my travels I have seen cities where downtown streets bustle with life from early in the morning until late at night. That's what we
are hoping for when we talk about revitalization -- not new buildings, but a place where you find people out and about. I want Tulsa to have
that kind of city magic again. I am too young to have seen it myself, but from older friends and relatives, and from books and articles and
old TV footage, I have seen and heard about the glory days of Tulsa's
downtown. This newspaper, in its first issue, featured a charming cartoon reminiscence of boys on a Saturday afternoon adventure in
downtown in the '50s. To them downtown was a place of magic -- full of excitement, entertainment, and a little intriguing seediness. I
wish downtown could look again like it did in a photograph which graced the cover of a phone directory a few years ago -- Main Street
in the early '50s, lit up with neon. You could look at that picture and imagine the noise of car horns and conversation echoing from
building to building.
But as in so many cities, as people moved to Tulsa's suburban fringes, the shops followed them, and so did the life. Starting in the late
'50s, our well-intentioned civic and business leaders looked for ways to halt the decline. Every few years a new fad was heralded as the
answer. We need more parking, they said, to compete with convenient
parking in the suburbs, so they ripped down block after block of solid, serviceable buildings to make way for parking garages and
asphalt lots. But the decline continued.
Old buildings offend people, they said; people like clean, modern new buildings, they said, so they ripped down block after block in the
name of renewal. They plowed under the birthplace and commercial heart of Tulsa and decapitated Main Street. And yet more stores
closed.
Like the victorious Roman army, which sowed salt in the fields of Carthage to prevent its resurgence, our leaders bulldozed Greenwood.
Greenwood had been rebuilt with toil and tears after its destruction in 1921, to become a lively and vital place again in the '40s and
'50s. But then our leaders ran an expressway through Greenwood's
heart, and cleared most of the rest, erasing all but a token of what had once been a vibrant
community.
People like malls, they said, so they ripped down more buildings to make a shopping mall in the heart of downtown. After a long, painful
decline, the mall closed and became yet another office building.
People like parks and greenspace, so they closed streets and tore down more buildings and built plazas and pedestrian malls. Other than a
rush of people at lunch hour, these places are used by folks with no other place to be. The businesses on the mall, invisible to potential
shoppers in their cars, closed one by one. Soon the pedestrian mall will be removed, in hopes that business will return to Main Street.
Tulsa was one of the last cities to adopt the fad, and
characteristically is one of the last cities to correct its mistake.
The same pattern has played itself out in city after city. Some cities have learned from their mistakes and stepped off the big
project treadmill, but Tulsa, under its unimaginative leadership,
plods on. The convention-center-and-arena fad is now in its second or third reincarnation. It will bring people downtown, they said over 30
years ago, and they tore down homes and small businesses and built an arena and convention center.
And people do come downtown for events,
but they come after they get off work, just in time for the start, grab a bite at a drive-thru window on the way or at a concession stand
in the arena, then rush for the exits at the end, and head straight back home. Even if people stick around downtown, it turns out that
sports arenas don't bring enough people around on a sufficiently
regular basis to provide a sound customer base for a nearby restaurant or shop. Think for a moment: Where is the revitalization generated by
the arena and convention center we already have? What makes us think this time will be different?
If we heed the experience of other cities, we know that it won't be any different. Countless other cities have followed the siren song of
convention centers and sports arenas and have been disappointed. We built it, but they didn't come. How about that. There weren't as
many people as they told us would come, and they didn't stay as long or spend as much as we were promised.
Undaunted, the convention and sports arena consultants say that we didn't build it big enough.
Build it bigger, and they will come. Heywood T. Saunders, professor of Urban Administration at Trinity University in San Antonio, has
written extensively about these consultants' reports, most recently in a 1999 report showing that consultants routinely overestimate
projected economic impact for these projects by a factor of four. (See his report on www.pioneerinstitute.org)
So city after city pours scarce tax dollars into these buildings -- tax dollars to build them, and more tax dollars to keep them open, and
more to recruit concert and convention and sports promoters to use them. The promoters get the use of nice new facilities without paying
a dime toward their construction and paying a pittance toward upkeep -- more profits to take with them when they leave town. (I don't
think those promoters deserve the hundreds of dollars they will take
from my family if this tax passes.)
There is a way to bring downtown back to life, but politicians don't much care for it, because they can't take credit for it. It takes
time. It uses the creativity of countless individuals, doing things
that, taken separately, may seem insignificant. The key is more people living and working in and near downtown. Government can do
small things to encourage the process along, but not much more, not without hurting the regenerative processes at work. Some of the right
things are finally being done in Tulsa, such as encouraging new residential development in downtown, by offering incentives and
removing regulatory barriers. Private development is happening everywhere, and the City is encouraging new development in east
downtown, in Brady Village, and at 6th and Peoria.
At a national level, visionary leaders like Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist are showing us the way, and in the 1998 book, "Cities Back
from the Edge: New Life for Downtown", Roberta Brandes Gratz documents dozens of cities where this truly grass-roots, custom-fitted
philosophy has been tried successfully, and tells of the countless failures of the Big Project approach.
Some of these modest but useful steps for revitalization were suggested at the task force's public meetings. Some were even
included in the task force report -- simple but important improvements that would have helped along the development already happening north
of the tracks downtown. But our good councilors, besieged by the special interest lobbyists, dropped all of those ideas in favor of the
same old package.
The problem with this package isn't that it's merely a tiny step in the right direction. The problem is that it is an enormous step in
the wrong direction. $263 million will be spent in the name of downtown revitalization, but the impact will be negligible if not
negative. Will it encourage people to live and work downtown if we
force useful, everyday sorts of businesses -- a day care, auto services, a cafe, clothing and furniture stores -- to leave downtown
to make way for a sports arena?
There are plenty of good reasons to vote against the rehashed Tulsa Project. It's half the project for twice the sales tax, and sales tax
is already too high. The operation and maintenance costs will be a drain on the general city budget. There's nothing in it to make Tulsa
more attractive to tourists or even to locals.
Still, if you love downtown as I do, you may be tempted. You may think this Tulsa Project is the last best hope for Tulsa's battered
downtown. Don't fret. Good things are beginning to happen downtown, no thanks at all to the devotees of downtown redevelopment fads. If
we have patience and imagination, and if we have the courage to get off the Big Project treadmill, the result will be a downtown not
merely rebuilt, but reborn. Do downtown a big favor and vote "No!"
Midtown leaders endorse
Michael Bates
"... I have come to respect Mike as an individual of high integrity with an excellent knowledge of
the internal workings of City Hall. He is a modest man, ardently concerned for our neighborhoods and for the better welfare of Tulsa. Articulate and knowledgeable, yet at the same time effective in a soft spoken manner, I believe Mike to
be the kind of individual we need as a spokesperson for our neighborhoods and our city."
-- Ursula Mueller, Sunrise Terrace and Midtown Neighborhood Alliance leader
"I've worked with Mike on a number of city issues. He brings
intelligence, knowledge and enthusiasm to the work of solving problems. Mike
will be great for Tulsa and great for District 4. He has earned my support
and my vote."
-- Don Burdick, Government Affairs Chairman, Central Park Condominiums