The city of Tulsa plans to consolidate its street infrastructure and civic engagement offices to improve the quality and efficiency of municipal roadwork.
At a news conference Thursday, Mayor G.T. Bynum said the city will create the Department of City Experience and re-introduce the Public Works Department. The departments will be launched July 1, the start of the city’s new fiscal year.
The departments will be structured as follows:
- The Department of City Experience will contain the City Design Studio, Community Development, the Tulsa Planning Office, the Payor’s Office of Resilience and Equity, Animal Welfare and Neighborhood Inspections
- The Public Works Department will contain Stormwater and Land Management, Traffic Operations, Street Maintenance, Refuse and Recycling and Engineering
The operations included in the two new departments comprise $105.6 million for the current fiscal year, according to city records.
Bynum said he decided to consolidate these departments after listening to residents.
“When you think of what Tulsa’s pay for work on our streets and the inconvenience that they go through when the work is underway, Tulsans should be delighted with the finished product is completed. And yet what I’ve found is that is almost never the case,” Bynum said.
Bynum said residents are not currently adequately told about street projects before they happen. He mentioned one instance where a councilor had to have two weeks’ worth of meetings with residents before the city began construction.
Bynum also said “any city councilor” could point to projects that have been revised after construction due to feedback from residents.
“We just have things in the completely wrong order,” he said.
The consolidation will allow the city to complete road construction projects more efficiently because they’re working together, Bynum said.
While he said the city generally doesn’t involve residents in road construction projects like it should, Bynum said there are examples of his proposed approach working. He pointed to the city realigning Riverside Drive to accommodate The Gathering Place.
“People were engaged on the front end, and you had great designers and community engagement on the front end to build something that citizens wanted,” he said. “That should be the model that we’re aiming for city-wide.”
Bynum hopes improvement for contractors is ‘dramatic’
Bynum announced the restructure less than a week after Association of Oklahoma General Contractors Executive Director Bobby Stem encouraged contractors to not partner with the city for road construction projects. Stem told reporters that contractors were spending more on roadwork than they would in Oklahoma City, and that the city is not easy to work with.
At the news conference, Bynum said he reached out to Stem, and that he wishes he had brought his concerns directly to him. But he also said Stem’s comments speak “to larger issues” that he and council recognize need to be addressed.
“My hope is that this dramatically improves the experience for contractors as well, because the contractors know that they’re going in and building something that a tremendous amount of thought and community engagement has been put into,” Bynum said.
