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Tulsa Drillers: Empty seats at ONEOK Field
It's a paradox: The Tulsa Drillers, our city's minor league baseball team, appear to be in the best financial shape they've ever been and setting attendance records every year. But when I've attended games in recent years, I've been surprised at the large numbers of empty seats. Below is a...
Australia: Cricket
NOTE: The fifth day of the third test match between Australia and Pakistan began at 5:30 pm Tulsa time, Friday, January 6, 2017. You can listen online (free with registration) or watch the ball-by-ball description (no registration required) here. Australia finished its second and final innings late yesterday with a...
John Oliver on taxpayer subsidy of pro sports stadiums
On his HBO show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver provides an entertaining and enlightening encapsulation of America's ridiculous habit of taxpayer subsidies for sports stadiums. MORE: The new Major League Baseball commissioner, perhaps inspired by the NFL holding LA relocation over the heads of existing NFL cities, sees the value...
Busy weekends: Mayfest, music, moms -- and an eclipse
It was a fun but busy weekend with no time for posting here. Friday night involved ferrying my oldest son from playing in Barthelmes Conservatory's spring open concert to singing with the Augustine Christian Academy show choir at the school's high school graduation. While he was busy with that, I...
Vacation 2009: Day 2
Day 2: July 24, 2009, Pacific, Mo. to Columbus, Ohio, via I-44 and I-70, 479.9 mi., 11:30 en route (plus one hour lost to the time change). 11 a.m. was a later start than I'd hoped for, but it was much better than the day before. We sailed through St....
The luxury box bubble bursts
The Wall Street Journal reports that the economic downturn is hurting corporate sources of revenue for sports teams and venues, including luxury boxes, club seats, naming rights, and other forms of sponsorship: In a case of monumentally bad timing, this year three of the biggest names in pro sports --...
The old Tulsa ballpark
An e-mail from Tulsa baseball history expert Wayne McCombs led me to this Digital Ballparks feature on Oiler Park, home of Tulsa minor league baseball from 1934 to 1976. It's a sequence of historic photographs accompanied by text setting out the history and highlights of the park and the players...
How much should a ballpark cost?
Note: I've received word that Thursday morning's Tulsa Development Authority meeting involving Will and Cecilia Wilkins and Novus Homes LLC's exclusive negotiating agreement has been moved to the 10th floor of One Technology Center (the new City Hall). One of the questions raised in my column this week is about...
A round-up of river tax ponderings and imponderables
If the Vision 2025 Sales Tax Overview Committee is as diligent and vigilant a watchdog as we're being told they are, how did they miss noticing that the arena was going to go way over budget when there was time to prevent the crisis? If Hurricane Katrina caused the arena...
Joel Kotkin on civic improvement schemes and city policy
This morning on KFAQ, Gwen Freeman and Chris Medlock interviewed real estate expert and urban critic Joel Kotkin. Last week in the Wall Street Journal, Kotkin wrote a pointed takedown of cities that chase the "Creative Class" with civic improvement schemes -- arenas, convention centers, government-planned entertainment districts, light rail,...
Rolling and bouncing; remembering Bartlesville
Our little one is now six and a half months old. At his six-month checkup back on July 11, he was 17 lbs. 6.5 oz., 26" long, and a 45 1/2 cm. head circumference. It was about that time that we started him on some solid food: oatmeal and rice...
The Knowledge of a London taxi driver
If you have trouble finding your way around the tidy Cartesian grid that defines Tulsa's street network, imagine learning your way around an ancient, complex, and chaotic street network, and keeping that map entirely in your head. From the Transport for London website: All licensed taxi drivers in the Capital...
Reason Las Vegas!
Reason knows how to throw an urban policy conference. The Dynamic Cities Conference is November 4-6 at the Mirage in Las Vegas, and it will feature convention center expert Heywood Sanders, urban critic Joel Kotkin, Logan Darrow Clements, who's behind the plan to protest Kelo v. New London by condemning...
Reviving downtown: the latest misguided attempt?
Sunday's Whirled had a front-page article about the city's plans for downtown east of Detroit and south of the Frisco tracks. (I know, I know -- it's been Burlington Northern for a long time now, but doggone it, the Saint Louis and San Francisco Railroad laid those tracks in 1882...
Edison stadium a dim-bulb idea
The recall campaign is over but yard signs are still sprouting up around midtown Tulsa. The campaign is not aimed at the general electorate, but at the board of Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) and the committee putting together the next school bond issue, slated for the November ballot. A group...
The convention biz -- increasing space chasing shrinking conventions
A friend forwarded this week's update from the Brookings Institute Metropolitan Policy Program, with links to lots of interesting articles about urban policy. The lead article is by Heywood Sanders, the nation's leading expert on the convention industry, and once again, Prof. Sanders has dared to compare the promises made...
Corporate subsidies a "doomed strategy"
Kevin Adams (whose article The Tulsa Time Blues you should read or re-read before you go to the polls) calls our attention to a couple of articles that question the economic development "strategy" which is guiding tomorrow's billion-dollar sales tax vote. Here are the lead paragraphs from a story in...
How NOT to revitalize downtown -- learning from Atlanta
Last week ground was broken on a new downtown destination for Atlanta, the $200 million Georgia Aquarium, to be funded entirely by a donation by Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution used the occasion to take a sober look at the likely impact on downtown Atlanta's vitality: Construction...
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