TULSA, Okla. — The City of Tulsa held a community meeting to inform property owners about proposed zoning regulations for the 71st Street shopping corridor on Monday.
The City of Tulsa referred to the zoning regulations along the 71st Street shopping corridor as “extremely complicated” and called this an effort to try and simplify it.
The meeting was a chance to give nearly 800 property owners who were sent letters by the city a chance to learn more about the city’s plans for updating the zoning regulations.
Nathan Foster from the Tulsa Planning Office said this is all an effort to simplify to zoning regulation process.
“Today we have an abundance of surface parking lots, very minimal landscaping that can be done, and so these new standards will help modernize the standards that are in the corridor,” Foster said.
District 8 City Councilor Phil Lakin said he hopes the proposed changes will make the process easier for businesses.
“We know there are businesses that want to do re-development, but they cannot afford it or they cannot take the time to do it because of the laws and the zoning regulations that we have in place,” he said.
The current commercial corridor, which stretches from Memorial to Garnett, is made up of a patchwork of zoning regulations for individual properties that were adopted beginning in the 1970s, according to the city.
Foster said a TIF District was adopted at the time that Scheel’s was proposed for the Woodland Hills Mall.
“We’re going capture sales tax from that development, we’re going to re-invest it directly in that corridor which ultimately will lead to new things like new streetscaping, lighting, and sidewalks and standards that we don’t see today on that corridor,” he said.
He said the city will be directly investing right back into 71st Street. The Scheel’s store now under construction at Woodland Hills Mall will also include hundreds of new trees and landscaping.
He said plans also call for overhauling the planted medians along 71st Street.
The revitalization effort does not address traffic flow in the busy shopping corridor.
The public hearing on this issue is set for Wednesday, Oct. 18 at 1 p.m. at Tulsa City Hall in Council Chambers.