Tulsa City Council Unanimously Approves Final Vision Plan

Tulsa City Councilors are celebrating after unanimously passing a Vision Tax Plan.

After several days of last-minute changes, the council finally agreed on how to spend the nearly $1 billion of sales tax funds over the next 15 years.

Thursday night’s vote was the easy part, but it took some last-minute scrambling, and, at times, even some heated arguments, to get there.

1/28/2016 Related Story: Task Force Reaches Agreement On Tulsa's Vision Tax Plan

Here's a look at where that $900 million will go:

Public Safety took a large chunk, with $202 million for police and $70 million for fire. The Tulsa Fire Department's funding came under scrutiny earlier this week, with several councilors wondering aloud why TFD needed so much.

And public transit, one of Councilor Blake Ewing's priorities, is on tap to receive $57 million to expand service if, the vote goes through.

More than $127 million will go to improving and beautifying the Arkansas River and the areas around it. The plan includes building two dams with bridges, with councilor and mayoral candidate G.T. Bynum behind the Zink Dam proposal.

One significant last-minute addition to the plan has to do with schools doling out $10 million to Tulsa, Union and Jenks Public Schools, to incentivize new teachers.

Mayor Dewey Bartlett voiced his approval of the council's decisions.

"We'll have at least two new crews fully equipped to fix our streets, fix our potholes, the cracks, maintain the streets so they last longer,” he said. “And the council came up with a lot of different projects, one of which is going to put water back in the river, fixing the dam, without a tax increase. Did I say that before? Without a tax increase."

Sergeant Clay Ballenger with The Tulsa FOP said, "We've had to make a lot of cutbacks over the years. Most citizens have heard about those, from amount of patrol to closing police stations, not being open 24/7, on and on and on. Cutting back detective units and investigations, cutting back on patrol officers, not being able to patrol neighborhoods like we would like because we just go from call to call; all of those things are going to be fixed. This is exciting."

The mayor will sign off on the plan next week and it will be up for a vote in April.