Word has reached me that Tulsa City Attorney Martha Rupp Carter has submitted her resignation effective July 1, and will be spending most of the next month using accumulated vacation time. This is great news for our city, and a great opportunity for Mayor Bill LaFortune.
Rupp Carter, appointed to the City Attorney's office by former Mayor Susan Savage, had a knack for getting the City into expensive legal trouble. The list of decisions which either got the City sued or could have is a long one: handling of outside legal support in the Black Officers' lawsuit, the 71st & Harvard ruling against the neighborhood's protest petition, allowing ex-Councilor David Patrick to remain in office despite the fact that he had not been lawfully elected to a new term, speaking to the press about election allegations against Councilor Roscoe Turner. The City Attorney's office under her direction always seemed to be working in the interests of some person or persons other than the ordinary citizens of this city.
Some City Councilors tried to give her the heave-ho a few years ago, when she authorized additional legal services to be performed by an Atlanta law firm in the Black Officers' lawsuit, without obtaining budget authorization for the expenditure, in apparent violation of the Oklahoma Municipal Budget Act. She dodged a bullet at the time, and those Councilors, who were doing their job to hold a city officer accountable for the expenditure of taxpayer money, were roundly condemned by the Tulsa Whirled and the rest of the Cockroach Coalition. There is word that an OSBI investigation of Rupp Carter indicates that those Councilors were correct, and that the possible release of that report was a motivating factor in her resignation.
When I and many others supported Bill LaFortune for Mayor, we never expected him to agree with us on all points, but we did expect him to clean out certain holdovers from the previous administration who had been leading our city down the wrong path. We haven't seen much action in that regard, but Rupp Carter's resignation is a great opportunity, and who is appointed by the Mayor to replace her will speak volumes about his direction for the remainder of his term.
