BatesLine

Not Tulsa, of course; Kitsap County, Washington:

Authorities are looking for a burglary suspect they said was identified through DNA left on a beer can at a crime scene in 2005.

Prosecutors in Kitsap County have charged Curtis Kees Napoleon, a 20-year-old North Kitsap man, in thefts of over $30,000 in missing appliances, boat motors and other items that disappeared around Dec. 20, 2005 from four residences.

Deputies found a can of Miller Lite beer and later asked Port Gamble S'Klallam Tribal Police to request people of interest in the case to submit voluntary saliva samples.

The State Patrol Crime Lab eventually made a match, deputies said.

(Hat tip to reader S. Lee.)

The Tulsa Police Department doesn't investigate burglaries as a matter of policy. It may not be an official policy, but it seems to be a de facto policy. They regard burglaries as an insurance matter and their role as one of documenting the loss. You might call the approach "no-fault burglary." It's a force of nature, apparently: Sometimes the hail damages your roof, sometimes a stranger enters your house and takes your stuff.

In 1999, our old home was burglarized while my wife and son were at our new house for inspections. They came home to find a girl's bicycle in the driveway and the front door open. They were afraid to go in for fear that someone was still in there. I came to the house, and we called the police. It took a few hours for them to show up. One officer checked the house to be sure no one was in side.

The burglar had apparently come in a back window. My wife had been in a hurry to get to the inspection and had forgotten to set the alarm. He had been after easily portable valuables. He dumped my wife's earring box and rummaged through drawers. He stole a camcorder and 35mm camera (with photos and video of my son's 3rd birthday party), a portable CD player and CDs, some house keys on a ring inside the house, and a checkbook.

Other officers came a bit later and talked to us. We left things in their state of disarray, not wanting to disturb any physical evidence. We asked about the girl's bike. Probably was taken from a burglary earlier in the day. "Do you need it for evidence?" No, keep it for your kid or give it away. "Aren't you going to dust for fingerprints?" No.

They handed us a phone headset that they had found at another nearby burglary. It was ours. So there were indications that the same person or persons had robbed three homes in the same day, taking a bike from the first house and abandoning it at our house, then taking a number of items at our house and accidentally dropping one of them at the next house. And yet the officers made it clear they were only there to make a record of the burglary and to provide us a report to take to our insurance company.

We had the locks changed, called the bank to stop payment on the checks that had been stolen. We tracked down the serial numbers of the camera, camcorder, and CD player, and filed a supplemental report with the police, thinking they would be put on the list that pawn shops use to check for stolen property, hoping it might help the police to catch the crooks.

Then one of our stolen checks was received by the bank. (The bank didn't notify me immediately -- it showed up in the next statement.) Someone had written a check to Pizza Hut delivery at 49th and Peoria. I requested an image of the check from the bank. They had forged my signature -- not even close. The phone number from which the order had been called in had been written on the check by the delivery man.

I notified the detective assigned to the case. Here was a lead. At the very least, we knew that someone had committed a crime by trying to pass a stolen check.

The detective was uninterested. He said that wouldn't be enough to tie someone to the burglary and get a conviction. Well, of course not, but surely it was enough to justify at least visiting the residence where the pizza had been delivered and the stolen check had been offered in payment. Nope.

I'm not sure why TPD doesn't pursue burglars more vigorously. Perhaps it's because they aren't prosecuted vigorously. Perhaps it's a lack of police manpower. Perhaps it's a mistaken philosophy of policing. I've heard enough stories from others to know that it isn't a matter of the individual cops not caring. The decision was made above their pay grade.

Whatever the reason, it needs to change.

It seems to me that some of these burglaries could end in home invasion, assault, and even murder. Some of these burglars could be tied to crime syndicates. "Broken windows" theory says that when you start to enforce lesser laws, the rate of more serious crime goes down.

I wonder if insurance companies keep tabs on which cities have the highest rate of burglary or the highest rate of unsolved burglary cases. We get an insurance discount for having a monitored alarm system. Not that I want my premiums to go up, but it seems reasonable that insurance companies would raise rates on policyholders in cities that are effectively sanctuaries for burglary.

Tonight at their regular 6:00 p.m. meeting, the Tulsa City Council will decide whether to authorize the Tulsa Public Facilities Authority (TPFA) to borrow the money -- $76 million -- to buy One Technology Center and to pay for consolidating city offices in that building. Because the financing will be sole-source -- seller-financed -- it will require seven affirmative votes from the city council to pass.

Proponents of the move talk about how a shiny new City Hall would improve the image of the City of Tulsa. I agree that the image of the City is important, but the true image of the City isn't shaped by the appearance of city government's headquarters building, which few of Tulsa's nearly 400,000 residents and few of our visitors will ever see.

The image of Tulsa's city government is not to be found in the City Hall building. Our citizens and visitors see it in our crime statistics, in the smoothness (or lack thereof) of our streets, in whether our pools are in good repair and open for use, in whether our building codes are enforced, in whether our parks are mowed. The public interacts with city government on our streets and in our parks and neighborhoods, and those places, not City Hall, shape their perception of Tulsa as a place to live, visit, and do business.

This deal should be measured by one standard: Will it leave the City with more money or less money available to fund the basic functions of city government?

Based on the numbers in the Staubach Company's report and the analysis of those numbers by Councilor Bill Martinson, there is a high risk that the move will leave the City of Tulsa with less money for police and parks and streets. If one of the current tenants leaves or even reduces its presence, if we are unable to find a replacement tenant who will pay the same price, if rental revenue is less than debt service on the loan, the City will have to make up the difference out of its operating budget. This deal would make the City of Tulsa a competitor in the commercial real estate industry, rolling the dice in a risky business, and using our mortgage money to place the bet.

To shift metaphors, this deal is a house of cards, and if any one of several contingencies fails to occur, the whole thing collapses.

The only facts that matter are these numbers -- how much it costs to operate our current facilities, how much it will cost to operate One Technology Center, how much it will cost to repay the loan on OTC, and how much we are likely to be paid in rent from third-party tenants.

The Council has not been given a full and detailed accounting of the cost of operating our current facilities. This information is surely available in our accounting system -- how much we pay custodial staff, how much we spend on utilities, the cost of repair projects -- based on actual expenditures over the last few fiscal years. Instead, Staubach prepared a sheet estimating cost per square foot for broad categories -- utilities, repairs, security, etc. -- and then multiplied by the sum of those per square feet numbers by the size of our buildings. The $24 million claimed as deferred maintenance costs are buried somewhere in Staubach's per-square-foot figures.

The Council has not been provided with a list of deferred maintenance items, the cost of each one, and the likelihood of needing to fund those items in the near future. Each such item should have a basis of estimate, explaining the work to be done and the manpower and material required. Instead, in response for their request for a detailed list, the Council was given the names of the items and a single number covering the cost of all of them.

With this lack of detail, it would be easy for Staubach to pick numbers for estimates that would make staying in the existing facilities seem to be more expensive than moving. And don't forget that Staubach gets paid more if the deal goes through, so they'd have an incentive to make the existing facilities look as expensive as possible.

The Council should not approve this deal without an accurate apples-to-apples comparison of costs showing that the move will be less expensive in the near term.

MORE: Jeff Shaw has a better idea for One Technology Center.

Laugh of the Day: "'I'm going to live in Tulsa the rest of my life,' [Kathy] Taylor says." Home is where the homestead exemption is.

Once again I'm later than I should be in getting this linked....

This week's column in Urban Tulsa Weekly is about the special Council meeting held on Saturday morning, June 23, to discuss Mayor Taylor's plan to move municipal offices from the current City Hall and other locations to One Technology Center at 1st and Cincinnati. Originally planned to be an executive session, councilors (with my encouragement) chose to discuss as much of the proposal as possible in open session and to defer any confidential matters until the end of the meeting. The meeting left councilors more doubtful than ever about whether the move would be good for city finances in the near term.

I left one interesting facet of the discussion out of the column: Councilor Martinson said he didn't think the Staubach Company had given due consideration to two other options for consolidating city offices: build-to-suit on land already owned by the City or by the Tulsa Development Authority, or a purchase-leaseback arrangement, whereby a private investor would take on the risk of finding tenants for the extra space in the building.

A possible location for build-to-suit would be on TDA-owned land near the Hartford Building between 1st and 2nd, Greenwood and Hartford. Martinson pointed out that a building custom-made and right-sized for city purposes, including requirements for easy public access to certain offices, might well be less expensive, and would be less risky, than a deal that required the city to attract and keep tenants for excess space.

A Whirled story about the plan quoted Martinson's analogy illustrating the problems with buying more building than we need:

"A gallon of milk is a lot cheaper per ounce than a quart. But if you only need a quart and the rest of it goes sour, you've ended up paying more money than what you really needed for the amount of milk you're going to consume."

Pat Fox responds to a lament about the demise of the Civic Center:

From an urban design perspective, Tulsa's Civic [Center] Plaza is a typical example of late 50's/60's thinking on public architecture. Government center in Boston is another example that is almost universally derided as an urban planning and urban design disaster. Far from providing a democratic, pedestrian friendly gathering place, these plazas actually discourage free assembly.

From the brutalist architecture of the convention center, to the tilt up aggregate walls of the police and municipal courts building, the civic plaza is a most unappealing place to sit, walk, or be. The library and the Francis Campbell Council building are it's most redeeming features, but the library is long outdated for functions of a modern library. City hall's public entrance is not on civic plaza as you'd expect, but below "ground" level in a dark, musty garage. The sloped sides of the planters prevent any resting or sitting, the fountain is empty because it leaks, and the county courthouse has so much mold in it, one of the judges who presides there considered filing suit recently. By the way, a large portion of our "paper" county records are kept in the basement of that building. If the Belvedere flooded because of the water table...you get the point.

I know firsthand that Boston's Government Center is a planning disaster, one of the least inviting public places in the world. The ultimate test of a public place is not whether there are people there in the architect's concept sketches, but whether people (normal people) want to linger there.

The concept of a six-block Tulsa Civic Center was an enormous mistake. Closing 5th Street to traffic only compounded the error. And when you realize that it replaced a tree-lined mixed-use area with three-story apartment buildings -- well, planners back then didn't appreciate the role that nearby residential areas played in the health of a central business district.

I recently photographed most of the articles in the Tulsa Civic Center vertical file at the Central Library and posted the photos on Flickr. The file contains news clippings mainly from the 1950s about the selection of the area (in 1952), what was there before the civic center, the area's appraisal and acquisition, the failure of bond issues to build the city's facilities, early concepts, including a 14,000 seat arena and a new facility for the Gilcrease collection, an explanation for the decision to deviate from the original award-winning plan, a protest from downtown merchants over the closing of 5th Street, complaints from patrons of the arts about the decision to defer construction of a new performance space, and, finally, a brochure from 1969 showing the new City Hall and Police Courts building.

My UTW column this week was also about the proposal to move City Hall to One Technology Center at 100 S. Cincinnati. Most of the questions I posed were raised in one form or another, and most were answered, although I won't say that my fears were allayed. (Don Himelfarb couldn't answer my question about the true operating costs of the first year, operating in both old and new facilities.)

I had two related feature stories in the issue, a report on the unearthing and unveiling of the buried car, and a look back at the Tulsarama! celebration in 1957 -- it was a huge city-wide celebration, plagued by at least as much rain as we've seen so far this year. It was much more than burying a time capsule and a car.

I'm pleased with the way the Tulsarama! story came out, but it isn't the comprehensive Tulsa 1957 story I wanted to do. I just ran out of time and couldn't get my arms around it. I have gathered a ton of material, looking through old city directories and planning documents, and receiving the reminiscences of Tulsans who were around in 1957. The article I wrote just scratches the surface, and I intend to provide more here and hopefully in future feature stories. The story of the major comprehensive planning effort that began in 1957 is a story that we need to know as we begin assembling yet another comprehensive plan.

Also in the current issue, Brian Ervin has a story on the difference of opinion about how many police officers Tulsa needs, with the Mayor and her interim police chief on one side and the Fraternal Order of Police on the other side.

UPDATE: Regarding the Belvedere, reader Richard Randall offered this interesting (and frightening) perspective:

We wonder why all of the bridges in Tulsa (and Oklahoma) are falling apart. Most of them were designed and built around the same time as the vault (give or take some years) by some of the same engineers. It seems to show just how well they designed and built some things back then and today, when it is built by the cheapest bidder. Growing up my dad had always talked about how bad the car would look when it came out (He worked at his dads construction company at the time the vault was built). He knew that the vault would fill up with water, by the design they used. Had they looked to the oil industry, they would have learned that water will find a way into anything. The best thing to use would have been a 1 to 2-inch steel box welded shut and encased in concrete. This would have withstood the fifty years. They did seem to grasp that idea a little bit. The time capsule was steel, (not sure if it was welded shut). Everything in it was in great condition.

Not only that, but the same engineers were probably responsible for designing the Civic Center's leaky and crumbling subterranean garage. (Maybe not crumbling any more. I haven't heard a report of falling concrete in some time.) One of the interesting facts that emerged in today's Council meeting about the proposed City Hall move -- about $16 million of that $24 million in deferred maintenance is related to the underground parking garage.

Actually, it isn't secret. It has been officially posted, but it seems to have been scheduled for a time (Saturday morning at 8:30, in room 201 of the City Hall tower) that would be unlikely to draw spectators, and it appears that part or possibly most of the meeting will be conducted behind closed doors in executive session. Here's the agenda:

Unless otherwise noted, the Council may discuss and/or review the following items:

01. Discussion regarding the proposed consolidation of City offices at One Technology Center located at 100 S. Cincinnati Ave. 07-529-3

02. Council may consider a motion to enter Executive Session pursuant Title 25 O.S. Section 307 (B)(3) to discuss the purchase of the One Technology Building. 07-529-4

03. Leave Executive Session regarding the discussion related to the proposed consolidation of City offices at One Technology Center. 07-529-5

04. Adjournment

The cited section of law includes the following item in a list of permitted purposes for executive sessions of public bodies:

Discussing the purchase or appraisal of real property;

The law further provides in subsection D:

An executive session for the purpose of discussing the purchase or appraisal of real property shall be limited to members of the public body, the attorney for the public body, and the immediate staff of the public body. No landowner, real estate salesperson, broker, developer, or any other person who may profit directly or indirectly by a proposed transaction concerning real property which is under consideration may be present or participate in the executive session.

While the discussion of the purchase or appraisal of One Technology Center is a valid reason for going into executive session, I would argue (and I hope that the councilors and other members of the press argue) that discussing the total costs of moving to OTC, the estimate and comparison of operating costs in the current facilities and at OTC, the sources of funds for a move to OTC, and any other aspect of moving city offices to a new building are not within the legally permitted reasons for an executive session and should be discussed in open session.

UPDATE, Saturday 1:00 p.m.: I was there this morning, and they spent three hours in open session covering a wide range of issues. I was proud of the job the City Council did this morning. Vice Chairman John Eagleton did a fine job of keeping the meeting on track. (Chairman Roscoe Turner had been scheduled to be out of town before the meeting was called.) Councilor Bill Martinson presented his analysis of the financial situation along with a list of questions drawn from his years in the real estate business. Every councilor had some significant question or point to make about the financial analysis presented by the Mayor's office. More details later, and in my column.

You know the story that ran on the front page Sunday's Whirled about how Mayor Kathy Taylor is going to solve downtown Tulsa's problem with vagrants?

Urban Tulsa Weekly's Brian Ervin had that story two weeks ago, and he included the significant detail that the downtown YMCA's residence is going to be forced to close in 2010 because of expensive new city fire sprinkler regulations, eliminating 300 single-room occupancy spaces.

Just sayin'.

How did the Whirled's P. J. Lassek come up with this first paragraph:

Consolidating several city facilities including City Hall into the One Technology Center appears to be a good deal, seven of the nine City Councilors said Friday.

from this set of comments, found in the same story:

District 1, Jack Henderson: "Councilor Jack Henderson said he needs to talk to more city employees because of concerns raised about the open office environment in the new building, which would mean workers might have less space and privacy. 'I think when all the dust settles, it will probably be a good deal.'"

District 2, Rick Westcott: "Councilor Rick Westcott said the city faces a decision -- either perform $12 million that is funded out of $24 million in deferred maintenance on the current aging City Hall building, or find an alternative. 'This alternative seems like an idea that makes sense,' he said. Westcott said he also plans to seek input from real estate experts. 'This alternative seems like an idea that makes sense.'"

District 3, Roscoe Turner: "Councilor Roscoe Turner said he doesn't know what he thinks about the deal. 'I have a lot of concerns to focus on other than moving City Hall. I can understand getting out of this building with the mold problems and all. I really haven't given it much thought. I really don't care about it.'"

District 4, Maria Barnes: "Councilor Maria Barnes said relocating City Hall has not been on her radar. She said she needs to determine what the city is getting into."

District 5, Bill Martinson: Was out of town, missed briefing.

District 6, Dennis Troyer: Was out of town, missed briefing.

District 7, John Eagleton: "Councilor John Eagleton said he needs time to digest the figures so he can make a decision. He said he already has some questions he needs answered. "

District 8, Bill Christiansen: "Councilor Bill Christiansen said the proposal 'sounds like a great business deal, but I think it will be a hard sell to my constituents who are still waiting for basic services. Most people don't realize that we're a fund-based city. They just know we don't have good streets, and they don't have sewer lines. Now we're going to go out and buy another building,' he said. Christiansen said he isn't saying he's against it at this point."

District 9, Cason Carter: "If this decision ends up saving taxpayers money, I think it's
a good one.... Right now, it's too early to tell."

My tally is seven who say they have concerns or questions that need to be addressed, and two that couldn't be reached. Was this a case of the Whirled putting their preferred spin in the lead paragraph and hoping no one would read the body of the article?

See Dubya tipped me off to this story in the New York Times about New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's anti-gun-rights crusade, and Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor gets a mention for her involvement in Bloomberg's group:

“As a new mayor, I’ve been able to talk to other mayors who have had similar experiences with violent crime,” said Kathy Taylor of Tulsa, Okla., a longtime N.R.A. member who said she does not see a contradiction between her support of gun rights and her work on the gun coalition. She views the coalition as a law enforcement effort to protect her constituents, not as an attempt to diminish the legal right to own a gun.

Ms. Taylor, a Democrat, said she had picked up methods for recognizing and controlling gang activity.

That's nice, but you could get the same thing from, say, the National Conference of Mayors, and it wouldn't require you to join an anti-gun-rights group.

The City Council ought to at least ask her to defend her involvement in this group. Other mayors left the coalition once they discovered that its focus was on changing laws to keep records on legal purchases of guns.

And just how long is her "long-time" NRA membership? Did she join when she decided to become a politician, to immunize herself from criticism on gun rights issues?

Zingo's dismantling is almost complete, and Bell's Amusement Park is about to vanish from their long-time location on the Tulsa County Fairgrounds. Bell's paid the most rent of any Fairgrounds tenant, but despite that, the park's lease was not renewed and county officials claimed to have no plans for redeveloping the land.

This week in Urban Tulsa Weekly, I ask whether the U. S. National Arabian and Half-Arabian Championship Horse Show is the real reason that Bell's was given the boot and whether trading a 50 year Tulsa tradition for a lucrative but temporary event was a smart move for taxpayers.

By the way, I used a number in the story of $20 million, which I recalled hearing cited by Expo Square officials as the cost of improvements made to attract and accommodate the Arabian Horse Show. I called Expo Square to confirm that number, and the comptroller went down the list and came up with a number of $15 million. Unfortunately, his response came too late for UTW's deadline.

And here's a link to last week's column on the City Council's vote to authorize Tulsa police officers to verify the immigration status of anyone who is taken into custody on felony or misdemeanor charges.

The intervention by Congressman John Sullivan and Senators Coburn and Inhofe seems to have given the Council the backing they needed to take up this issue. Here you can read a letter from Sullivan to Mayor Kathy Taylor prior to the Council vote, and here is one from after the vote, urging her to implement the resolution.

Some further notes on local law enforcement and illegal immigration

In a letter to the head of ICE, Sullivan repeats his call for expediting the Sheriff's Office application for 287(g) status:

I believe that a 287(g) designation, which would allow for the cross deputization of Tulsa County Sherriff’s deputies and jail personnel, would help to mitigate these problems by ensuring that Oklahoma law enforcement personnel have the authority, training, and tools they need to report and detain criminal aliens in the course of their regular duty. If implemented in Tulsa, the 287(g) program would act as a force multiplier for ICE and help protect our communities from terrible incident like the one mentioned above.

Nashville police recently obtained 287(g) status. This case is one of the reasons they pursued it vigorously:

Garcia was charged with two counts of vehicular homicide while intoxicated and evading arrest. Court officials said he has reached a deal with prosecutors and will plead guilty today, the same day the trial was scheduled to begin. His lawyer, Assistant Metro Public Defender Glenn Dukes, did not return a call seeking comment.

Garcia is being held at the Metro Jail under an immigration hold, which means he'll be turned over to federal authorities after any criminal sentence he might serve.

But Garcia was well known to law enforcement before the fatal accident.

County records show that he had been booked into the Metro Jail on at least 14 different occasions since 1997.

Besides the DUI cases, he had been charged with domestic assault, leaving the scenes of accidents, driving on a revoked or suspended license, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, theft, failing to have insurance and driving with an open container.

On at least one occasion, local authorities said, Garcia was flagged by federal authorities and deported, only to return and resume his streak of arrests.

The other times, Garcia went to court, was jailed for some period and released. Sheriff's officials said they routinely sent notification to federal immigration authorities that they had booked a foreign-born inmate.

Nashville hopes to replicate the success of 287(g) in Charlotte, N.C.:

In the seven-month period following the implementation of its 287(g) immigration enforcement program, Charlotte, N.C. saw significant decreases in the number of Hispanics arrested for Driving Under the Influence (DUI), the total number of DUI-related arrests among Hispanic persons and the amount of Hispanic gang-related crime, law enforcement personnel there said.

In the program’s first nine months, Charlotte’s specially trained sheriffs identified 1,520 arrestees as having entered the country illegally.

All were marked for deportation back to one of the 31 different countries — mostly Central and South American — from which those 1,520 individuals came, Mecklenburg County Sheriff Jim Pendergraph told WFAE (Charlotte) talk radio last month.

And a full 20 percent of the foreign-born persons who were brought into the jail and subsequently identified though 287(g) had been arrested for drunken driving, Pendergraph said.

At the same time, a statistical analysis by the Sheriff’s Office shows that the number of Hispanic-related DUI incidents and arrests fell sharply in the months following the beginning of 287(g).

From 2005 – when sheriff’s deputies had to request an arrestee’s immigration information from a federal database in Vermont, as they still have to do in Nashville – to 2006, the number of Hispanic persons arrested for DUI decreased by 26 percent.

Additionally, the number of overall DUI-related arrests of Hispanic persons decreased by 63 percent – from 1,379 to 508 – during the same period.

Thanks to a helpful reader, I managed to find a cached version of the crime position paper that had been on Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor's campaign website prior to the 2006 election. Just in case it vanishes from there, I've posted the whole thing below, in the extended entry. It would be interesting to know from police officers and other insiders how many of these proposals have been put into motion.

I can still find no sign of Taylor's campaign commercials. If you happened to capture any of them, please contact me at blog at batesline dot com.

UPDATE 2006/05/28 10:30 pm: A reader with inside knowledge of Tulsa Police Department operations e-mailed his point-by-point review of Taylor's plan -- what's been implemented and what hasn't. For ease of comparison, I've added his review below each point.

Also (hat tip to MeeCiteeWurkor), the FOP local has a page devoted to tracking Taylor's campaign promises regarding crime. I'll include their evaluation as of today below each section.

The situation with the cameras ought to be easy and inexpensive to remedy. A simple digital camera ought to be standard equipment in every squad car.

This week in UTW, I'm writing about Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor's vanished campaign promises and her failure to deliver on one of them in particular: a more collaborative relationship with the City Council. Her refusal to keep them in the loop about the hiring of an interim and a permanent police chief, her use of private dollars for public actions (like the recruitment of a new chief) to try to circumvent the Open Records act, and her unilateral decisions to commit Tulsa to radical positions on gun control and anthropogenic global warming with which most Tulsans disagree.

Two weeks ago, Kathy Taylor became the 500th mayor to sign the U. S. Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement, which you can read in PDF form here, and you can read more about the agreement's development on the website of Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels. And here is the Climate Protection page on the U. S. Conference of Mayors website. Taylor's action came without any consultation with the City Council.

And here's a belated link to the previous week's column about the last-minute agreement reached on Fairgrounds annexation, negotiated by Taylor behind the Council's back, and the need for the Council to defend its institutional prerogatives for the sake of checks and balances in local government. In the same column, I also covered an apology by a Tulsa Whirled reporter to the Tulsa Minuteman Project for underestimated their numbers at a Cinco de Mayo counter-rally, and I make my recommendations for Absolute Best of Tulsa Spiritual Leader and Best Family Fun Spot.

MORE: Here's an interesting thread on a national police and law enforcement forum about the Tulsa Police Department and Taylor's criteria for a new chief. The pseudonymous officer posting there claims Taylor is only looking at female candidates. If true, it would be another example of Taylor putting left-wing politics ahead of the public interest.

Tulsa Police Department's "don't ask" policy regarding illegal aliens is creating a vicious cycle -- fewer reports of crimes by illegal aliens means a perception that Federal support isn't needed.

May 24, 2007

City of Tulsa
200 Civic Center
Tulsa, Oklahoma 74103

Dear Tulsa City Council,

We firmly believe that a change in Tulsa Police Department’s (TPD) “hands off” policy in dealing with illegal immigration is a vital step towards protecting Tulsa from criminal illegal aliens. We are writing to encourage you to adopt a proposal that would permit TPD to ask for proof of citizenship on all suspected illegal aliens encountered by TPD officers in the course of their regular duty. This policy change should also request that anyone who is found to be unlawfully present in the United States by TPD be reported to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

As you are aware, Mayor Taylor recently introduced a proposal to change TPD’s current illegal immigration policy, which unfortunately would limit the criminal offenses for which TPD officers can call the Department of Homeland Security’s Law Enforcement Support Center (LESC) to report immigration violations. By only requiring officers to report illegal aliens who commit felonies, this proposal would prohibit the ability of TPD officers from reporting immigration violations of individuals involved in offenses such as DUI’s, hit and run accidents, simple assault, carrying a concealed weapon without a permit, or shoplifting, just to name a few. We urge you to reject this proposal.

In order to bring more federal resources to Tulsa, more calls must be placed to LESC reporting immigration violations; they can be reached by calling (802) 872-6060. ICE has repeatedly told us that the Tulsa area has low numbers of illegal alien apprehensions by local law enforcement because proof of citizenship is often not asked for and not reported to ICE, thus depressing the perceived number of criminal illegal aliens residing in our communities. By allowing TPD to report all immigration violations to ICE during every incident with illegal aliens, this will bolster our case for a permanent ICE office and presence in Tulsa, to help alleviate the strain on our communities, and local law enforcement budgets. TPD is one of the largest police agencies in the state and the simple fact is that, without their help in reporting immigration violations to ICE, Tulsa can expect to have difficulty getting a permanent ICE presence and the increased federal resources we so desperately need.

Clearly, we welcome those who wish to come to our country to pursue the American dream through legal measures. America is a nation built by immigrants, who are vital to our culture and society. It is important to note that we are not asking for the Tulsa police to engage in racial profiling. We reject racial profiling as a means to enforce immigration law at all levels of government.

Again, we encourage you to approve this important policy change to permit the TPD to ask for proof of citizenship on all suspected illegal aliens encountered by them, as well as report those violations to ICE. Together we can make an increased ICE presence in Tulsa a reality.

Sincerely,

John Sullivan
Member of Congress

James Inhofe
United States Senator

Dr. Tom Coburn
United States Senator

You can register your opinion with your Councilor by dialing 596-192X or e-mailing distX@tulsacouncil.org, where the X is the district number.

From the Mayor's Office to city employees:

I am pleased to announce today the selection of David Bostrom to serve as Interim Police Chief for the City of Tulsa. He will serve in this capacity beginning immediately and until I complete my review of applications and select a permanent chief. I will be making this announcement public this morning at a press conference, but I wanted to let you know prior to that announcement.

David is coming to us with outstanding credentials and will be moving from Wilmington Delaware. He has served in law enforcement for over 35 years and his career includes command roles with the City of Wilmington, Delaware and 23 years with the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C.

I am very proud of our Tulsa Police Department and all that they have done to help reduce crime in our community. I have briefed David on the professionalism and qualities of all of our city employees and the many initiatives our police officers have worked to implement. Acting Chief McCrory and the command staff has met with David as well to bring him up to speed on the structure and operations at the TPD.

I want to personally thank Chief Mark McCrory for his service as acting Chief since the retirement of Chief Been. He has served with honor during a challenging time and I sincerely appreciate all of his efforts.

Thank you for all you do to support our city public safety officers and I hope you join with me and Chief McCrory in welcoming David Bostrom to Tulsa.

Sincerely,

Kathy Taylor
Mayor

MORE: From a quick Google, it appears that Bostrom is the former Public Safety Director for the City of Wilmington, Del., and that he left that post in 2000 after a newly elected mayor declined to rehire him.

This column from the Wilmington News Journal by Al Mascitti suggests that Bostrom was hired to deal with a rise in gang-related shootings, and that he tried to implement some form of community policing, but couldn't get the support of the police department, and the mayor that hired him didn't back him up:

There is no connection between a public opinion survey about Wilmington police and the news that David Bostrom will leave his city public safety post. But there should have been.

That Bostrom will depart with his boss, Mayor James H. Sills Jr., is no surprise. He's an outsider, brought here from Washington during Sills' second term, and never had a prayer of building a power base in City Hall....

Bostrom, to his credit, quickly realized the rancorous relations between the cops and the black community posed a greater long-term threat than the drug-related gunfire.

So he tried to institute community policing - a system of strengthening ties between officers and residents credited with reducing crime in such cities as Boston and Washington.

He might as well have tried breeding an attack opossum. His plans for six neighborhood "mini-stations" were foiled at every turn. Though it might be rent by problems with labor and race relations, there's one point on which everyone in the Wilmington Police Department agreed: It's safer to hunker in the bunker at Third and Walnut streets.

Mayor-in-waiting Jim Baker has indicated he intends to let them have their way on this point, and why not? He will have enough battles waiting when he takes office - why tick off the police?

Bostrom might have fared better with backing from Sills, but that would have constituted special treatment from this administration. In eight years Sills never learned how to back away from his liabilities, let alone back up his assets.

In the end, with nothing else to do, Bostrom was reduced to measuring the public's perception of its safety. The $30,000 University of Delaware study found slightly more people felt safer at night in their neighborhoods in 1999 than in 1998. Fittingly, the increase wasn't considered statistically significant.

A story about the new mayor's decision not to rehire Bostrom tells more about his background and the controversy with the police department:

Bostrom said he was not surprised when he received his letter. Baker had said during the campaign that he likely would not keep Bostrom as public safety director.

Mayor James H. Sills Jr. appointed Bostrom in 1997. He came from the Police Foundation, a nonprofit research group. He also served on the Washington, D.C. police force for 23 years.

"I live in the city, so of course I hope the Baker administration is successful in accomplishing all the things they want to get done to improve Wilmington," Bostrom said.

Bostrom oversaw the police and fire departments. Baker has not yet indicated whether Bostrom will be replaced or whether he will instead deal directly with the chiefs of those two departments.

Bostrom's tenure included a clash with the police union over his plan to patrol the city's neighborhoods. An arbitrator in 1998 ruled the plan was discriminatory and based on race. The plan was replaced with one that assigned officers based mostly on their seniority.

Some summer 1995 stories in the Washington Post identify Bostrom as a an inspector in Washington's Metropolitan Police Department and the commander for the 2nd District. Earlier in the year he was identified as commander of the MPD's special operations division. In 1990, Bostrom was identified as director of the planning and research division. In 1983. he was identified by the Post as a captain and assistant commander of the youth division.

An organization called Street Law lists Bostrom as a member of its board of directors and lists his affiliation as International Association of Chiefs of Police. In the 2002 program for the IACP convention, Bostrom is listed as Manager, Community Policing Consortium, part of the IACP's Programs and Research Directorate.

UPDATE: Someone e-mailed MeeCiteeWurkor with the information that Bostrom shows up in the city's computer network address book as "Chief of Police." Is the interim title just a way around legal complications from the lawsuit filed on behalf of the three internal candidates?

INTERESTING THEORY on why an interim has been appointed:

My guess is that he is being hired as a sort of short-term 'hatchet man' - someone to implement possibly unpopular policies. Then after those changes are implemented and the hubbub over them has died down, a new, permanent chief is brought in to maintain things.

A permanent new chief coming from the outside right away and changing things a whole lot would probably only find dissension and low morale after six months. After all, there were 3 people working for you that were qualified and wanted your job.

I think this may be a good move by the mayor.

To use a sports analogy:

Many times the head coach that is hired to replace a long-time head coach has difficulty making it simply because the players and fans are used to the old coaches system. These replacement coaches frequently do not last long, but their replacement typically does because the players and fans are now accustomed to change.

UPDATE: The Street Law program, of which Bostrom is a board member, is an initiative of the Soros Foundation. Hat tip to commenter G. Hanna.

Chris Medlock has his ear to the ground regarding Mayor Kathy Taylor's plan to sell 18 holes out of 36 at city-owned Page Belcher golf course for private development. His latest blog entry has an aerial view showing the area in question, which extends north and south of 71st Street west of Union, very convenient to the newly improved 71st Street and US 75 interchange and the Tulsa Hills retail "power center."

Whether or not you think the city should be involved in the golf business, this is why you ought to be concerned:

Regardless of your position on whether or not the golf courses should be shut down to save money, it is quite troubling to hear that Mayor Kathy Taylor may be planning to offer the highly valuable land to only one, highly connected, developer.

If sold, the city should ask for Requests for Proposals (RFPs) from the entire development sector. How else will we ever know if the citizens are getting the best deal possible on their tax dollar investment? How else will we know that special favors haven’t been granted for future favors?

If there is only one developer involved, it's likely that this plan didn't just happen, but has been in the works for some time and has nothing at all to do with solving the city's tight finances.

This week's UTW column topic: The Mayor's proposed FY 2008 budget has been released, and it includes some unpleasant surprises. As the old arena is converted to ballroom space and the new arena isn't open yet, convention and arena revenues will vanish for the year, while start-up administrative costs appear with a vengeance. The net result: A $1.7 million hole in the General Fund, which the Mayor proposes to plug by shutting down 27 holes of golf and cutting a police academy, resulting in a net loss of officers. (The suggestion that golf savings will be funding northside pools is a smokescreen. The Mayor didn't actually say that that would happen, and in fact one fewer pool will be open this year than last.)

There was a typo -- my fault -- in the section of the column about the pools. Last year nine pools were open -- four funded by the city and five by private sponsorships, not four.

Also this week, a few thoughts on the result of Oklahoma's vote for a state quarter design. How did we miss out on an American Indian theme?

One of the images I suggest might have been a better choice is Willard Stone's sculpture "Exodus". Follow that link to see a picture of it.

Elsewhere in the current issue, Brian Ervin has a story on the problem of sinkholes caused not by geology but by aging underground sewer and stormwater pipes. (Take a look at the downtown stormwater management master plan -- it's in the government documents section at Central Library -- and note the section on "subsurface voids." That's where there's a gap between the relatively thin layer of concrete and asphalt and the solid ground beneath.)

The second installment to UTW's guide to summer events and activities is in this week's issue. Here's a link to the first installment.

Also, nominations are in order for Urban Tulsa Weekly's Absolute Best of Tulsa awards. Click the link to enter your choices online, or pull a ballot out of a paper copy and mail it in.

Dear Mayor Taylor,

I read about your compromise proposal -- the City waives sales taxes on the Arabian Horse Show, the County allows the City Council to vote on any zoning changes at the fairgrounds, the County handles permitting at the fairgrounds.

Do you realize that none of this makes any sense unless you approve annexation? If you veto annexation, you lose any leverage you have over the county on the terms of this agreement. The county could renege tomorrow, and you'd have no recourse.

But if you sign the annexation ordinance, then you and the Council could approve sales tax waivers, permitting waivers and any other relief that you deem appropriate to address the County's concerns.

You're holding all the cards. Why are you folding?

And why didn't you include any of the city councilors in the negotiations with the County? They had to learn about the agreement through the news media. If you truly want to work with the council as fellow teammates working for Tulsa, it won't help if you show more deference to officials of another government than to the elected representatives of your own citizens.

I was disappointed when you won, but I consoled myself in thinking we were at least getting someone who was tough, someone who would aggressively represent the city's interests. Guess I was wrong.

And about that comment in the letter from the County Commissioners, saying that you could blow off the city councilors because they'd soon forget. I think you know better.

Of the five who voted for annexation, I've known four of them for many years. They aren't going to forget. This isn't like the legislature where they vote on thousands of bills in a four-month session. This was a major issue, and these councilors spent some political capital because they believed annexation was best for the City and would have no adverse effect on the County. You led them, and us, to believe that you agreed with them, and then you went behind their backs to cut a deal that leaves the City empty-handed.

This was a telling comment:

"She's been scared of the county since day one. First day she talked about it she was trembling, saying, 'They've got all the money,' " [Council Chairman Roscoe] Turner said.

That's the real problem here, isn't it? Your predecessor was so determined to get approval for a downtown arena that he handed the county the keys to the cash box. You had to go hat in hand to get extra money for the arena, and you'll probably have to go back again.

But the City Council has control of a lot of money, too. Do you think they're going to be inclined to vote for your utility rate hike when you just walked away from at least $300,000 in revenue?

Bill LaFortune put this city at a serious disadvantage, all for an arena that we didn't need and won't be able to afford to run.

At some point City officials have to stop being pushed around by the County and the suburbs. I'm not saying you have to go to war, just that you have to defend the City's interests without apology.

I hoped we'd elect a Mayor in 2006 that would do that. Chris Medlock and Don McCorkell would have. I thought you might, but evidently I was wrong. I guess we'll have to wait for 2010.

I want to call your attention to three relatively new links on the sidebar:

TPD Blog, the blog of the Tulsa Police Department, has had a lot of interesting content lately. They link to articles in local media about TPD, and provide regular updates on the progress of the latest academy class. In one recent entry, Off. Will Dalsing expresses his opinion of the personnel and financial challenges faced by the TPD:

So here is the problem: while it is true that we are back to being at, or slightly above, our "authorized strength," that number is terribly low. The Tulsa Police Department has been at that number for over twenty years. True, the population has not significantly changed in numbers, but the calls for service (the amount of calls that the officers must respond to) yearly has gone up in the tens of thousands....

Imagine that you are having a bit of a problem in the neighborhood. Kids are out at all hours of the night being loud and tearing stuff up. Maybe there are some houses with what appears to be a lot of traffic…. maybe someone is selling drugs there. Or maybe there are some scary looking people whom you are pretty sure are calling themselves a gang. You would call the police right?

So the Police Captain at the local division assigns a whole squad of seven or eight cops to your street. The Captain tells them "saturate that neighborhood for a few days….I don’t want anyone to so much as spit on the sidewalk without having to talk to an officer because of it."

Is that a dream? It is in Tulsa. See we don’t actually have enough staff to take the calls for service. We "hire-over" nearly every shift at every division. It’s hard to be pro-active when you are always back "on your heels." So even thought we do have a squad at some divisions for "Directed Patrol," it may be still at the expense of our response to calls in the field.

Or let’s say you are building a new structure in your downtown that will likely bring tens of thousands of people to the area several nights a week. The area is in the process of revitalization. Foot traffic is going up. The bars and restaurants are popping up. For tourism, safety, and the well being of everyone involved, more cops are needed. In fact, the business owners are so decisive on the matter that they are willing to give their own money to help equip officers to work in the area. Can we give them a squad of officers? Not currently.

We know we must be pro-active for Tulsa’s new arena and for the downtown district as a whole. A part-time bike squad is in the works but how will we have the manpower to staff the area full time?

The second link is Stop the Chop, a website about protecting Woodward Park's trees from indiscriminate removal. You can read the history of the controversy, view relevant documents, and learn what you can do to help.

The final link is not Tulsa-specific. It's a web community for conservative activists throughout the State of Oklahoma, and it's called GetRightOK.com. The site includes a blog, a forum, an events calendar, and other community networking tools. It's intended not just to be a place to chat and trade insults but to network for the purpose of taking constructive political action. I've written a guest piece for them, yet again about the Oklahoma Republican state convention, but with a focus on the state chairman and vice chairman's races, with some historical background.

Fairgrounds annexation: Still no action from the Mayor, who has until the end of this week to sign or veto. The scrivener's error that reset the 15-day clock was a failure to specify to which council district the newly annexed territory would be assigned. I supposed everyone thought that was obvious, as it's surrounded by Council District 4 on all four sides.

City budget: The Mayor will submit her proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2007-08 to the Council at the 10:00 a.m. urban development committee meeting, with a full presentation to follow at the regular meeting on Thursday night. With the fire district tax dead (a fact the Whirled didn't get around to reporting until Saturday), there will have to be some creative juggling to get the books to balance. Rumors are that proposed spending will grow faster than the rate of inflation and that the arena operating costs will be worse than previously acknowledged.

Also on the council committee agendas: During the 8:00 a.m. meeting, a presentation on the FY '08 operating budget for the BOk Center. During the 10:00 a.m. meeting, Councilor Turner's proposal to require the public display of sales tax permits, the rezoning of the SE corner of 11th Street and 161st East Ave. for residential and commercial use (currently the Brashear Stables; the TMAPC voted 4-4 on the rezoning in a rare tie), a discussion of the 2006 Police Department Manpower Report, and a property tax increase.

Yeah, you read that right. City of Tulsa property owners will have their millage go up enough to cover the latest $6.125 million installment of the city's $14.5 million settlement with Arvin McGee, who spent 12 years in prison for crimes he didn't commit because of what a jury ruled was Tulsa police misconduct. The Council has no choice but to commit the money to pay the settlement.

Brad Henry veto watch: The first attempt to override Henry's veto of pro-life SB 714 failed, because of a switcheroo by Shawnee Sen. Charlie Laster and a longer term flip-flop by Sand Springs Sen. Nancy Riley, who promised in her first race in 2000, "absolutely NO STATE FUNDING FOR ABORTION." Henry protected the interests of his trial lawyer buddies by vetoing SB 507, a comprehensive lawsuit reform bill that incorporated most of the provisions he had previously championed. Brandon Dutcher says there's a link: Laster insisted on the tort reform veto in exchange for his SB 714 flip-flop.

The National Association of Manufacturers is watching Oklahoma's progress on lawsuit reform very closely. And here's a fact sheet from the State Chamber outlining the key points of SB 507. (Hat tip: Point of Law.)

And after returning tanned and rested from Spring Break, missing the successful conclusion of budget negotiations, Henry has now vetoed not only the legislature's budget, but five agency bills that matched his own budget proposal.

Today should see passage of Oklahoma's landmark immigration enforcement bill, HB 1804. If it passes, it will be headed to the governor's desk.

UPDATE: Where was I this morning? Oversleeping. I thought I had two alarms set, but somehow neither one went off. We'll try again tomorrow morning at 6:10.

Wherein I try to figure out what I need to talk about tomorrow morning on KFAQ:

Tuesday night at 7 p.m. the South Tulsa Citizens Coalition will hold a town hall meeting to discuss the state of their lawsuit trying to stop Jenks and Bixby's deal with Infrastructure Ventures Inc. to build a toll bridge across the Arkansas River. The meeting will be held at Christ Church, 10901 S. Yale. The lawsuit suffered a surprise setback when Judge Gordon McAllister ruled that the 75-year contract between a trust established by the two cities and IVI was not a franchise. Will they appeal or give up and see if the city will step in?

Yard signs all around Woodward Park are advertising a website called stopthechop.net. The petition effort is working to save trees in Woodward Park which have been marked for removal when trimming of branches would be sufficient to protect public safety and the trees' health. One of our city's greatest but underappreciated assets is our canopy of trees. Seen from the air or a tall building, the extent and density of our urban forest is amazing. These trees reduce summer temperatures and cooling costs, improve air quality, act as a wind break, and improve property values. Councilor Cason Carter has taken some ribbing for his proposal to raise private dollars for an urban forestry program focused on city rights-of-way (there already is one for the city's parks), but I think it's a good idea. Expanding our urban forest and maintaining its health is important to the city's "curb appeal" and quality of life.

I also like Carter's proposal to amend the Tulsa City Charter to move city elections to the fall of odd-numbered years. It's a move I've championed for a long time -- it gives new elected officials time to find their feet before the budget process begins, and it helps grassroots candidates by enabling door-to-door campaigning in the summer and fall, rather than the winter when early sunset and inclement weather can interfere with a candidate's efforts to meet the voters.

The State Senate has yet to vote on whether to override Gov. Brad Henry's veto of SB 714, which would have put Oklahoma taxpayers out of the abortion business. The bill passed with a veto-proof majority, but pressure is on eight Democratic senators who voted for the bill to reverse and vote to sustain the veto. Oklahomans for Life is asking us (click to read the action alert in PDF format) to write the Democrats who voted for SB 714 and thank them for their past and future support for the bill. They provide a simple method to e-mail all eight of them at once via this address: Pro-LifeDemocrats@OkForLife.org

A bill designed to bypass anti-charter-school obstructionists on the Tulsa School Board passed the State House last week. SB 661 would expand which governing bodies could grant a charter to create an independently governed but publicly funded school. Cities of over 300,000 population and public universities could also oversee charter schools. The effort was led by Democratic State Rep. Jabar Shumate, who represents part of north Tulsa. His constituents are fed up with being trapped in sub-par schools, and they cannot afford private school tuition. One charter elementary school, the Deborah Brown School, serves the near northside, but the school board is unwilling to let them expand enrollment and unwilling to charter additional schools. When a student enrolls in a charter school, state funding (about $5,000) would follow him from his public school to his charter school.

While SB 661 has passed both House and Senate, there were some legislative maneuvers which mean that the bill is not yet able to go to the Governor. Shumate was the only House Democrat to support SB 661, the only Democrat to put the interests of schoolchildren and their parents ahead of the interests of the education union and the school board association. The bill passed with only 51 votes because a number of Republicans were absent. The bill had passed the Senate by a vote of 34-9 with bipartisan support.

Jeff Shaw also brings news of a hot dog vendor who set up shop next to the daily paper's building on Main Street. I don't know if I've ever heard of someone selling hot dogs in downtown Tulsa in my lifetime, although I've seen them crop up in front of Lowe's and Best Buy stores. (A long time ago, my grandfather would buy tamales from a man who sold them in downtown Bartlesville.)

Another good piece of legislation is waiting for Gov. Brad Henry's signature. SB 507 is a serious, comprehensive tort reform bill that bears a striking resemblance to the recommendation put forward in 2004 by the Oklahoma Council for Public Affairs. The OCPA blog lists the key features:

$300,000 cap on rewards for non-economic damage;

Reforming joint and several liabilities rules (eliminate the ability to collect from defendants a award percentage that is much larger than the percentage at which the defendant was at fault);

Limits and uniformity on prejudgment interest;

Requiring expert testimony for medical liability cases;

Collateral source rule reform, (defendants can now take into account how much plaintiff has already been awarded from other sources); and

Strengthen evidence required in court to prove liability and negligence to be awarded punitive damages.

In the final Senate vote, the bill passed by a vote of 25-23, along party lines except for a lone Democrat, Susan Paddack of Ada, voting in favor.

One of the goofiest accusations made in the course of the Fairgrounds annexation debate is that some councilors, specifically John Eagleton, voted for annexation just to make me happy, out of some misguided sense of loyalty.

(Other goofy debating points: I'm for annexation because I have "a bone to pick with the county," and my opinion doesn't matter because I'm not a businessman. Both are ad hominems and neither address the merits of my arguments or the arguments of other annexation proponents. I'll deal with the "bone to pick" in depth some other time, but I will say this: I have never suffered any personal or financial loss or significant inconvenience as a result of a county action -- with one exception. My skepticism about certain aspects of county government is not at all personal, but is grounded in nine years of watching the County Commissioners' actions, particularly the addiction of certain commissioners to non-competitive contracts.)

(The one exception? As a dad, I'm disappointed that my kids won't have an amusement park in town any more.)

There are five members of the Council whom I knew and with whom I was friendly before they became city councilors. If they always did what I wanted, then I would be the uncrowned King of the City Council, a modern-day Robert S. Kerr. But that doesn't happen.

I can think of one vote in particular that was important enough to me that I took the time to come to the Council meeting and speak. It was a zoning case near I-44 in east Tulsa, the part of town where I grew up and where my parents still live. I was there with other east Tulsa residents to ask the Council to deny the zoning request, which would have perpetuated the trashy first impression Tulsa gives to those who arrive by car from the east and northeast. Our side lost, with a couple of my councilor friends voting contrary to my wishes.

If any city councilor listens to me it's not because I can finance their climb up the political ladder. I can't use my massive economic and social clout to ruin them if they crossed me. I can't provide make-work jobs for their relatives. I can't take them to dinner at the Summit Club or for a round of golf at Southern Hills. And to borrow an old blues lyric that Bob Wills borrowed a few times, "I'm not good-lookin'. I don't dress fine. The way I whip it is a hangin' crime."

As was evident last Thursday night, I don't have masses of mind-numbed followers ready to obey my every command. It was pretty much just me and, amazingly enough, Greg Jennings, with whom I have often disagreed in the past, speaking in support of annexation. If the decision Thursday night was a matter of pull, there was a lot more pull on the other side of the issue.

If any of these councilors pays me any mind, it's only because I try to be precise and thorough in what I say about an issue, and sometimes I do a decent job of translating a concept from bureaucratese to plain English.

Bill Martinson certainly didn't communicate with me in composing his rationale in support of annexation. I opposed his first run for office and didn't endorse him in the Republican primary last year. I didn't feed information to the Council staff or the city finance department staff for their thorough research and analyses. Council Attorney Drew Rees did the legal research on the issue of security for the Tulsa State Fair, not me. I had a few conversations with John Eagleton, but I didn't come up with a copy of the Arabian Horse Show contract, or even have the foresight to suggest it to anyone.

If anything, the thoughts I've presented here and in my column owe more to the research and analysis that others did than the other way around. The only original point I contributed to the conversation had to do with the non-financial benefits of annexation, a point that didn't seem to carry a lot of weight in Thursday night's debate. (Which is why my business background is irrelevant to the discussion.)

I guess it's more comforting to annexation opponents to believe that I mesmerized the City Council into bending to my will than to believe that five independent, intelligent councilors came to their own conclusion based on facts and logic, in the face of heavy pressure to set those facts aside.

It took a while, and everybody got to speak that wanted to speak, but the City Council voted 5-4 to approve the ordinance to annex the Tulsa County Fairgrounds. Voting in favor were Henderson, Turner, Barnes, Martinson, and Eagleton; voting against were Westcott, Troyer, Christiansen, and Carter. The emergency clause vote broke the same way, which means it failed -- two-thirds vote would be required to put the annexation into immediate effect. Without the emergency clause, it will go into effect sixty days after the Mayor signs the ordinance.

I'll be on KFAQ at 6:10 in the morning to talk about the debate and the vote, so tune in to 1170 and listen.

I was especially impressed with Councilor Martinson's comments. I've had plenty of disagreements with him on various issues, but his analysis of the pros and cons of annexation was flawless, just as impressive as his analysis of the city's financial constraints. His business and accounting experience is a real asset to the council.

As are the legal expertise and fearlessness of Councilor Eagleton. A highlight of the meeting was when he called fair board member Clark Brewster (the banty rooster) on Brewster's bluffing claim that the increased sales tax rate resulting from annexing the Fairgrounds would constitute a breach of contract with the Arabian Horse Show. Eagleton had the contract in hand, demanded that Brewster cite the paragraph to back up his claim, and then read the clause that clearly contradicted Brewster's claim. Eagleton's diligent digging for facts has diffused several of the bogus arguments leveled against annexation.

UPDATE 4/11: There are two complementary accounts of the City Council debate on annexation in the latest Urban Tulsa Weekly: Brian Ervin's news story on the debate, with details on why various councilors voted the way they did; and my column, on the factors that may influence Mayor Kathy Taylor's decision to sign or veto annexation.

UPDATE 4/18: David Schuttler has posted video on YouTube (thanks, David!) of the exchange between Clark Brewster and John Eagleton regarding the Arabian Horse Show's contract. I had forgotten that it was actually Bill Martinson who interrupted Brewster to ask him how a city action could cause a breach of contract between the fair board and the Arabian Horse Show. Brewster's reply, "The terms of that contract provides [sic] very specifically what their vendors would pay as a matter of tax," led to Eagleton's question, "Clark, which paragraph are you referring to?"

This week in Urban Tulsa Weekly, I take a look back at the decision of the Tulsa County Public Facilities Authority last fall to evict Bell's Amusement Park from the Tulsa County Fairgrounds. Although it's not a new story, the way the eviction was handled sheds some light on the question of the City of Tulsa's annexation of the Fairgrounds (to be decided this Thursday night by the City Council), currently an unincorporated enclave surrounded by the City of Tulsa. Expo Square management and TCPFA members have made a number of claims about the effects of annexation, and those claims need to be weighed in light of the board's credibility and transparency -- particularly the credibility of the three TCPFA members who were on the board prior to 2007.

Here's another doubtful decision: Last year the Tulsa State Fair reached the one million attendance mark for the first time in four years. In December, the 2006 Fair won six awards for Marketing and Competitive Exhibits at the International Association of Fairs and Expositions (IAFE) in Las Vegas. Amber Phillips, who was manager of the Tulsa State Fair in 2004, 2005, and 2006, overseeing increased attendance each year, didn't get to enjoy the fruits of her hard work and creativity, because Expo Square CEO Rick Bjorklund had fired Phillips a week earlier. (Officially, her position was eliminated in a "reorganization," but it's not as though they're going to stop having a Tulsa State Fair, and someone has to manage it.)

You can read more commentary and background about the Bell's eviction here (including an interesting look at Bjorklund's career trajectory). And this website has a number of articles on Bell's and other amusement parks in this region, including Frontier City and Joyland in Wichita. Here's his evaluation of what was done to Bell's.

I've gotten really sloppy about posting blog links to my Urban Tulsa Weekly column. In case I forget, you can always go directly to the urbantulsa.com home page and find a link under Columns. Articles from the new edition are posted on the website Wednesday morning. I will be adding retroactive links to previous articles so that you'll be able to find a complete archive listing here.

In any case, this week I consider the idea of moving City Hall to the Williams Communications Group building, aka the Borg Cube, aka One Technology Center. Our existing City Hall is inadequate and, to say the least, homely:

A couple of years ago, I was giving a tour of the city to a friend from New York. Despite her love of '60s pop music and fashion, the poorly-executed '60s architecture of City Hall left her cold. When I pointed out the place that occupies so much of my attention, she declared, "That is the ugliest city hall I have ever seen."

As you'll read, even Weird Al dissed our City Hall when he filmed a movie here. (In the service of researching this article, I had to watch UHF again. In the commentary track, Weird Al misidentifies the ersatz City Hall as the Christian Science church at 10th and Boulder -- it's the First Christian Church across the street at 9th and Boulder.)

The real City Hall entrance is gloomy and subterranean, beneath the Civic Center Plaza. In place of grand steps, there is a curb cut leading up a few inches from the main driveway through the parking lot. A set of automated sliding glass doors are framed by white-painted cinder blocks, on which is mounted the words "CITY HALL" in original-series Star Trek block lettering.

Also in this week's issue, Brian Ervin has a story on the anti-illegal-immigration proposal currently before the Oklahoma Legislature. Ervin does an excellent job of setting out the details of the bill, how it differs from last session's bill, what influences shaped the bill, and how changes in the balance of power have changed the prospects for passage. He spoke to proponents Rep. Randy Terrill and Sen. Jim Williamson and opponents Victor Orta and Ed Martinez and is very fair in representing both perspectives. (UTW has a real gem in Mr. Ervin.)

No, not me, darn it. Michael S. Bates, Human Resources Director for the City of Tulsa, is stepping down after nearly 12 years in the post and 34 years as a city employee. He's one of the reasons I have made a point of using my middle initial here, in my Urban Tulsa Weekly column, and in my two runs for City Council.

I've only met him once, probably in 1999 or 2000, at a breakfast hosted by Mayor Susan Savage on "smart growth." He mentioned (in jest, I think) that if I had a letter to the editor in the paper, Savage would stop by his office to ask about it.

Citeewurkors have told me that the other Michael Bates isn't beloved within their ranks. I don't know why that is -- perhaps just because he's the guy that has to enforce the rules, the guy sitting on the other side of the table during salary negotiations. When I ran for office, I won over a few voters by assuring them that I wasn't him, so I assume I lost a few votes from city employees who didn't get that message. Then again, I may have gained a few votes from people who assumed the head of personnel for the city would have something substantial to offer as a councilor.

He says he plans to be a consultant, so the need to disambiguate our names isn't going to go away any time soon.

But it turns out that a middle initial isn't enough to set me apart from all other Michael Bateses. I know of another registered Tulsa County voter with the same three names as me who is six months older than I am. And according to the city payroll spreadsheet released recently by the Tulsa Whirled, there's an "equipment operator II" in the Public Works department named Michael D. Bates.

Then there's Michael W. Bates, a former Member of the British Parliament and a leader of the Conservative Christian Fellowship; Michael Bates, the late British actor (Clockwork Orange, Bedazzled, and, on TV, "It Ain't Half Hot, Mum" and "Last of the Summer Wine"); Michael Bates, prince of the unrecognized micronation of Sealand; Chicago area political columnist Michael M. Bates. (The latter's bio concludes, "As a lad, he distributed Goldwater campaign literature and since then has steadily moved further to the Right.")

I guess this sort of confusion is bound to occur when you have a surname in the top 250 by popularity and a first name that was number one through most of the Baby Boom and Baby Bust years.

Maybe I should follow TAFKAP's lead and change my name to an unpronounceable symbol.

Here's to a happy retirement for any and all Michael Bateses.

Tulsa City Council Chairman Bill "Landslide" Martinson is not one of my favorite city councilors, but I've been told by other Martinson non-fans that he does have a good mind for numbers and financial analysis, which could be an asset as the city confronts with its budget problems.

Recently Martinson presented to his colleagues a thorough and impressive summary of the financial box the City finds itself in. Municipal Revenues and Fiscal Constraints is available for your perusal on the City Council's website. Every citizen ought to read it and digest it.

Some highlights:

• Charts showing how much of the general fund is used for personnel costs, particularly public safety personnel costs.
• A chart on page 12 showing the city budget adjusted for inflation over the last 10 years. The budget grew faster than inflation during Susan Savage's tenure, didn't keep up with inflation in the wake of the telecom crash during LaFortune's term, and with last year's budget returned to the same level as 1996-7 in constant dollars.
• Why less than half of the city's revenue is available for operations.
• How the city balanced its budget during the lean years -- cuts to parks, street maintenance, street lighting, code enforcement, graffiti abatement, right-of-way mowing -- all areas that affect the city's "curb appeal" and quality of life.
• Why the same percentage of sales taxes (2% for operations) hasn't been sufficient for maintaining the same level of service.
• The impact of federal policy shifts -- reduction in direct federal aid to cities since the 1970s, reduction in Medicare reimbursements for ambulance service, increased environmental mandates on cities, failure to deal with illegal immigration.
• Why the state has a surplus, while cities struggle to provide services -- the state has multiple, complimentary revenue sources, including income taxes, sales taxes, and oil and gas production taxes.
• Why only one of those three options is available to the City of Tulsa.
• Restrictions on the use of property taxes by cities.
• The impact of sales tax exemptions.
• Tulsa County government's discovery of sales tax as a source of operating revenue.
• Tulsa County government's refusal to restore a share of property tax to Tulsa County municipalities.
• The impact of suburban flight on the city's finances.

Again, every active citizen needs to read this. So do all of our state representatives and state senators and county officials. This is what Chris Medlock was talking about when he called for Tulsans to reject the county's attempt to renew Four to Fix the County and when, as a candidate for state house, he called for adoption of an urban policy at the state level -- how do we finance Oklahoma's cities, the state's economic engines, and protect them from a spiral of decline?

Veteran Oklahoma political analyst Mike McCarville has been keeping a close eye on one aspect in particular of Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor's administration: Her involvement as a charter member of the Mayors' Coalition against Illegal Guns, a group of pro-gun-control mayors led by New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino.

The coalition has claimed that its focus is on enforcement of gun laws, but its real agenda has been exposed by mayors who were involved at the outset but later withdrew. In February, Mark Begich, the Mayor of Anchorage, Alaska, announced his withdrawal from the coalition:

"I do support the efforts to strengthen laws and prosecute individuals who dispense or use illegal guns, and getting them out of the hands of criminals. However, upon further review of the coalition, it appears they may have a different agenda than I anticipated.

"I am concerned the coalition is working on issues that conflict with the beliefs we share in Alaska about legal gun ownership, and I'm also concerned gun ownership advocates are not part of the full discussion within the coalition. We cannot afford to risk protecting our Bill of Rights and the rights of legal gun owners.

Earlier, Idaho Falls mayor Jared Fuhriman withdrew for similar reasons:

He told a local newspaper that he was originally told that Bloomberg's coalition was only going after "illegal guns." But after doing his own research he said, "I could see there was a conflict with the NRA and with some of the beliefs we have here in Idaho." ...

Bloomberg won't be sending out any press releases, of course, but it's important to point out when mayors dump Bloomberg's anti-gun group because they've been told the same lie Bloomberg's telling the public.

This isn't about going after criminals with guns. This is about criminalizing gun ownership. Mayor Fuhriman, a former police officer, did the right thing after his constituents helped him see the truth about Bloomberg's group.

Taylor is the only Oklahoma mayor to join the coalition. Her nearest fellow members are the mayors of Fayetteville, Arkansas, North Little Rock, Arkansas, Dallas, and Irving, Texas. There are very few dots on the map in the plains and mountain states.

Most recently, McCarville is noting speculation about Taylor's involvement in this group and her decision to reject three qualified internal candidates to replace Dave Been as Tulsa's Chief of Police. The three internal candidates are working with the local FOP chapter to file a grievance under the city's civil service regulations.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that the city's chief exec should have the authority to hire the best candidate for the position (with the advice and consent of the Council), and the maneuvering in the upper echelons of the TPD when Been was placed on leave suggests that an outside candidate might have a better shot at unifying the force under new leadership. Still, I'm concerned that Taylor might hire someone who doesn't respect the rights of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms. I think it would be appropriate for city councilors to ask the Mayor to appear before them and answer questions about this group, about her involvement, and about how this issue is shaping her search for a police chief.

This entry from December features a photo showing Taylor at the organizing meeting of the coalition at New York's Gracie Mansion and includes a quote from the New York Daily News describing Bloomberg's gun record: "He mounted a national gun control crusade, and he scored unprecedented court victories against firearms dealers...."

The initial meeting of the group included a briefing on New York City's lawsuits against gun manufacturers, an effort that makes it harder for law-abiding citizens to obtain weapons for their own protection, and a Jersey City gun-buyback program, which encourages the handover of legal weapons but does nothing to slow the use of weapons by criminals.

Bloomberg even used private investigators posing as gun buyers to try to entrap gun dealers in other parts of the country, endangering several federal investigations in the process.

The coalition's main purpose appears to be repeal of the Tiahrt Amendment, a rider on the appropriations bill for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE). The Tiahrt Amendment exists to protect the privacy of lawful purchasers of guns. When a person buys a gun and passes the required instant check, the law forbids the government from retaining a record of that purchase. (Dave Kopel wrote an article explaining the Tiahrt Amendment for National Review Online in 2004. The NRA fact sheet on the law explains why it should be retained and strengthened, not eliminated.)

You can read all of McCarville's entries about Kathy Taylor at this link.

Congratulations to fellow Tulsa blogger Steven Roemerman on his confirmation as a member of the City of Tulsa Sales Tax Overview Committee. It's a sign of his manifest intelligence and civic-mindedness that he was nominated by the man whose election he tried to prevent. Roemerman was a fervent supporter of former Councilor Jim Mautino, who was defeated for re-election by Dennis Troyer.

The Sales Tax Overview Committee monitors the spending of the "third-penny" sales tax fund for compliance with the list of projects promised to the voters. I know that Steven will be a diligent watchdog, and he should have some interesting insights into city finances to share with us on his blog.

This week's column in Urban Tulsa Weekly is about the latest developments in the City of Tulsa's move to annex the Tulsa County Fairgrounds (aka Expo Square).

Related to that topic, UTW reporter Brian Ervin has a cover story profile of City Councilor Roscoe Turner, the leading proponent of annexation.

There were a couple of developments in the story that I didn't get to in my column: Mayor Kathy Taylor's bizarre entrance into the debate with her set of bargaining chips and County Commissioner Randi Miller's passive-aggressive raising of the white flag. But Ervin does a great job of covering them in his news story on annexation.

If you're interested, here's a link to the
state law that governs a city's annexation of an enclave -- 11 O. S. 21-103.

This is just nuts. Saint Francis Health System has decided to close its hospital near 101st Street and 161st East Ave (New Orleans and Elm) in Broken Arrow and move those operations to the Saint Francis Heart Hospital at 91st & Garnett, just west of the Tulsa - Broken Arrow boundary.

Now Tom Neff, strategic planner for St. Francis Health System, is saying that the cities of Tulsa and Broken Arrow are negotiating to swap land so that the St. Francis Heart Hospital would be transferred to the jurisdiction of the City of Broken Arrow, in exchange for some other land.

I guess the point is that this would let Broken Arrow claim that it still has its own hospital, even though the actual location of the hospital wouldn't be any different. And since Owasso is getting two hospitals, Broken Arrow might feel left out if it hadn't any.

Tulsa has already conceded land to Broken Arrow in recent years, giving 480 acres northeast of 51st and 145th East Ave. so that the entire Battle Creek development could be within the City of Broken Arrow. That was a very valuable concession -- Tulsa gave up a big chunk of its land which lies within the Broken Arrow school district, which is more valuable for residential development than land within the Tulsa school district.

The City of Tulsa can't afford to give up any of its territory to booming suburbs. We annexed this land 40 years ago to make sure Tulsa wouldn't wind up like landlocked inner cities in the midwest and northeast.

Here's an idea: Instead of saying, "Broken Arrow has one hospital," the Broken Arrow Chamber of Commerce could say there are two excellent hospitals (Saint Francis and SouthCrest) within a few miles of Main Street. After all, suburban officials are fond of telling us (when it suits them) that we're all one big happy metro area.

Retailers have been relocating from the core city to the suburbs for business reasons. Now an institution is relocating from a suburb to the core city for business reasons, strategically located to serve Broken Arrow, Bixby, and southeast Tulsa. The City of Tulsa needs to tell the City of Broken Arrow, firmly but gently, to live with that reality.

Chris Medlock has the beginnings of a list of answers to frequently asked questions regarding the City of Tulsa's proposed annexation of the Tulsa County Fairgrounds. He tackles the following questions:

Q: Is the City taking over the Fairgrounds from the County?
Q: Is the Fairgrounds a “tax free” zone?
Q: Is the 3-cent tax break the major draw for retail activity at the Fairgrounds?
Q: Is annexation akin to raising taxes?

That last one has an interesting answer. Medlock points out that Sen. Randy Brogdon, indisputably the taxpayers' best friend at the State Capitol, was previously Mayor of Owasso, and as Mayor and thus a member of the City Council, he voted to approve numerous annexations, many of them including already developed property which suddenly became subject to city sales tax and millage. Either that means that Randy Brogdon is a tax-raisin' fiend, or else annexation isn't really a tax hike.

Annexation opponents have also asserted that the City of Tulsa gets a free ride on the use of the David L. Moss Criminal Justice Center, more colloquially known as the County Jail. In a comment on an earlier entry, County Commissioner Fred Perry wrote: "He [Michael Bates] ignores the fact that the county runs the jail and charges the city nothing (a multi-million dollar value)."

But there's more to that story. First of all, everyone who spends money in Tulsa County, whether within the city limits of Tulsa, in some other municipality, or in the unincorporated areas, pays the 1/4 cent sales tax that funds operation of the jail. Tulsa businesses supply the lion's share of that fund. Everyone who owns property in Tulsa County, whether within the city limits of Tulsa, in some other municipality, or in the unincorporated areas, pays the county millage, part of which goes to fund operation of the jail. Even though the money flows through county government, most of it originates with the economic activity of City of Tulsa residents.

The City of Tulsa also has a contract with the Tulsa County Commission, running until June 30, 2008. In the contract, the City provides the County with the use of the old city jail, on the third floor of the City of Tulsa Police Municipal Courts Building, just west of the courthouse, and the use of the Adult Detention Center on Charles Page Boulevard near Newblock Park. The City also provides a "fully staffed evidence property room" to handle evidence required for district court cases related to City of Tulsa law enforcement. The agreement refers to a separate agreement giving the County use of a facility adjacent to the County's Juvenile Detention Center.

When the contract was executed in 1998, the value of the City of Tulsa's contribution was estimated at $1,862,350. The contract specifies that the "reasonable value" of the City's contribution is equivalent to paying the County for daily housing of 116 municipal prisoners.

In exchange for all of that, plus $1 a year, the County pays to house up to 116 of the City's municipal prisoners. If the monthly average of the daily number of municipal prisoners ever exceeds that number, there is a formula for the City to compensate the County for the excess. But if the number of municipal prisoners is lower than 116, the County does nothing to compensate the City.

Now, not every perp caught by the Tulsa police department is a "municipal prisoner." When someone is arrested on a violation of state law -- homicide, robbery, grand larceny -- that case will be handled through District Court, no matter whether the sheriff, the Tulsa police, the Highway Patrol, or some other authority arrested him. The county jails exist for the purpose of handling such prisoners. (I'm sure someone could find the appropriate cites on oscn.net. I'm too tired right now.)

Municipal prisoners are defined in the contract as "individuals present in the Jail System exclusively as the result of a City of Tulsa misdemeanor charge." If you're convicted of violating one of the laws in the Tulsa's penal code and you haven't also violated a state law, you'd be considered a municipal prisoner. At the time the jail contract was executed, the number of municipal prisoners was less than 80 per day, about a third below the amount considered equivalent to the City's contribution to the system. I am not sure what the current average number of municipal prisoners is.

What would happen if, hypothetically, the County Commission decided to "retaliate" for annexation by terminating the jail agreement with the City?

The County would lose the use of the old city jail would have to find another place to house prisoners awaiting trial in District Court, as the old county jail on the upper floors of the courthouse has been remodeled into offices for the District Attorney. The County would also have to set up a bigger evidence room of its own find other facilities to replace those that the City provides it free of charge. Finally, the County would lose the financial benefit it enjoys when the number of municipal prisoners that the County pays to house drops below the level the City is allowed by virtue of its contribution to the system.

In short, the County would be cutting off its nose to spite its face, especially since annexation would not have a detremental effect on County government. That would also be true if the County were to follow through on threats to move the Fairgrounds out to Glenpool. But that is a post for another day.

An e-mail this morning from Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor:

Dear City of Tulsa employees,

I am writing to keep you informed of recent actions regarding the City's legal department. City Attorney Alan Jackere has decided to retire effective January 2nd, 2007 and has agreed to remain with the City's legal department through the end of the year. Alan has worked for this city for 32 years and I sincerely appreciate his long service to Tulsa.

I will begin the process of searching for a permanent successor immediately. As you may know, this is a civil service position and, as has been the long-standing practice, internal candidates will be given the first opportunity to apply and be considered for the position.

To supervise the Legal Department and assist in a transition until a successor is hired, Judge Deirdre Dexter will serve as acting interim City Attorney beginning immediately.

I hope you will all join me as we all wish Alan well in his future endeavors. As is true of so many of you, Alan has been a dedicated veteran of public service to our City. He deserves our thanks and appreciation for his work.

Thank you for all you do.

Sincerely,

Kathy Taylor
Mayor

Interesting -- thanks and appreciation to someone she suspended? And what of Larry Simmons, the deputy City Attorney who was also suspended.

Deirdre Dexter is a pleasantly surprising choice to serve in the interim. I endorsed her in the runoff for District Judge Office 10 (won by Mary Fitzgerald).

You'll note that City Attorney is a civil service position. As important as the job is -- one of the few non-elected offices whose duties are specified in the City Charter -- the appointment ought to be handled like the U. S. Attorney General, nominated by the executive and confirmed by the legislative branch (the City Council).

Chris Medlock has been looking at Mayor Kathy Taylor's sudden and unexplained suspension of City Attorney Alan Jackere and his deputy Larry Simmons, and sees a connection with Taylor's push for changes in civil service policies and a renewed push to get the Bixby-Jenks bridge built.

I'm no fan of Jackere's, and I was inclined to agree with Councilor John Eagleton's speculation (heard on KOTV tonight) that the suspension was connected with Jackere's handling of the wrongful prosecution lawsuit of Arvin McGee, but there's a lot to ponder in what Medlock has to say.

In that same entry, you'll get an intro to Nancy Jane Siegel, currently an adviser in the Mayor's office, and very possibly the next City Attorney.

Lest you think Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor's attendance at a New York City conference of pro-gun-control mayors was an aberration, the McCarville Report finds a news story that puts Taylor at yet another meeting of the group, this time in Chicago, and now the group has a name:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and Milwaukee Mayor Thomas Barrett had harsh words Wednesday for the Bush administration and the gun lobby's influence on Congress.

"When Washington makes bad decisions to protect criminals rather than the public, we suffer the consequences," Bloomberg said at a news conference outlining the agenda for Thursday's Midwestern summit of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group Bloomberg founded with Boston Mayor Thomas Menino....

Daley, Bloomberg, and Barrett - accompanied by counterparts from a number of smaller cities - all complained that inaction by the federal executive branch and the influence of the gun lobby, particularly the National Rifle Association, on Congress have left local officials to combat the problem of illegal weapons....

The mayors - including Tulsa, Okla. Mayor Kathy Taylor and Rockford, Ill. Mayor Lawrence Morrisey - spoke at Chicago Police Headquarters from behind a table loaded with illegal firearms seized by police in recent months. Most were rapid-fire automatic pistols, but there also were automatic shotguns, military-style assault rifles and even a Prohibition-style Thompson submachine gun.

The Midwestern mayors were to meet in an all-day conference Thursday to discuss legal and technological strategies. Bloomberg said Menino would hold a similar conference in Boston Nov. 9 and Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin would hold one in her city Nov. 30.

The NRA's response is that the laws are there, ready to be enforced if these mayors will only apply the necessary resources. These are illegal weapons, and added burdens on law-abiding gun owners isn't going to stop criminals who are already violating the law. Taylor is allying herself with mayors who have sought to use lawsuits to put gun and ammunition manufacturers out of business. That's like suing the head of Black and Decker for the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

McCarville notes that Taylor's involvement in this group hasn't received much attention in the local media. Whatever your opinions on gun laws, surely everyone can agree that we ought to know what alliances and causes she is joining in her official capacity, in the name of the City of Tulsa. And the City Council ought to ask her to come before them to explain her involvement.

I wonder: If Taylor's leanings on this issue had been known, would it have cost her the election?

MeeCiteeWurkor will be on 1170 KFAQ with Michael DelGiorno tomorrow (Tuesday) morning at 6:10 a.m. to talk about his investigation into the use of illegal labor by a city subcontractor.

Here are links to each of the articles in his series:

• Introduction: What's an American to do?
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Ethics Hotline Report Filed
• Public comments on this series

Be sure to tune in, or click here for information on how to listen to the Michael DelGiorno show online.

This was originally posted on October 7, 2006. I've bumped it to the top since it was a topic of conversation during my weekly visit with Michael DelGiorno on KFAQ this morning. On a related note, KFAQ is sponsoring a special showing of the film Border War tonight at 7 (by invitation only) and paid screenings at 9 tonight and tomorrow night at 7 and 9 (October 17 and 18) at the Starworld cineplex in Bixby.

MeeCiteeWurkor has begun a series of posts about the hiring practices of contractors and subcontractors to the City of Tulsa. In this first post, he is reporting on a specific instance of a city subcontractor employing people who cannot work legally in the U.S. One of the illegal workers was driving a truck carrying city property, despite the fact that he had been arrested on a DUI charge.

On August 17th of this year, between approximately 7am and 8am, I observed one of Don Shope’s “Mexicans” driving a blue and white Ford F-150 truck with an Oklahoma license plate of 396-ZMH....

I was told that the worker driving the truck had recently received a DUI and had his license suspended. I approached the gentleman, who I believe goes by the name “George”. I hollered at the guy in the truck and confronted him. There was an exchange in which I asked the supposed illegal worker why he was driving if his license was suspended, and especially after getting arrested for DUI. The contractor’s worker admitted to being arrested and not having a driver’s license, but soon realized what was happening and began to speak in Spanish and saying that he didn’t understand English.

There is audio (actually a darkened video) and a transcript of a confrontation with the Mexican worker's boss about this situation.

In the introduction to this series, MeeCiteeWurkor explains why he is posting this information, and he also explains the relationship between the City of Tulsa, the companies that contract with the City, and the subcontractors that are hired by the contractos to do the actual work.

As Dan Paden wrote: "Mee's risking his livelihood to bring this to your attention. Go and have a look. I don't think it's putting it too strongly to say that the citizens of Tulsa owe that to him."

Found on the web:

Mayor Taylor was selected as one of 60 applicants — out of a field of 400 — to participate in a Joint Civilian Orientation Conference. During her trip, she will be attending briefings with senior defense officials to discuss national defense matters from a strategic perspective, and then travel to the Middle East to observe activities and operations of each branch of the military.

During her trip, she will send back regular reports of her experience.

And this helps address budget shortfalls, economic development, and violent crime in Tulsa how, exactly?

It was just days before he would be replaced on the Tulsa Airport Improvements Trust (TAIT) and Tulsa Airport Authority (TAA), having been rejected behind the scenes by the City Council for reappointment to another term. Nevertheless, at the board's meeting last Thursday, September 14, lame-duck Ron Turner jumped right in to nominate Meredith Siegfried for another year as TAA chairman, breaking the precedent of rotating the chairmanship. Not only did he make the nomination, but he cast the deciding vote. Although he wasn't legally obliged to abstain, it would have been decent and honorable to allow his replacement, Dewey Bartlett, Jr., to participate in the selection of a new chairman.

Siegfried, as chairman, seconded her own nomination.

Siegfried and Turner are both Nordam board members and have tended to vote in lockstep on TAA and TAIT. Perhaps, by keeping her in the chairmanship, Turner figures he can keep a hand in running the city's airports.

Not only is it a breach of precedent, it's a bit presumptuous to appoint Siegfried to a year as chairman when her TAA/TAIT term expires midway through her term as chairman. There's no guarantee that the Mayor will reappoint her or that the Council will confirm her.

The nominations were approved by a 3-2 vote, with Don Himelfarb from the Mayor's office casting a vote in favor. Himelfarb was attending his first TAA/TAIT meeting and acknowledged, in response to Siegfried's question that the Mayor had not given him any direction regarding the selection of a new chairman. Nevertheless, he voted. It's not clear whether he was there as a formal proxy for the Mayor, and therefore entitled to vote on her behalf, or just present as her eyes and ears.

(Where was Mayor Kathy Taylor? There's a rumor that she was out of the country -- in Paris with her husband. If she was running the city long-distance, it might also explain why she was caught flat-footed by the controversy over police pay.)

David Schuttler has posted the meeting video at Google -- you can find via this entry on his site. The vote on officers for 2006-7 occurs within the first eight minutes.

The Tulsa Police Department has had a blog for a few months now, but they've recently added a new blogger.

Casey Mankin is one of twenty recruits in the current TPD Academy. Mankin, 32, is a C-130 pilot in the Oklahoma National Guard. He's married, and they're expecting their first baby in January. He began blogging his experiences starting with his orientation back in June.

Mankin's blog entries are collected in the "Academy Life" category of the TPD blog.

Other recent TPD blog entries of note:

• A salute to Officer Jared Shoemaker, who gave his life serving as a U. S. Marine Corporal in Iraq
• A TPD head-to-head test of three police vehicles -- the Chevy Impala, Ford Crown Victoria, and Dodge Charger

There's a map that shows the City of Tulsa divided into drainage basins, named after creeks that carry stormwater runoff to the rivers. It's interesting because it also illustrates where the city's ridges and high points are, such as the major divide between the part of the city that drains directly into the Arkansas River (via Crow, Joe, Haikey, Fred Creeks, among others) and the part that drains into the Verdigris (via Mingo, Bird, and Spunky Creeks, among others).

I've seen these maps at the State Fair and at neighborhood meetings, but I've never been able to find it online. Can anyone point me to a digital copy?

Mayor Kathy Taylor is busy trying to wash her hands of any tough decision-making on giving Tulsa police officers the raise that the arbitrator says they deserve. In the Tulsa Whirled today she's quoted as saying:

"So far, I'm pretty disappointed that the police haven't come to help me develop a solution to this problem," the mayor said. "We need to work as a team to figure it out."

She said the "easiest thing would be to accept the raise and not figure out how to pay for it long term, but that is not the fiscally responsible thing to do."

Taylor said she has asked Police Chief Dave Been and the FOP leadership to provide information by Sept. 1 on how to pay for their raise, but hasn't gotten a detailed analysis. She said she plans to call on them again.

"This shouldn't just be up to the mayor to figure out when the FOP and the chief are running the Police Department," she said.

It's hard not to hear a peevish, passive-aggressive tone in that comment.

It's the Mayor's job, as head of the City's executive branch, to allocate the City's financial resources to fit our priorities and meet our obligations. She has a finance department to help her with that task. She's already punted once on serious budget work this year, opting for a utility rate increase instead of limiting the growth of the city budget to the rate of inflation.

A couple of people have suggested a source of funds worth considering: The money currently used to pay the Tulsa Metro Chamber for convention and tourism promotion and economic development. Not all of the money, mind you, just the additional percentage of the hotel/motel tax that the Chamber has been granted every year since the late '80s.

It is reasonable to argue that nothing is more important to Tulsa's ability to attract conventions, tourists, and new businesses, and to retain existing businesses and attract the labor pool they need to grow and thrive, than to get violent crime in Tulsa under control. And to do that we need to retain our best police officers and attract high-quality additions to the force.

I'm pleased to see that four of the City Councilors are backing the raise. It seems to me that the Council could on its own initiative pass a budget amendment to make the funds available for the raise, then appropriate the funds. If the Mayor approves the budget amendment and appropriation, the raise would go in without the need for an election. The election would only go forward if the Mayor vetoed the raise.

Those meddlesome City Councilors told us that these members of the Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority (TMUA), Messrs. Cameron and Reynolds, were arrogant and uncooperative. They declined to support their reappointment to this authority which controls Tulsa's water system, and whose policy decisions affect the future growth of Tulsa and its suburbs.

In July 2004, as these two men were up for reappointment, the Council had questions about the policy of the TMUA for prioritizing the extension of water lines to unserved parts of the city ahead of extending new lines to the suburbs. Rather than respect the Council's concerns and delay any significant decisions until the issue could be addressed, the TMUA voted the next day to extend a new water line to Bixby. That action was an expression of the TMUA's high-handed contempt for our elected representatives on the City Council.

The Council responded with the only tool they have for keeping authorities, boards, and commissions in line with the will of the public. Five councilors -- Henderson, Mautino, Medlock, Roop, and Turner -- voted against both of them. Their action drew howls of outrage from the Mayor's office, the suburban development industry, and the Tulsa Whirled. Two of the five were targeted for recall. Medlock was specifically told that if he approved the reappointment of Cameron and Reynolds and new water lines to Owasso, the recall effort would be dropped.

After months of lobbying and pressure, Sam Roop flipped his vote, going back on a signed commitment not to support the reappointment of Cameron and Reynolds under any circumstances. Shortly thereafter, Roop was appointed to a high-level position in Mayor Bill LaFortune's administration. Cameron and Reynolds were back in for another three-year term.

Saturday's Whirled had a story about Mayor Kathy Taylor's concerns about the TMUA. Decisions about the board's lobbyists and attorneys were made without consulting the board. She was left out of the loop on the change in lobbyists. One TMUA member, Richard Sevenoaks, has been excluded from membership on any of the TMUA's three committees. (The board has only seven members.)

If I'm not mistaken, Cameron and Reynolds should be up for reappointment next year. The Mayor should replace these two with board members who will look after the City of Tulsa's best interests first, who will be deferential to policies set by the city's elected officials, and who will not regard the TMUA as their personal fiefdom.

And sometime soon, the Tulsa Whirled, among others, should apologize to Henderson, Mautino, Medlock, and Turner for all the nasty things the paper wrote about them for opposing the reappointment of these two board members.

UPDATE: Tultellitarian has given Cameron and Reynolds the GOBble award.

Every week, Tulsa's City Councilors receive a bulletin with a list of upcoming city and county board and commission meetings, with hotlinks to the agendas for each, plus links to other news and articles worthy of our councilors' attention. The current weekly bulletin and an archive of back issues are available on the City Council website.

Of note in the latest issue: A 1950s photo of 71st and Memorial, back when it was a county road intersection, and a summary of the latest population trends. Metro area population grew 7% from 2004 to 2005, but the City of Tulsa lost 2.4%, dropping down to 370,447.

Last week, on August 23, Ed Chambers of the Federal Aviation Administration in Fort Worth sent a letter to Jeff Mulder (500 KB PDF file), head of the Tulsa Airport Authority (TAA), regarding discrimination by the TAA in the treatment of Fixed-Base Operators (FBOs) at Jones Riverside Airport, the City's general aviation facility west of the Arkansas River. The TAA manages Tulsa's two city-owned airports.

FBOs typically provide aviation fuel, repair services for aircraft and avionics, and facilities for the use of crew and passengers. AirNav lists two FBOs at Jones Riverside Airport (KRVS): Roadhouse Aviation, owned by Kent Faith, a pilot with American Airlines, and Christiansen Aviation, owned by City Councilor Bill Christiansen. (Click those links and scroll down to read comments from pilots about the two FBOs.)

The letter reminds Mulder that federally-funded airports are required to be evenhanded in their treatment of FBOs, in accordance with the airport's grant assurances. The FAA letter quotes Assurance 22c:

Each fixed-base operator at the airport shall be subject to the same rates, fees, rentals, and other charges as are uniformly applicable to all other fixed-base operators making the same or similar uses of such airport and utilizing the same or similar facilities.

The FAA is investigating a "Part 16 complaint" that Roadhouse Aviation has filed against the Tulsa Airport Authority, and the FAA's findings, after several delays, are expected in October. Like the Part 16 complaint, this letter deals with the TAA showing favoritism toward one FBO over another, but the letter addresses a separate issue.

In 2002, Roadhouse Aviation sought to lease an empty lot from the TAA for a new facility. The TAA board, prompted by new board member Ron Turner, placed a condition on Roadhouse's lease: Because the new facility was near one of several sites identified in a study as a potential future tower location, a condition was placed on Roadhouse's lease. If the FAA chose that location for a tower, Roadhouse would be required to tear down its new facility at the company's own expense, restoring the site to its undeveloped condition.

As a result of Roadhouse's lawsuit against TAA, the condition was removed from the lease, but a memorandum of understanding making the same commitment was placed in the airport's lease file. The added requirement meant added expense and delays for Roadhouse in getting the new facility financed and built.

Fast forward to April 2006. Two new hangars are being built by airport tenants, one by Christiansen Aviation, the other by Ray Booker. Both new hangars are within the required 300 foot clear area of four of the potential tower locations identified in the study. Because these two new facilities are in the same situation as the Roadhouse facility, the FAA wrote that, "they also should have the same memorandum in the airport's ground lease file that calls for their removal should the FAA decide to proceed with tower construction on this site."

But they don't. These two other tenants have not been subjected to the same conditions and agreements as Roadhouse Aviation. The letter says:

In the interest of treating all similarly situated FBOs the same, the memorandum requiring removal of facilities and restoration of the lease area at lessee's cost should the FAA opt to construct a new tower should be in all three of the lease files or in none.

We ask the airport operator to examine the lease records and respond to the allegation of unfairly treating one FBO in favor of two other FBOs by September 11, 2006.

The TAA should respond in one of two ways: (1) by saying that they have placed the same memorandum in the files of all similarly situated tenants, or (2) by saying that they have removed the memorandum from Roadhouse's file. This is a simple and straightforward situation, and the TAA should acknowledge the problem and correct it.

What the TAA should not do is what has been done so far in response to the Part 16 complaint: Have the Florida lawyer that was hired by the city send a lawyerly response filled with rationalizations and self-justifications.

What course of action the City and the TAA will take is up to Mayor Kathy Taylor. As an ex officio TAA board member, she can join with two reformers on the TAA board to fix the problem that the FAA has identified.

It's not a good sign that she nominated Ron Turner for another term on the TAA, when he seems to have been the driving force behind the policies that have put Tulsa in hot water with the Feds.

We don't need a team or a plan. We need the Mayor and the TAA to say to the Feds, "You're right, that was wrong, and we've already put things right." That attitude would serve the City well in dealing with the broader Part 16 complaint, and might help us avoid financial penalties that would hurt commercial aviation passengers who fly from Tulsa International as well as the private pilots who use Riverside.

I was pleased to hear this morning that Brandon Jackson and Ron Turner had withdrawn their names from reappointment to the TMAPC and the Tulsa Airport Authority, respectively. Both had drawn significant opposition based on their performance in office. Turner basically disqualified himself by saying that he would not appear before the Council for questioning, calling the Council a "kangaroo court."

That kind of contempt for the elected representatives of the citizens of Tulsa ought to be rewarded with a permanent ban from service on a board or commission. Future councils need to remember Turner's attitude.

Turner is a retired Brigadier General in the Air National Guard. Regarding Turner's contempt for the City Council, someone said that generals don't answer to privates. But generals do answer to the civilian authority of the President and the Congress. The reappointment process is the one opportunity the people of Tulsa have, through their elected representatives on the Council, to hold authority, board, and commission appointees accountable for their performance and judgment on these important boards.

Although they have withdrawn their names in writing, Turner's and Jackson's names still appear on tomorrow night's Council agenda, so it would be sensible for those in opposition to have a representative present, just in case. If they were to reverse themselves, the Council would have good cause to delay the hearing, since many opponents would have made other plans based on the news of their standing down.

In response to Turner's announcement, State Rep. Mark Liotta, whose district encompasses Tulsa International Airport, called on Mayor Kathy Taylor to appoint an airport neighbor to fill the seat on the Tulsa Airport Authority:

State Representative Mark Liotta called on Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor to appoint an airport area neighbor to the Board of Trustees of the Tulsa Airport Authority. "Mayor Taylor has an opportunity to appoint to the Board, someone who actually lives within the traffic and sound footprint of the airport." said Liotta. "This would be a great first step toward ensuring that all parts of Tulsa are given a voice."

"The board could only benefit from the perspective of an individual who understands the local effects of the airport on a daily basis." he said.

"Among the many active neighborhood leaders who are also airport area
residents, there should be no problem finding someone willing and uniquely able to serve their community."

The position became available when current member Brigadier General Ron Turner asked that his name be removed from consideration. General Turner had served on the board since 2002.

Liotta continued, "This individual would be keenly aware of the concerns of Tulsans who live within a mile radius of the airport, including neighborhood cohesion, street traffic patterns, industrial and commercial development, as well as airport noise abatement."

Rep. Liotta suggested that relations between the airport and its neighbors could be improved, "The best way to maintain good neighbors is by maintaining communication, and putting a neighbor on the board can certainly improve communication. This should have been a requirement for at least one of the board positions when the board was originally developed."

Representative Liotta's House district encompasses the entire Tulsa
International Airport and all the surrounding neighborhoods. Liotta has served in the House since 1996.

I can think of a number of excellent candidates, such as Carol Barrow and Laura Dowty of Layman Van Acres neighborhood (just south and east of the main runway) and David Schuttler, who has had to deal with all the problems in Cinnabar's management of the airport noise abatement program.

(I hope our new County Commissioners-to-be will take a similar step with regard to the Fairgrounds and put an Expo Square neighbor on the Tulsa County Public Facilities Authority.)

A majority of the City Councilors deserve credit for standing firm and asserting their right to ask questions and hear the concerns of the public on these controversial nominees. They held the line against Jim Beach's nomination to the Board of Adjustment, too, resulting in that nomination's withdrawal. Overall, the Mayor has gotten her way on over 100 nominations, so you can't fault the Council for scrutinizing only three of the Mayor's nominees.

My Tulsa World blog has video of yesterday's Council Committee hearing on Ron Turner's reappointment to the Tulsa Airport Authority. Turner has been asked to appear before the full City Council meeting to answer questions and respond to citizen complaints of his conduct during his time as a chairman and member of the TAA.

I posted this a year ago March, after a Council meeting when things didn't go as anyone expected. It seems appropriate again tonight:

Trust is a fragile thing.

Trust is essential to any human endeavor involving more than one person (which is to say, nearly every endeavor worthy of pursuit), but it is easily broken and once broken it is almost impossible to mend.

You can go from treasured friend to arms-length acquaintance and not realize it's happened until it's too late. It's like being demoted, but someone forgot to copy you on the memo. Good will is gone, and its absence is evident in body language and tone of voice. Warm smiles are replaced by chilly glares.

It comes down to this: Before, your actions and words were given the benefit of the doubt. Your good intentions were assumed. After, your actions and words are viewed with suspicion of dark motives, and actions and words from the past are reinterpreted in accordance with this new, negative theory of you.

And here's the worst part: Every effort you make to find out what went wrong, to mend fences, to seek restoration is viewed through the same lens of suspicion. Far from patching the hole, your efforts only dig it deeper. What sounds like a simple, reasonable explanation as it leaves your mouth reaches your erstwhile friend's ear as defensive and evasive.

(UPDATE: Dawn Summers posted a "not so random thought" a couple of days ago that captures this situation perfectly -- "I was there when we became friends, where was I when we became strangers?")

What can bring about such a dramatic change, in the absence of any intentional breach of trust? A seed of doubt, watered by imagination, is all it takes. The seed may be planted by accident, the misapplication of past experience, or it may be planted deliberately by someone seeking to destroy a friendship or an alliance.

In the battle for the Tulsa's future, the coalition of reformers is made up of people who are just getting to know each other, and the bond of trust is not yet fully formed. We are vulnerable to attack at this point, and we must guard against it.

Thursday night's City Council meeting didn't go the way anyone expected. Allies inadvertently ended up working at cross-purposes, but some observers jumped to the conclusion that there had been a betrayal, that some sort of deal had been cut to the disadvantage of the Reform Alliance. The seed of doubt was planted and imagination watered it. I'm hopeful that efforts to root it out quickly were successful.

Brethren, we need to watch and pray, because we are surely under attack. And we need to give each other the benefit of the doubt.

Someone said some words that were misunderstood and taken out of context. Instead of trying to settle this misunderstanding privately, those offended decided to take their dispute public. I have spent a good deal of my time these last three days trying to get everyone to talk to each other before bridges are irretrievably burned. It may be too late. The story is now in the hands of those who are gleeful at the prospect of the Reform Coalition torn asunder. I do not believe that was the intention of those who chose to take the matter public, but I fear that is the effect.

Please pray for peace and healing.

The final report from Tulsa's Citizens' Commission on City Government is the topic of this week's column in Urban Tulsa Weekly. The commission, appointed by then-Mayor Bill LaFortune last December, finished on schedule, made some constructive recommendations, including a recommendation against adding at-large seats to the City Council.

You can find the full text of the Citizens' Commission on City Government report on the Tulsans Defending Democracy website.

Also in this week's UTW, Ginger Shepherd covers the new Tulsa Public Schools superintendent, downtown revitalization in Muskogee, the recently passed City of Tulsa budget, and the sweet no-bid contract Murphy Bros. got to continue to run the Tulsa State Fair midway.

The story quotes Jerry Murphy, owner of Murphy Bros.:

Murphy added, �why would you fire someone that is doing a good job?� and been doing it for a long time?

In fact, the midway has been a disappointment for a long time, and Tulsa County Public Facilities Authority (TCPFA -- the fair board) members owed it to the public to see if another operator couldn't bring better, more reliable rides for better prices, but instead they continued the Tulsa County practice of awarding contracts to insiders without competition. Jerry Murphy's wife, Loretta Murphy, contributed $5,000 to the mayoral campaign of County Commissioner Randi Miller, who is also a member of the TCPFA and voted to approve the contract with Murphy Bros.

This week's column in UTW is about Mayor Kathy Taylor's first batch of appointments to city authorities, boards, and commissions (ABCs), particularly the appointment of Jim Beach to the Board of Adjustment, a move that has drawn opposition from neighborhood leaders and may provoke the end of Taylor's honeymoon. Taylor's appointment of Steve Berlin, a Great Plains Airlines board member, to the TARE board is also controversial.

Yesterday, long after I filed the story, I got word that the Taylor administration had pulled Beach's appointment off of this Thursday's Council agenda, and in fact it is missing from the online agenda, while the other appointments are still present.

Someone has said that any appointment to the Board of Adjustment is bound to be controversial, and that's true. You're almost certain to upset either the development lobby or the homeowners' groups. You have to choose which group you want to please and which group you want to anger, and Kathy Taylor has chosen to please the development lobby and anger neighborhood leaders with her first pick. That says a lot about the direction of her administration.

Also in this week's issue is Ginger Shepherd's story about the planned cleanup of Tent City, an unauthorized campground for the homeless between the north bank of the Arkansas River and the levee, west of downtown.

Shepherd also has a story about former Councilor and mayoral candidate Chris Medlock and his campaign for State House District 69.

The charter review commission that Bill LaFortune put in place last December following the failure of Tulsans for Better Government's supercouncilor initiative petition is nearing its scheduled conclusion. I spoke at last Friday's meeting at the invitation of Co-Chairman Ken Levit. This week's Urban Tulsa Weekly has my report on the meeting and the kind of recommendations the Citizens' Commission on City Government is likely to make. (For a complete picture, don't miss Bobby's entry at Tulsa Topics, which contains audio of my presentation and TU Professor Gary Allison's remarks.)

My column also includes an update on SB 1324, the bill that would interfere with local government control of Board of Adjustment appeals and enforcement of design rules in historic preservation and neighborhood conservation districts.

(By the way, on Wednesday the State Senate officially rejected House amendments to SB 1324 and requested a conference committee. Conferees have yet to be named.)

This issue also includes a Ginger Shepherd profile of new District 7 Councilor John Eagleton. (Previous issues featured District 2 Councilor Rick Westcott and District 4 Councilor Maria Barnes.)

Eagleton tells how he came up with the idea that would use a south Tulsa toll bridge and a nearby TIF district to fund improvements to the roads leading to the bridge and to cover the shortfall in the BOk Center arena, while giving BOk the financing for the bridge in exchange for dropping their lawsuit for the $7.5 million owed by Great Plains Airlines and guaranteed by the Tulsa Airport Improvements Trust:

He said he came up with the idea while sitting in a Creek County Court for a docket call. The docket that day was six to seven pages long, and he was bored while he waited to be called. He counted the ceiling tiles, his mind was wondering and then he "was hit like a bolt of lighting" with the idea.

Whatever the merits of Eagleton's idea, that's certainly a more constructive and acceptable way to beat boredom in a Creek County courtroom than other methods that have made the news.

This issue also includes coverage of Mayfest (also here), a continuation of the summer events guide, and a ballot for the 2006 Absolute Best of Tulsa awards.

This week's column covers three topics: (1) An update on the status of HB 2559 and SB 1324, the bills in the Oklahoma legislature which would dictate local zoning and land use policy from Oklahoma City; (2) Mayor Taylor's hiring of former City Councilor Susan Neal; (3) the topics under serious consideration by the Citizens' Commission on City Government, including non-partisan city elections.

Since the story was filed, I've learned that HB 2559 is dead, but SB 1324 has gone to conference committee and is still very much alive. I spoke yesterday to State Sen. Brian Crain, the Senate author of the bill, who believes that the provision requiring Board of Adjustment appeals to go directly to District Court is merely a clarification of existing law. He directed me to 11 O. S. 44-110. I mentioned that Tulsa's City Attorney office had said that Tulsa could change its zoning ordinance to allow certain BoA decisions to be appealed to the City Council, and that such a change was discussed by the previous City Council.

The other part of the bill amends 11 O. S. 44-104, and it appears to put design guidelines (such as those in use in historic preservation and neighborhood conservation districts) in the control of the Board of Adjustment, rather than special design review boards:

[The Board of Adjustment shall have power to] Hear and decide proposals for accessory elements associated with an allowed building use, where appropriate general performance and design standards have been established which promote greater economic value and provide a harmonious relationship with adjoining land uses by ordinance or by administrative rule or regulation. Such proposals and performance or design standards may include, but are not limited to, such accessory elements as sound, building material, runoff, lighting, visual screening, landscaping and vehicular considerations;

I understood Crain to say that that language was intended to give cities the flexibility to enable infill development, and that it was crafted with the help of INCOG staff. Crain said he was open to suggestions for clearer language.

While I am sure of Sen. Crain's good intentions, I don't see an urgent need for either provision. Unless cities are complaining that they are unable under present law to add flexibility to the zoning code, leave well enough alone. While Tulsa does need infill development, local government is best suited to design rules that will balance competing concerns and ensure that the investments of homeowners and developers alike are respected.

Your calls to state representatives and state senators are still needed to stop this bill, which I believe would set a precedent for further legislative interference in local zoning.

On the matter of the City Charter, I'll be speaking Friday afternoon at the invitation of the Citizens' Commission, mainly to address the issue of partisanship. Here's my column on the idea of multi-partisan elections, an alternative to the non-partisan concept. I hope also to get in a plug for Instant Runoff Voting, which we need already, but we'll need it more if we move toward any system in which primaries are eliminated.

Tomorrow Tulsa votes on a new one-percent sales tax, a tax that will stay in effect until it raises nearly half a billion dollars. I'll be on KFAQ, starting at 6:40 (a bit later than normal) for my usual Tuesday slot, then joining a panel discussion about the tax after the 7am news.

Here's a link to a 19-page PDF with the official ordinance containing the approved lists of projects.

I haven't had much to say about this one. My preferred solution -- 18 month extension to finish unfunded 2001 sales tax projects -- was passed over by a rush of deal-making by the last council. There are plenty of needed projects, but there's a lot that doesn't seem worthy of the third-penny, which was originally envisioned as a tax devoted to long-term capital improvements -- not computer equipment, not "rolling stock" (e.g., police cars), but things with a life span of 20 years or better.

If it failed, it wouldn't be the end of the world. The new mayor and council could put together a new package focused more on necessities, less on frills. It would mean a couple of months with a lower sales tax rate, rather than a seamless continuation of the same rate.

In the course of putting together my own roundup, I came across Steve Roemerman's comprehensive aggregation of third-penny sales tax stories, which he started collecting back in September.

Here's what other Tulsa bloggers are saying about the issue. I won't duplicate Steve's excellent effort, but I will pull out a few quotes of note.

Mad Okie says send it back to the drawing board:

If this proposal was about infrastructure and roads I wouldnt even be typing this, but its about repairing pools we cant afford to fill, improving roads & parking for an arena we cant afford to build, its for repairing a roof on a convention center that Vision 2025 is supposed to fix.

Voting this penny down will not destroy Tulsa, but it will show that you are not a sheep willing to be herded around by your city masters.

Bobby Holt
has a problem with the priorities, not with the penny:

I'm not against the 3rd Penny Sales Tax. My problem is the priorities that management, our elected officials, set. Every capital project can be categorized as either "needs" or "wants" and the current capital project listing for this 3rd penny is full of both. Basic needs of a city, public safety, roads, water, and sewer should take the largest chunk out of this tax. If not, our elected officials have their priorities askew.... So once again Tulsans have what appears to be a quickly thrown together package with a hefty list of "wants" attached to it.

Red Bug of Tulsa Chiggers writes:

Somehow over the decades this penny has been hijacked in usual fashion by those not so concerned with our crumbling infrastructure, but for a hodgepodge of porcine projects.

Our streets are a disgrace. Anyone with any reasoning knows that we need a major emphasis on improving streets. Yet this third penny gives only a token amount to street projects. My problem is not with the third penny so much as the priority of projects and what the projects themselves represent.

If, by some miracle, this tax is defeated, it only means we are telling politicans we don't like this plan, roll up your sleeves and give us another practical choice.

Dan Paden wonders how we afforded streets and police and fire protection and water service thirty-some years ago on a sales tax rate half of today's:

Oh, I remember the bad old days, back when I was a kid. Sales tax was only about four and a half cents on the dollar. Of course, we had no police, no fire department. No streets. No safety and no security. No city-county health department.

What? You don't believe that? But if we had all that, back then, at about four cents on the dollar less than we are paying now, what's all the extra money been for?

Buying votes, of course. If you're as sick of it as I am, then I encourage you to vote no on the Third Penny as well.

MeeCiteeWurkor hints at his preference.

Dave Schuttler reminds us that we still have a choice.

Regarding the second item on the ballot, which would add temporary hangars for the American Airlines maintenance base, Bobby has a link to a Daily Oklahoman article about an aerospace analyst who calls attention to the changing aircraft maintenance business and the risks of cities investing in that industry:

American Airlines is the only domestic airline that continues to do its own aircraft maintenance and is expanding operations to take on the work of other airlines. In the last few years, several U.S. airlines have been liquidated or filed for bankruptcy. Other airlines have continued to send their maintenance and repair work to outside contractors in the United States and around the world.

"This is a high-risk business," said William Alderman, president of Alderman & Co., a Connecticut-based aerospace and defense investment banking company. "Projects like this where state and local governments have invested money have been a complete disaster."

Alderman pointed to the United Airlines maintenance center in Indianapolis, where the state invested millions to get the center, only to have it shut down leaving workers without jobs. Oklahoma City was among the cities competing for the airline's maintenance facility in 1991. Losing the bid for the facility caused city leaders to put together the MAPS sales tax program.

I am worn out -- I've been up since 5 a.m. and going without a stop -- so I don't have much to say, but my fellow Tulsa bloggers do:

Several bloggers responded at length to Ken Neal's Sunday column in the Tulsa Whirled, which called for raising taxes to cover the cost overruns of the BOk Center:

• MeeCiteeWurkor:
  Ken Neal: Add-On tax for Arena


• Chris Medlock: You Can't Be the "I Told You So" Crowd, Unless... You Were Right in the First Place


• Dan Paden: Blistering the Weekly Fishwrap at No Cost

And the BOk Center made the cover of the latest Tulsa Inquiry.

MeeCiteeWurkor has Mayor Kathy Taylor's e-mail to city employees about her proposed budget and a response from an anonymous city employee.

MeeCiteeWurkor also has photos and a thoughtful entry about Monday's immigration protest at City Hall.

Tulsa Topics' Bobby was at the City Hall event, too, and has photos, including a panoramic crowd shot.

David Schuttler was at the anti-illegal-immigration rally at 21st and Garnett and has posted his mixed feelings about what he saw and some photos of the event.

Mad Okie has a question about mass healing services:

...as someone said to me a long time ago, "If they really had the gift of healing why aren't they down at the hospitals using their gift instead of making a stageshow out of it?"

Good discussion follows in the comments.

In the "Photo Fun" corner, Mad Okie has some truth-in-advertising billboards and bus benches, and Chris Medlock features State Rep. Ron Peters on an SB 1324-themed DVD cover. Nice midriff, Ron.

Red Bug at Tulsa Chiggers hosted a neighborhood crime awareness meeting in his home and writes about what he learned.

I caught the tail end of the Homeowners for Fair Zoning meeting tonight, after my son's baseball game. Former City Councilor Jim Mautino is the new HFFZ president. Other past, present, and future Councilors there: former District 2 Councilor Chris Medlock, District 4 Councilor Maria Barnes, and possibly-future District 5 Councilor Jon Kirby.

Kirby told me that Martinson has asked for a rehearing of the voter irregularity case, rather than signing off on the judge's order for a new election. Martinson, as the incumbent, will continue to serve until the revote is finally held. It may not happen until the July state primary date.

Monday afternoon, I pulled my nine-year-old out of school early and we met my wife and the other two kids at Gilcrease Museum for the inauguration of the Mayor, City Auditor, and City Council of Tulsa. We were happy to be there to honor our friends on the Council who were newly elected and newly re-elected.

Everyone was running a little late. Parking was a complete mess. I saw Alison Eagleton, the wife of one of the new councilors, and Councilor-elect Cason Carter pulling their cars out of a full parking lot and into an overflow lot just as the festivities were set to begin. Gilcrease hosted the event two years ago, but that wasn't a mayoral inauguration, so the crowd was a good deal smaller then. The last mayoral inauguration was held outdoors on the Williams Center Green.

The room was packed to capacity. We said hello to Councilors Roscoe Turner and Jack Henderson and their wives as we walked past the VIP section. Jim East offered my wife his seat and my daughter took the empty seat next to it, while I took the baby and his big brother and found a place to stand near the back of the room. My holding a very cute baby meant that there were some smiles in my direction from people who normally wouldn't smile at me.

We wound up standing just behind Ginger Shepherd, UTW's new city reporter, and just in front of Becky Darrow, from South Tulsa Citizens Coalition and Tulsans Defending Democracy. I noticed that the baby was much happier if I held him on my left shoulder where he could flirt with Becky.

Since no one (maybe not even Kathy Taylor) really knows what a Kathy Taylor administration is going to look like, we are all like a bunch of Sovietologists trying to discern the inner workings of the Kremlin based on who is standing next to whom atop Lenin's Tomb during the May Day parade.

The first clue of the day wasn't an encouraging one: Former KRMG morning host John Erling was the Master of Ceremonies. Erling was the radio mouthpiece of the Good Ol' Boy network, finally driven from his microphone last year by declining ratings.

Taylor's speech? Nothing much specific. She talked about her administration representing the diversity of Tulsa. If she really means geographical and ideological diversity, that's great. If she means there's a place at the table for supporters of Chris Medlock and Don McCorkell and Bill LaFortune and even Ben Faulk, that's wonderful. If she plans to look beyond the Midtown Money Belt for appointments to authorities, boards, and commissions, I applaud her. I hope she didn't mean that she'll surround herself with people who think just like she does and justify it because they have a diversity of ethnic backgrounds or political party affiliations.

My five-year-old daughter, who is on the petite side herself, complained after the ceremony that she still hadn't seen the new Mayor's face in person; she could only see the top of Taylor's head over the heads of the people in front of her.

We stayed around for a long time after the ceremony, shaking hands and chatting. I took a few pictures of dignitaries, and I had my son take a few of me with some of the councilors, but I missed a few shots I wanted because my son was busy taking pictures out the Vista Room window of the Osage Hills in bloom. (If you're on the home page, click the "Continue reading" link to see the photos.)

It's no surprise that the Tulsa Whirled continues to spin its revisionist web about the last two years at City Hall as a way to vindicate itself and to try to intimidate the incoming Council. With a little more free time on his hands, recently former City Councilor Chris Medlock does an able job of rebutting the Whirled's assertions with reality.

Unable and unwilling to debate the Council reformers on issues, the Whirled and the entrenched special interests painted a portrait of lies, and through frequent repetition they got their readers to believe it. It's the same phenomenon I described in my Thursday, November 24, 2005, column:

That sort of accusation by implication happens a lot at City Council meetings, but with reform-minded City Councilors as the target. The accusers are city officials who find themselves being asked polite, reasonable questions that they�d rather not answer. To deflect attention from the substantive issue at hand, they complain that they�re being bullied or browbeaten. The daily paper duly reports the baseless complaints, which gives their editorial board a chance to wheeze out a few paragraphs deploring the behavior that didn�t happen.

I challenge anyone to point to one example of rudeness from those two men -- name the date and the occasion. I never saw it or anything approaching it.

The Whirled editorial that Medlock rebuts is about Tulsa's water policy. It was the belief of a majority of the City Council that the City of Tulsa should reexamine its policy concerning water sales to the suburbs. Instead, the Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority and Mayor Bill LaFortune rushed to commit the city to 40-year sweetheart deals that were not necessarily to Tulsa's advantage. At the same time, suburban developers financed a campaign to break the Council majority through the recall of the two councilors their polling told them were most vulnerable.

Oklahoma City charges outside-the-city customers from 25% to 75% more than inside-the-city customers. Meanwhile, Tulsa sells water wholesale to outside customers at the same price city residents pay -- $1.98 per thousand gallons. Medlock and Mautino and the other councilors thought Tulsa ought to be smarter about how it handles water sales.

Owasso is certainly smart -- they buy water from Tulsa at the same price Tulsans pay, then they mark it up and pocket the profits to pay for municipal services. Owasso's city manager, Rodney Ray, raised a ruckus because some wise Tulsa councilors were talking about doing something for Tulsa's benefit that might cut into his profits.

Someone over on the TulsaNow Forum (currently broken due to Microsoft web server issues) wondered recently about using water revenues to make up Tulsa's likely budget shortfall. Chris Medlock and Jim Mautino wondered about that, too. For their trouble their reputations were trashed, and they and their families were put through a recall ordeal that lasted nearly a year. They've been falsely accused of being rude, mean, impolite -- all adjectives that better fit their accusers. To the TulsaNow forum poster who wondered about that, where the heck were you when these two forward-thinking councilors needed your support? And are you going to be there for the new city councilors when they get flack for thinking outside the box?

As I mentioned earlier, the Whirled's aim with this editorial is partly vindication, partly to warn the incoming councilors not to cross them. This editorial was published for the same reason that King Edward Longshanks had William Wallace's head displayed on a pike on London Bridge -- pour encourager les autres.

There's a mythology surrounding councilors of the past who were savaged (and Savaged) by the political and media establishment. The myth says that those councilors somewhat deserved the trashing and bashing they received -- they pushed things too far or too fast, they didn't choose their battles carefully, they were inflexible, they were unwilling to compromise.

A new councilor will be tempted to think, "If I'm just smart -- like they weren't -- I'll get positive things done for the City, I'll emerge without a scratch, and everybody will like me." Lady and gentlemen, if you do the job you were elected to do, if you faithfully seek the best interests of the citizens of Tulsa, you will get trashed. You will get trashed by powerful and entrenched interests who don't care if a policy is good for Tulsa as long as it's good for them and their cronies.

As for the temptation to distance yourself from the legacy of Jim Mautino and Chris Medlock -- just remember that six of the nine of you were elected because you were more like Chris and Jim than your opponents were. Your opponents got money from the same people who tried to give Medlock and Mautino the boot, and you beat them. Your opponents complained about bickering at City Hall, and you beat them. If you aren't getting any pushback at all from the Whirled, the Chamber, the Public Works Department, or the development lobby, we're going to assume you aren't doing the job we sent you to do.

Jim Mautino and Chris Medlock have a proud record of achievement during their too-short time at City Hall. West Tulsa is getting a new superregional shopping center which will bring in sales-tax revenues from residents of Tulsa's rapidly growing south and west suburbs. For the first time in nearly 20 years of the City's contract with the Chamber, there's real oversight of how that $2 million a year gets spent. We have a city-specific economic development plan. We're going to get a new comprehensive land use plan. We have an ethics ordinance in place, so that conflicts of interest are properly disclosed and handled.

District 6 and District 2 are getting long-overdue infrastructure improvements. Charter changes are now in place to protect homeowners from arbitrary rezonings, to avert another wasted year on a frivolous recall effort, and to ensure that appointees to authorities, boards, and commissions face regular review by our elected representatives.

All of that happened because Chris Medlock and Jim Mautino and their allies were willing to push those issues and to take some heat as a result, but also to compromise enough to get majority support and a mayoral signature. What more might they have accomplished without the distraction of a recall election?

By all means, learn from their mistakes, but don't ignore their many successes. Build on those successes.

I'm off in a few minutes to attend the 2:00 p.m. inauguration of the new Mayor and City Council of Tulsa at Gilcrease Museum, in the Vista Room. The event is of course open to the public, but I was honored to receive personal invitations to attend from three members of the incoming Council.

As an inauguration gift to the incoming councilors, particularly the Republicans, I'd like to present this January 2002 article by grassroots organizer Morton C. Blackwell: Advice to a Just-Elected Conservative Friend. Some key excerpts that contain echoes of the campaign just ended:

If significant political forces which supported your election decide you can no longer be the object of their affection, they will make you the object of their pressure. And when you run into a few troubles, as every elected official does, they won't instinctively jump to support you. They will ask themselves, "Why bother?"

Keep the faith. You can't make friends of your enemies by making enemies of your friends. Learn to live with the reality that some people won't like you if you do what you were elected to do.

No matter what you do, some people will be your enemies. They will never love you, so don't worry about trying to make them love you. You can make most of them respect you, though. If you work at it, you can learn better the art of how to say unpleasant things pleasantly. If you keep your word, you can keep your friends and win at least respect from most of your enemies....

The local, state and national political landscapes are littered with the moldering wrecks of the careers of politicians who won conservative support by giving their word on conservative principles and then broke their pledges....

In a system of separation of powers and checks and balances, most people realize you can't accomplish everything you'd like to. But you must say and do things which prove you are doing the best you can to live up to your supporters' reasonable expectations.

Complete victories are delightful but rare. You should prove yourself willing sometimes to win only incremental victories and sometimes to fight losing battles for good causes.

Curious as it may seem, a politician rarely hurts himself when he fights in a principled way for a cause which loses or against a cause which wins.

It's not exactly the Federalist Papers, but here's a fascinating glimpse of the intent behind Tulsa's form of government, from the debates that preceded the adoption of the 1989 City Charter.

From the January 11, 1989, Tulsa Whirled, then Police and Fire Commissioner Bob Dick speaks in support of the proposed mayor-council charter which was up for a vote that February 14:

Dick said some people are worried city councilors would argue among themselves.

"What's wrong with that?" Dick asked. "Why shouldn't we hear differing views on the issues that will arise?

"Our form of government tends to chill a little bit of the public debate over some issues," he said. "There is a tendency that if I need something I may not want to attack the street commissioner or the water commissioner because I may need his or her vote.

"I'm not saying that happens all the time. But it can happen," Dick said.

From a debate with Tom Quinn, in the February 2, 1989,
Whirled:

Quinn said the mayor, the chief administrator who would serve a four-year term, would erect a political empire through doling contracts without competitive bidding and through appointments on commissions, trusts and authorities.

"It all boils down to how benevolent the dictator is," Quinn said.

Dick countered that council approval of the mayor's proposed budget is required, as is approval for all appointments, including division heads.

Dick also said the auditor "would be the 'anti-mayor,'" counterbalancing through whistle blowing any abuses of power by the mayor or council.

I'd say Tom Quinn was prescient. His is an apt description of city government during the Savage years, and I suspect we can expect the same under a Kathy Taylor administration. It wasn't until the City Council had members who were assertive enough to "argue among themselves" that the Mayor began to be held in check. We finally have a critical mass of councilors who are assertive enough to buck the Mayor on appointments and other issues. It has helped to have a mayor who hasn't used the office's leverage to keep the Council on a leash.

The Council could be even more effective as a check on the Mayor's power with the passage of Propostition 1, which would give the Council the right to employ an attorney independent of the City Attorney's management.

What we haven't had to date is an Auditor that has acted as an anti-mayor. Phil Wood has done a competent and thorough job for the last 18 years, but he has taken a quiet behind-the-scenes approach to the job, rather than acting as a whistleblower. His focus has been on ensuring that the city follows sound financial practices and controls. I applaud Wood's pioneering work to make city government information available on his personal website, which preceded the official city website by a few years.

Michael Willis, the Republican challenger to Wood, has suggested that the City Auditor could be more proactive in working with the Council to conduct performance audits of city departments -- going beyond asking whether money is being spent as authorized to ask whether money is being spent wisely. That's worth considering.

I was inclined to vote for Wood, because what he has done, he has done well, even if he hasn't fulfilled the potential of the office, and he has a reputation of being above the fray of partisan politics.

What pried me loose from that position was a $2,000 contribution from Wood's campaign to the campaign of Dennis Troyer, the Good Ol' Boy candidate trying to unseat District 6 Councilor Jim Mautino. Mr. Wood has picked a side in the struggle to make Tulsa's government work for all Tulsans, and he picked the wrong one.

(UPDATE 4/3/2006: From Phil Wood I learn that his campaign gave only $200 to the Troyer campaign, not $2,000 as reported in the Tuesday, March 28, 2006, Tulsa Whirled. While the Tulsa Whirled printed a correction in the next day's edition, they didn't note the correction in their online story, nor did they link the correction in their special election section of their website, which is available without charge to non-subscribers. Here is Wood's explanation of the contribution and the discrepancy in amounts:

The Tulsa World published that my campaign contributed $2,000 to Troyer's campaign. I sent them a copy of his report clearly showing $200 (not 2,000) and they published a correction the following day.

I contributed the $200 to encourage distribution of my signs since the 'sign crew' is primarily my wife Emily and me.

I called Councilor Mautino the morining of the publication to assure him I had not given $2,000 to his opponent.

Thanks to Phil Wood for the clarification. I was also told by someone who spoke to Wood that he said he had given $200 to each of the Democratic candidates to encourage them to place his yard signs in their districts. $200 gifts are not required to be reported, and presumably wouldn't appear to be an endorsement. In this case, the Troyer campaign chose to report the gift, which was misread by the newspaper as a $2,000 gift.)

The fact that Willis until recently worked for LaFortune is a concern, but if we wind up with Taylor as Mayor, Willis could be a good counterbalance. He doesn't have Phil Wood's decades of experience, but the actual audit work is done by a team of internal auditors, under the management of the City Auditor. And he would inherit the procedures and policies established by Wood.

On the other hand, Willis endorsed City Council District 9 Good Ol' Boy candidate Jeff Stava and last year co-founded a PAC with Stava. (The PAC hasn't spent any money.)

My inclination is to vote for a move toward a more active, visible role for the City Auditor.

Yes, I know I was slammed by the Whirled in yesterday's lead editorial. I will respond, but not tonight, as I am already up too late and have an early morning and a long day ahead of me.

Meanwhile, my son played his first little league game of the year tonight. He scored the winning run!

District 6 City Councilor Jim Mautino will have a town hall meeting tomorrow evening, Wednesday, March 22, at 6:30 p.m., at Martin East Regional Library, 26th & Garnett.

Here's the agenda, according to Mautino's website:

• So that you may have the opportunity to make an informed decision about who you want to be your voice at City Hall
• Short informational powerpoint presentation on the 3rd penny sales tax extension
• What street, water, and sewer projects are in the works and what is proposed
• What can be done for all of us to feel safer and what can be done to improve our streets
• What are our options regarding Eastland Mall
• "From the Floor" Question and Answer Session covering all your areas of concern -- Questions will NOT be prescreened

Jim is in a tough race, and he could use your help to get the word out about his accomplishments as a City Councilor. Call 437-2642 to volunteer. If you have friends and family in District 6, encourage them to support Jim and to attend tomorrow night's Town Hall. (Click here to see a map of the district.)

UPDATE: Volunteers will be walking neighborhoods on Saturday to hand out campaign material for Jim Mautino. To help out, meet Saturday at 10:00 a.m. at Jim's house, 14628 E. 12th St.

Thursday night the Tulsa City Council gave the green light to the Tax Increment Finance district for the Tulsa Hills retail development between 71st and 81st on the east side of US 75. Steve Roemerman and I were both there, and both of us spoke in support. Steve has a good summary of the debate and discussion.

The final vote was 8-to-Martinson. If I were Jon Kirby's campaign manager, I'd record the replay, grab some audio or quotes and use it in the final weeks of the campaign. Martinson's performance undermines any claim Martinson might make to being reasonable, pro-Tulsa-business, and pro-Tulsa-development.

Martinson claimed he just had questions that needed answers, but he undermined his credibility by asking repeatedly if there weren't better ways to spend the $16.5 million in taxpayer money involved in this project. But those tax dollars won't be generated if the development doesn't go forward. I'm sure he understood that, so why act like he didn't?

At one point, the taxpayer who would be generating those revenues was recognized -- the developer, John Collett. As the sole owner within the boundaries of the TIF, part of his property taxes (the increment over the current taxes on the land) will go to repay the bonds which will finance the roads and water lines and sewer lines needed by the development. Some of the sales taxes generated by the center will as well, but only up to a certain amount each year, and only until the bonds are repaid. No taxing entity loses any money that they are currently receiving, and taxes aren't raised on anyone else to pay for it.

Martinson, Neal, Baker, and Sullivan all wanted to move the issue back to committee, but Medlock held firm, saying that everyone was here who might be needed to answer Martinson's doubts, and that he was willing to spend the time necessary. Christiansen wasn't willing to wait, as his wife (a school teacher) was off for spring break next week, and they planned to be out of town. Martinson seemed angry at Christiansen, saying that he thought Christiansen had an open mind but it was apparent that he was all for it. Martinson said something about Christiansen giving him some leads to pursue -- presumably leads that would help derail this project.

One aspect of the proceedings confirmed the appropriateness of the label "Cockroach Caucus": Christiansen, Martinson, Neal, and Sullivan all said that they had heard from experts and people more knowledgeable than they who said that this was a bad deal, but none of those knowledgeable experts were named, and none of them showed up to argue for killing the deal. Rather than have the debate in the light of public scrutiny, these shadowy opponents remained hidden. And when it was apparent that they wouldn't be able to move the issue back to committee, the opposition from these councilors disappeared.

I think the plan was to push it back to committee and to continue to delay and delay until options on key pieces of land were set to expire, making it impossible for the project to proceed. I suspect that other investors want to see a big-box center closer to 121st Street and US 75, between Jenks and Glenpool. If Tulsa Hills went forward, a center five miles south wouldn't be able to attract that same collection of tenants.

A commenter on my previous entry expressed surprise and amusement about my concern for the success a big-box development. Would I rather this be a mixed-use, New Urbanist village? Of course. I don't like the fact that between 71st and 81st there is no access from the East or the West to this development -- you're going to see traffic nightmares because of this. I'm hoping they'll respect the topography and the trees, but I don't expect that they will.

But I'm realistic enough to know that this kind of development is going to go in somewhere in southwest Tulsa County. The demographics are ripe for it, and if it isn't built by these developers in the city limits of Tulsa, it'll be built by someone else outside the City of Tulsa, and some other city will reap the tax windfall. That's money to pay for police, streets, and sewers. That money will help finance improvements to downtown and inner city neighborhoods, too.

How can I support big-box retail here, but not on Cherry Street or Brookside? It's a matter of scale and compatibility. This development is going to be next to a limited-access highway, and is designed to attract customers from a wide radius, particularly to the south and west where there are no comparable facilities. And there isn't an existing neighborhood that it has to be compatible with.

A big-box store would damage the pedestrian-oriented qualities of neighborhoods like Cherry Street and Brookside unless it met certain design guidelines to make it pedestrian-oriented -- e.g, a two-story Lowe's, with parking in the basement. Even then, the scale of such a store would overwhelm these neighborhoods of small-scale retail right next to homes. The Brookside Plan is a good first step in defining what would be compatible new development in that neighborhood, but it needs teeth -- design guidelines for selected areas need to be part of our land-use code.

In Miami's Kendall area, they've built a big-box center where it's all stacked vertically and connected to a transit station. It can be done, but it won't be done unless the City of Tulsa requires it.

Congratulations to the Council, and particularly to Chris Medlock, who has been working with the developer and the Urban Development Department for two years to bring this to fruition. He deserves some credit, too, for building support for this from his fellow councilors and for rallying community representatives to show up and support this.

Speaking in support of this plan were Darla Hall, the former District 2 councilor whom Medlock twice defeated, and Randi Miller, the County Commissioner and former District 2 councilor who probably kept Medlock from winning the GOP nomination for mayor. Rick Westcott was there, too, so you had everyone who ever represented the affected council district there speaking in support. Despite past disagreements and rivalries, they all came to support this project for the benefit of west Tulsa.

My column this week is about the six Tulsa city charter amendments on the April 4 ballot, and why you should vote FOR all six.

I wrote a column about these amendments, and those that didn't make the cut, back in November, right after the amendments had been approved for the ballot. It's instructive to see which councilors supported and which opposed each one.

At TulsaNow's forum, there's a lively discussion about the need for Proposition 1, which would allow the Council to hire legal help independent of the City Attorney's office. Michelle Cantrell (posting as "pmcalk") makes some excellent points.

Also in this week's issue of Urban Tulsa Weekly:

Jarrod Gollihare has the first in a series of stories about charismatic universalist preacher Carlton Pearson.

UTW's new city reporter, Ginger Shepherd, has a story about the proposed sprinkler ordinance for residential high-rises and another story about a dispute between Community Care College and students over the school's veterinary program.

The cover features the poker craze, and Barry Friedman reports from an illegal private game and from the casinos.

Wonder whatever happened to KTUL sports director Mike Ziegenhorn? So did David Austin, who spoke to Zig and his old boss at KTUL.

Tomorrow night the Tulsa City Council will vote on whether to approve a Tax Increment Finance (TIF) district for Tulsa Hills, a major shopping destination planned for the east side of US 75 between 71st Street and 81st Street. The center would attract shoppers from west Tulsa, Jenks, Glenpool, Sapulpa, and other cities further to the south and west. A study of retail opportunities within the City of Tulsa identified this site and one near I-44 and 129th East Avenue as the optimum locations for a new major retail development.

Do I need to spell it out again? Retail generates sales tax, and sales tax pays for police, fire protection, street repair, and every other city service. With all the residential development, there's going to be a major retail development west of the river, and if it isn't in the City of Tulsa, we lose.

The idea behind a TIF is that you take an area not producing much in the way of taxes and finance infrastructure improvements to the area via the increase in taxes resulting from new development. Tulsa has a number of TIFs in and near downtown; the one centered on Home Depot has been the most successful.

"Increment" is the key word. The various taxing authorities are still getting the same amount of money they had been getting, but the incremental dollars are used for improvements within the district. The hope is that improvements within the district will stimulate development outside the district that will also generate more tax revenues.

It takes a long time to put together a TIF. You have to get the support of every public entity with a claim on those property taxes. In this location that means the City of Tulsa, the Jenks School District, Tulsa County, the Tulsa City-County Library, the Tulsa City-County Health Department, the Tulsa Technology Center (Vo-Tech), Tulsa Community College, and I think there's one more, but I can't think of it at the moment.

The final hurdle requires the affirmative vote of seven councilors. (Hey, wait a minute -- I thought we couldn't have supermajorities under our Charter.) That may be a problem. Bill Martinson, Councilor for District 5, has been making noises like he may vote against it. In a previous council meeting, Bill Christiansen raised concerns about this new shopping center stealing customers from Woodland Hills Mall.

But the more accurate comparison is to 71st between Garnett and Mingo, a collection of big box stores and smaller retail. East and southeast Tulsa, Broken Arrow, and Bixby residents will still shop along that corridor, because it will still be more convenient than going another seven miles further west.

The real target for this shopping center are the residents of new upscale housing in Jenks, Glenpool, and unincorporated parts of northeastern Creek County. If Tulsa Hills isn't built, these shoppers will still be stolen from 71st and 169, but instead of those retail dollars staying in Tulsa, the new shopping center will be in Glenpool, and that's where the tax revenue will go.

There's another problem if this TIF is turned down. This has been a lengthy process, and if it ends before being consummated, Tulsa will have trouble attracting other developers to anchor other TIF districts.

I encourage you to show your support at tomorrow (Thursday) night's City Council meeting. Help Councilors Martinson and Christiansen understand how important this is to Tulsa.

Here is a link to a 19-page PDF file with the list of "third-penny" projects approved by the City Council on Thursday for a May 9th election.

$71 million of the package consists of incomplete projects from the 2001 third-penny. Of the $385 million in new projects, here are some interesting figures that give you a sense of the priorities of the outgoing City Council:

$41 million for culture and recreation, including new and expanded parks facilities that will require more money from the first two pennies for operation. That amount also includes $2 million for convention center renovations, something we were told that the $183 million in Vision 2025 funds for the arena and convention center was going to pay for. That $2 million replaces money shifted to the arena to pay for the "iconic" glass wall.

$32 million for police equipment and facilities -- a helicopter, police cars, and a new police lab and property room.

$24,150,000 for downtown projects, spread out among various categories. That doesn't count five downtown street projects out of 22 in the "arterial streets -- major rehabilitation" category. The capital project inventory in the 2005-6 budget (p. 34, item 108) lists downtown street and sidewalk improvements at $9.2 million, so let's use that number in the absence of a project-by-project breakdown in the third-penny plan. That makes $33,350,000 for downtown compared to $32,000,000 for the police department.

I'm taking a quick break from work to post this breaking news.

Over the transom comes some very good news for Tulsa and the Tulsa Metro Chamber, news of the first victim of Tuesday's City Council results:

Dear Steve and members of the Board:

Please accept this letter as notice of my resignation effective no later than January 16, 2007. I will plan to leave my position at a mutually agreed upon time that works for me and my family, as well as you and the Chamber and our contractual obligations to each other.

I submit this resignation with mixed emotions. The Tulsa Metro Chamber and Tulsa have been my passions for the past eight years. All of the accomplishments we have achieved together are too numerous to mention in this letter. Highlights to me are: a streamlined organization that is focused on economic development and the issues that impact economic development; a large, stable, and active membership that has been engaged through the creation of new programs that benefit business, our organizational relationships, and our community; the Chamber is supported by our members at the highest level in its 100 year history with a budget that has grown from approximately $5 million to $8 million during the past few years; we are on point on all of the major issues impacting Tulsa�s business community and we pass the initiatives we support, the most significant being Vision 2025, which is focused on economic development and higher education; and, today the public policy issues we are tackling, and the strategic directions of our new Tulsa�s Future program and our Convention and Visitors Bureau are focused, meaningful and tight.

I am leaving behind a contemporary organization that is truly poised to provide direction and leadership in a community that has broken out of a long period of complacency about itself. Today Tulsans are restless and looking to take the leap forward, a sleeping giant has been awakened. The Chamber has played a big role in waking the giant. We recently were nationally recognized as America�s Best Metro Chamber. This Chamber can make a big difference in leading forward. We have great community leaders around our various tables, we have an experienced and talented executive team and staff, and we have the desire to make good things happen.

On a personal note, I am a guy that needs to make a difference. I will look for a new challenge either here or someplace else where I can make that happen. Meanwhile, when we moved here eight years ago we sold the sailboat and boxed up the skis. The skis haven�t been out since. It is too late in the season for the skis, but maybe we will see you on the lake.

Very truly yours,

Jay M. Clemens

Commentary later.

UPDATE: Before you read the news stories below, here are two primary documents:

• Mayor Bill LaFortune's press release about placing Police Chief Dave Been on administrative leave.


• Police Chief Dave Been's statement in response to the Mayor's claims.

Mayor Bill LaFortune has placed Police Chief Dave Been on administrative leave, claiming that Been withheld a consultant's report about the department's SWAT unit.

KOTV is reporting:

Police Chief Been sent us a statement that says in part, "Mayor Bill LaFortune was fully informed of the audit and approved the contract." He said he received five copies of the report on February 10th and gave them to the SWAT team's chain of command to review. He said the report was common knowledge within the department and was delivered to the Mayor's chief of staff immediately when it was requested on February 15th.

This seems like a very disproportionate response, and you have to wonder: The FOP didn't endorse LaFortune. Without directly calling LaFortune a fool or a liar, Been has been on the radio saying that, yes, more police officers would actually reduce crime and make Tulsa a safer place. Meanwhile LaFortune has been trying to sell the idea that "more police officers mean more arrests mean a higher crime rate," that we have an adequate number of officers for a city our size. This looks like retribution by LaFortune against a department that won't play with make-believe with him.

Over on the TulsaNow forum, a forum participant calling himself "ChazInTulsa" says Been was on KRMG radio this morning, and when asked for his endorsement, Been said that he can't get involved in politics, but the FOP speaks for him.

(Here's a link to the KRMG clip, in Windows Media format, courtesy David Schuttler.)

It is interesting that LaFortune would be so swift in taking action, when you remember how he dragged his feet in dealing with leadership failures at the airport, failures that jeopardized Tulsa's federal funding.

In case you've missed hearing about it, this Sunday, 2 p.m., KFAQ is holding a rally in support of Tulsa's police officers at LaFortune Stadium, between 51st and 61st on Hudson Ave, just north of Memorial High School. This has suddenly become an even more interesting event than it already was.

meeciteewurkor has some thoughts and interesting comments here.

And I thought I heard Terry Simonson calling in to KFAQ's Dillon Dodge show, and if I understood what I heard correctly, he seemed to think that some person or persons in the Police Department who wanted to push Been out of the way, and they convinced LaFortune that he could regain support among police officers by getting rid of Been.

UPDATE: Dan Paden comments:

Of course, I don't know. If the Mayor is really justified in his actions, you have to feel a bit sorry for him, 'cause it sure looks like he's behaving like a spoiled, petulant child. And so close to the primary, too. Surely he's smart enough not to do something like this unless he has to.

On the other hand, I guess there's always the possibility that he really isn't smart enough not to behave like a spoiled, petulant child just before the primary. I know what that's like. Done it enough times m'se'f. Behave that way, that is, not that I've ever been in a primary election.

Tulsans for Better Government (TBG), the group promoting a petition to dismember three Tulsa City Council districts and adding three supercouncilor seats (to be elected citywide to four year terms), filed ethics reports with the City Clerk's office, as required by state law. As of December 31, 2005, the group has accumulated $66,350.00 and has spent $18,882.14. Given that they suspended the petition drive on December 5, it will be interesting to see what they do with the remaining money.

Here is the list of donors disclosed on those forms, in descending order of amount contributed:

No time to analyze this, but feel free to comment on who gave, their connections with various interests, and their possible motivations.

At Thursday's City Council meeting, District 8 City Councilor Bill Christiansen read a proposed resolution concerning the south Tulsa toll bridge. The resolution outlined a compromise position that would allow a bridge to be built, but not under the current arrangement between Tulsa County and Infrastructure Ventures, Inc. (IVI).

It sounded very familiar to me. That's probably because it was nearly identical to a plan that Cliff Magee, Christiansen's opponent in the Republican primary, put forward on January 23. Dave Schuttler linked to it on Our Tulsa World at 4:41 that afternoon. The Tulsa Beacon featured a story about Magee's plan in this week's issue, which went to press on Tuesday. Christiansen's plan first saw the light of day on Thursday's Council agenda.

It's an annoying reality in politics -- you can put forward a great idea, and your opponent can rip it off and claim it for his own. If your opponent has the support of the local power structure, he may even get away with it.

Magee's plan is better than Christiansen's copy in one important respect. Both plans involve setting up a public trust, but Magee would have the City of Tulsa as the only beneficiary of the trust, while Christiansen would include the county and other municipalities.

I am hoping that south Tulsa voters who are concerned about the bridge are also concerned about the bigger political picture that makes deals like IVI's possible, that they won't settle for someone who backs them on their pet issue, but will support candidates who will work with other reformers for positive change at City Hall.

My wife worked for American Airlines for a number of years, before the airline spawned the SABRE Group as a separate business. It was a good company, she liked her job, and we appreciated the flight benefits. I have no axe to grind with Tulsa's largest private employer, but I don't see the point in spending another $4 million in taxpayer dollars for the special benefit of one company.

Mayor Bill LaFortune has proposed adding a little over $4 million to his "Third Penny" sales tax plan, extending the duration of the tax by another month. The money would pay to build temporary hangars at Tulsa International Airport for the use of American Airlines' maintenance operation.

AMR, American's parent company, lost over $600 million in the last three months of 2005. Over the course of 2005, AMR lost $861 million. The loss in 2004 was $761 million. The company will be paying out an estimated $78 million in bonuses to upper management. AMR has $3.8 billion in unrestricted cash on hand.

The money LaFortune proposes to spend on AA is a drop in the bucket from the airline's perspective. So why this last minute push to add it to the Third Penny package?

Reason #1 is to try to salvage his plan to put a six-year renewal on the ballot for the general election. A majority on the City Council is leaning toward passing an 18 month extension of the current tax, to pay for projects approved in 2001 that haven't yet been funded. If that happens, LaFortune looks ineffective, and he loses the ability to sell his reelection based on the new projects in his plan. The AA subsidy creates a sense of urgency -- the claim will be made that if we pass only an extension to pay for already-approved projects, it may cost our city jobs.

Reason #2 -- it's a response to the story that he cost Tulsa jobs by snubbing the airline. He sent a deputy to a meeting with AA officials about bringing new maintenance work to Tulsa, while he went off to Mississippi with ORU students and members of Guts Church to help rebuild the hurricane-damaged town of Long Beach and to shore up his support for re-election with a segment of Tulsa's charismatic community. Kathy Taylor has said LaFortune being AWOL in this situation is the main reason she decided to run for Mayor.

Reason #3 -- he's hoping for the endorsement of the Transport Workers' Union (TWU) and the help of their membership with his campaign. LaFortune was heard today saying that the Firefighters' Union (which was early to endorse his re-election) would be helping him put out campaign signs, and he was hoping to get the TWU's help with that, too. (How will Republican voters feel about re-nominating a mayor whose primary base of support is the labor unions?)

Whatever LaFortune's reasons for wanting this, it's not wise to include the money in the Third Penny, which ought to be for basic infrastructure improvements. Nor should we be putting all our eggs in one basket; we need to cultivate other sources of jobs. And it shouldn't be the City of Tulsa paying for this alone. Many AA employees live in Owasso, Broken Arrow, and elsewhere in the region, and all stand to benefit from any growth in AA's local workforce.

This proposal ought to stand separately from any other ballot item. Mayoral candidate Don McCorkell has suggested using a general obligation bond issue to pay for the hangars. Others have suggested that the suburbs chip in their fair share.

Chris Medlock has pointed out that direct government subsidy of business is a losing game in the long run, and why should we single out one company and ignore other businesses that may leave the city? I think the subsidy is a bad idea, but even if it weren't, it still has no business being part of our city's essential capital improvements program.

One of the baseless charges tossed at Tulsa City Councilors Jim Mautino and Chris Medlock during last year's recall attempt was that the two were anti-growth and anti-development. The reality is that both are boosters of quality new development in the two underdeveloped sections of the city that they represent -- far east and west Tulsa respectively. What has put them at odds with the development lobby is that Medlock and Mautino believe the City ought to prioritize its resources and infrastructure to encourage new development within Tulsa's city limits.

Both councilors have worked with developers to encourage and facilitate new developments in their districts. Medlock helped shepherd Tulsa Hills, a major retail development at 71st and US 75. Mautino has worked with developers interested in the I-44 corridor for mixed use projects and other locations around east Tulsa that would be prime locations for new housing.

What Mautino and his constituents don't want is to turn east Tulsa into a dumping ground for all the uses that aren't wanted in other parts of the city or metro area. As a neighborhood activist, he made some enemies by insisting that the concrete batch plant on 11th Street west of 145th abide by the rules for screening and stormwater management. East Tulsa has a dramatic north-south ridge with views of the city to the west and the Verdigris River valley to the east. There are hills and streams and woods, and historic Route 66 runs through the middle of it. The four-mile-long section of I-44 where it is joined with US 412 is the busiest segment of highway in the State of Oklahoma, and with some infrastructure improvements it would be an excellent location for retail.

Unfortunately, the area has been overlooked for most of the 40 years it has been within the city limits of Tulsa. Most areas still do not have water or sewer service, making development even more risky and expensive. Worse, the negative perception of Tulsa Public Schools and East Central High School in particular are deterrents to new housing developments. To my knowledge, the last subdivision built in that part of the city was Indian Hills (legally Rolling Hills IV) in the mid-70s.

Recently, a new 400-home subdivision proposed for the southeast corner 11th and 161st East Avenue fell through apparently because of financial demands made of the developer by the head of the City of Tulsa Public Works Department. The developer was just seeking a sewer connection to make the development feasible. At this point, I am going to hand you off to Tultellitarian, writing at MeeCiteeWurkor's site, who has a detailed summary of the situation, what happened, and who seems to be at fault for losing a development that would have been good for the City of Tulsa and Tulsa Public Schools.

Last Tuesday, December 27, Councilor Jim Mautino notified City Clerk Mike Kier that Mayor Bill LaFortune appears to be in violation of the city's ethics ordinance, because he is a member of the board of the Tulsa Metro Chamber, which is a contractor to the City of Tulsa. While a member of the Chamber board, LaFortune has approved and signed contracts on behalf of the City with the Chamber.

Two days after Mautino's letter, City Auditor Phil Wood sought City Attorney Alan Jackere whether a violation of the Ethics Code has occurred. Wood points out that LaFortune, as a board member of the Tulsa Metro Chamber, "appears to have an Organizational interest," which is defined by section 601 of the ethics ordinance as existing when "a City official is a director or member of a board which establishes policy and/or budgetary decisions for the entity." Wood goes on to cite section 603, which states that "no City official shall participate in any City business in which they have an organizational interest." Wood then cites an contract renewal between the City and the Chamber, worth $1,901,000, which the Mayor approved on August 29, 2005, saying, "This appears to be City business in which he has an organizational interest." (The City Auditor is designated by the ordinance to handle ethics complaints regarding the Mayor.)

The following day, December 30, the Mayor's Office issued a press release requesting a "clarification" of the ethics ordinance. In the release, the Mayor's membership on the board of the Tulsa Metro Chamber is compared to his membership on the Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority, the Tulsa Airport Authority, and the Indian Nations Council of Governments. The difference is that the Chamber is a private organization with its own interests, while the two authorities are public trusts established to own property and enter into multi-year contracts for the benefit of the City of Tulsa. By law, the Mayor is an ex officio member of the two authorities and appoints the other members, subject to Council approval. INCOG is a "voluntary association of local governments," established by agreement of the governments involved. The City of Tulsa is a member of INCOG.

The Tulsa Metro Chamber and its defenders seem to think of the Chamber as an official branch of City Government, but it is a private organization, established to serve the interests of its members, which sometimes may coincide with the best interests of Tulsa's city government, but sometimes may not. That's why it's a conflict of interest for an official approving City contracts for the Chamber to also sit on the Chamber's board. It's revealing that this press release issued on LaFortune's behalf doesn't distinguish between governmental agencies and the Chamber.

Below are links to PDF files of the relevant documents, each about 30 KB in size:

• Councilor Jim Mautino's letter to Kier regarding LaFortune's apparent ethics violation
• Auditor Phil Wood's letter to City Attorney Alan Jackere
• Press release from Mayor Bill LaFortune's office

Councilor Mautino asked the City Clerk's office for a copy of Bill LaFortune's ethics disclosure statement, which is required by the ordinance. Mautino was told that LaFortune had not filed such a statement. Mautino has asked for a letter from the City Clerk confirming that fact, and he was told it would be forthcoming.

As I get time over the next couple of days, I'll fill you in on Councilor Jim Mautino's ethics complaint against Mayor Bill LaFortune, who (until yesterday) was a board member of the Metro Tulsa Chamber and while serving as a board member, he also approved and signed contracts on behalf of the City of Tulsa with the Metro Tulsa Chamber. Turns out the Mayor hasn't filed an ethics disclosure statement, which is required by law.

Councilor Mautino has also been speaking out about the way the city's Public Works Department mishandled extending sewer to a new housing development proposed for 11th and 161st East Ave, which would have been one of the first new developments in the Tulsa Public School district in years, maybe more than a decade. Our city departments and boards seem to be more eager about extending infrastructure to the suburbs than to unserved areas of our own city.

Bobby of Tulsa Topics has done a great service by collecting in one place, in chronological order, the petition origins of the recent drive to dismember three Tulsa City Council districts and add three at-large seats on the Council, and the parallel thread leading to the Mayor's "Citizens' Commission on City Government".

It's especially interesting to notice the timing of Tulsa Whirled editorials and news stories on the subject.

I encourage you, as always, to explore the links on the right side of the page, as well as the linkblog above. (And note, too, that there's an archive of all previous linkblog entries.)

If you're a Tulsan, be sure to check out the TulsaBloggers.net aggregator. And MeeCiteeWurkor offers the convenience of the same set of blogs combined into a single set of links, in reverse chronological order.

Beyond our city limits (well beyond, in one case), you will find a couple of blogs that always have something new and interesting: Dustbury and Mister Snitch!

Tulsans for Badder Government halted their petition for at-large councilors on Monday, and Mayor Bill LaFortune announced formation of a new "Citizens' Commission" to study Tulsa's form of government. The Mayor says he doesn't want any politicians involved in the process, but he's handpicking all the members. Council members weren't consulted, nor have they had the opportunity to recommend members of this task force. Bobby's got details at Tulsa Topics.

I really did hear Tulsa Mayor Bill LaFortune say this tonight:

"More police officers mean more arrests mean a higher crime rate."

Here's the audio of my question and his answer (500 KB MP3), at a "Mayor's Night In" meeting for neighborhood leaders. (Thanks to Bobby of Tulsa Topics for capturing it.)

I always thought crime rate was based on crimes reported, not arrests.

Also, LaFortune seems to say that it's just fine for Tulsa to be a donor city on the "4 to Fix the County" tax. (If the tax passes next week, Tulsa sales will generate $50 million of the tax, but only $40 million will pay for projects in or near the City of Tulsa. The rest will go to the suburbs.)

The good news is that Tulsans for Badder Government has decided to drop its petition effort for dismembering three Tulsa City Council districts and replacing them with three elected city-wide. The bad news is that, word has it, Mayor Bill LaFortune is going to set up a blue-ribbon panel to study the form of government headed up by the same wealthy Utica Square types who supported the petition. Either way, their goal is the same -- dilute the influence of citizens from the outlying parts of Tulsa at City Hall.

Bobby at Tulsa Topics went by to sign the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) state initiative petition at a storefront near 51st and Harvard today, and he learned that the same company was soliciting and paying for signatures on TABOR, the eminent domain reform petition, and Tulsans for Badder Government's petition. Go read what Bobby learned when he visited the office and returned again later. Then go visit politicalactivists.org and learn about the world of professional petition signature gathering.

MORE: On the home page of politicalactivists.org, the first sentence says, "At politicalactivists.org we are a non partisan organization dedicated to putting conservative issues on the ballet for voter approval." But they go on to say that they've done work for the Kerry for President campaign and the Democratic National Committee and an anti-Bush 527 called America Coming Together.

And here's one of politicalactivists.org's proud accomplishments on behalf of "conservative issues": "We were directly responsible for rallying over 5,000 people to attend our promotion of John Kerry with Michael Moore (Producer of Fahrenheit911) and Carl Pope (Executive Director of Sierra Club) on the Portland State University Campus."

MeeCiteeWurkor was at last night's City Council meeting for the last item on the agenda: Whether to extend the right to unionize to more city employees. The proposal failed at the previous meeting: Turner, Henderson, Baker, and Mautino voted yes; Sullivan, Medlock, Neal, and Martinson voted no; Christiansen was absent, effectively a no vote, since five votes were required for passage. Councilors Turner and Henderson put a motion to reconsider on this week's agenda, but someone who voted against the proposal would have to make the motion to reconsider. And no one did.

MeeCiteeWurkor reports much anger at Councilor Randy Sullivan after no motion to reconsider was made. He writes about what he was told in trying to understand the cause of the anger, and he writes about his disgust, if what he was told is true.

Here's what I found shocking: If what was said is true, Randy Sullivan is raising campaign money. Will he run in the district he currently purports to represent, District 7, or will he run in the district in which he lives, District 9?

My column in the current Urban Tulsa Weekly is a review of the City Charter amendment proposals Tulsans will vote on next spring, as well as a few that didn't make the cut, along with a look at the politics behind what passed and what didn't.

There were a couple of new developments tonight. Illegitimate Councilor Randy Sullivan tried to move the zoning protest petition amendment from the March primary election ballot to the April general election ballot. He tried to make the case that voters would be disenfranchised by having the vote on the primary ballot, when turnout would be lighter.

Councilor Chris Medlock pointed out that homeowners were promised back in 2004, when the courts ruled that the protest petition ordinance was in conflict with the charter, that the amendment to restore that protection would be on the next citywide election ballot. That would have been the December 2004 library bond issue, but the Council held off at the request of library officials. The next opportunity was the city bond issue in April 2005. The Council called the election, but something happened -- the dog ate Bill LaFortune's homework -- and the required public notices weren't placed in the Tulsa Legal News. The March 2006 is the next available citywide date to vote, and because there will be a mayoral primary, every precinct will be open anyway.

The other councilors were apparently persuaded by Medlock's argument -- Sullivan's motion died for lack of a second.

Councilor Roscoe Turner brought the recall amendment up for reconsideration, as I was hoping he would. The original proposal was modified by two complementary amendments proposed by Councilor Tom Baker. The requirement for signature comparison for the recall petitions was dropped (by a unanimous vote). Added in its place was a requirement for each signer to provide a valid contact phone number. That passed by a 5-4 vote (Baker, Henderson, Mautino, Medlock, Turner in favor; Christiansen, Martinson, Neal, Sullivan against). The amended amendment was sent to the voters by a 7-2 vote -- Martinson and Sullivan voted against. Although it isn't my ideal, the proposed amendment would require that recall be for cause, provides a consistent standard for number of signatures across all offices, and requires that signature gatherers be residents of the district. If we pass it in April, it will help ensure that a recall only happens when genuine constituents have a genuine and grave complaint against an elected official.

Finally, a District 7 resident (and a friend of mine), John Eagleton, protests that he did raise the issue of Randy Sullivan's non-residency with members of the City Council when it was publicly acknowledged in February 2005. Eagleton asked the Councilors to seek the City Attorney's opinion on the effect of filing a bogus declaration of candidacy; he believes it would render the election null and void and cause the office to become vacant. That was never done, apparently, perhaps because everyone was distracted by the recall effort underway at the time.

I remember, too, that there were District 7 residents who wanted to recall Randy Sullivan, but they restrained themselves at the request of Councilors Medlock and Mautino, who were themselves under threat of recall at the time.

Here's a link to all the articles in the current issue. Don't forget -- just a few more days to donate gifts for children in the DHS foster care system. Pick up a copy of the dead-tree version of UTW for a list of kids, ages, and the gifts they'd like for Christmas.

Know what you're signing. There are reports that Tulsans for Badder Government, the elite bunch pushing for diluting representative democracy in Tulsa, are obtaining petition signatures under false pretenses:

A person went to the post office and a petition was presented for him/her to sign. The top petition page was for the TABOR (Tax Payer Bill of Rights) and all indications were that was the petition being signed. HOWEVER, THE ACTUAL PETITION WAS FOR THE COUNCILOR AT LARGE PROPOSAL. That, folks, is lower in life forms than dung beetles. So, if you are asked to sign a petition, just refuse unless you read everything completely and know for a fact exactly what you are signing.

In addition to being so low, get this; the people asking you to sign the petition, may be breaking the law. Title 34, Oklahoma Statute 3.1, says signature collectors must be citizens of the State of Oklahoma. Violations of that statute can be fined $1000.00 plus 1 year in jail for each offense. Two of the signature gatherers were from out of state and ran away when asked to provide identification.

Remember, a valid petition will always have the gist of the petition on the page you're signing. Be sure you can see and read the whole page before you sign. If you are presented with the at-large councilors petition, ask to see the petition gatherers' ID.

Please report any sightings of the at-large councilors petition to the Tulsans Defending Democracy website -- what day, what time, where, and, if possible, the name of the petition gatherer. Also let TDD know if you've been contacted in any other way about the petition -- a letter in the mail, a phone call, a poll.

Hat tip to MeeCiteeWurkor and Citizens for Fair and Clean Government.

A couple of my Tulsa Blogger colleagues (Steve Roemerman, Mad Okie) noticed that Councilor Bill Christiansen, who is said to be plotting a run for Mayor, was absent from Thursday night's meeting, which was chock full of controversy. Christiansen avoided going on the record for or against allowing city employees to unionize and avoided voting on a couple of key charter change proposals -- protecting historic preservation zoning and reforming the recall process.

Councilor Roscoe Turner surprised a lot of people with his vote the other week against a charter provision to require a councilor to resign if he moves outside his district and again this week with his vote against recall reform. There was a silly rumor going around that Turner swapped his vote on the requirement to live in your district for a vote from Randy Sullivan (the Councilor who doesn't live in his district) to support unionizing city workers. I found that rumor incredible: Turner has enough honor not to make that kind of deal, and enough sense not to trust Randy Sullivan to keep that kind of deal. (On Thursday, Sullivan voted against allowing city workers to unionize.)

I saw Councilor Turner a few days ago and asked him about his vote on the district requirement. He pointed out that state law already authorized the Council to expel a member who moved outside the district, but there needed to be a complaint from a District 7 resident before they could investigate and act.

(I wrote about the relevant statutes back in January when the Whirled finally acknowledged that he no longer lived in the district. Bubbaworld disagrees with my analysis and makes a pretty convincing case that if you moved often enough, the City Charter allows you to run for Council in any district. I could run in District 6, since I was a qualified elector there from 1981 through 1988, and in District 9, since I was a qualified elector there from 1988 through 1993.)

I'm hoping that Councilor Turner was making a tactical move in his vote against recall reform. It couldn't win last Thursday -- Sullivan, Neal, Baker, and Martinson were all against it, so at best it would have been a 4-4 tie, with Christiansen absent -- but Turner's vote against allows him to bring it up at the next meeting for reconsideration when Christiansen is present and will either send the measure on to the voters or at least put Christiansen on record opposing recall reform.

Dave Schuttler has posted some video highlights from last Wednesday's town hall meeting at Martin East Regional Library with Councilors Jim Mautino and Chris Medlock. I was there and thought they both did a great job of answering questions about the third penny, "4 to Fix the County," economic development, and the various airport issues. Watch the videos and see for yourself.

Medlock will be speaking Tuesday night, November 15, at Rudisill North Regional Library, which is at Pine Street and Hartford Ave (1520 N Hartford). The program is scheduled to run from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

From a reader who was at today's Council Committee meeting, at which a resolution was to be considered, opposing the proposal to dismember three council districts and replace them with three supercouncilor seats elected citywide to four year terms:

The Jackal is up to his dirty tricks again. The resolution was pulled from the agenda by Susan Neal because [City Attorney] Alan Jackere called giving his opinion that they were not legally able to vote on a resolution that might affect the outcome of an election. How interesting considering that the Council just passed a resolution last week to support the school bond vote. Oh, the irony of it all!

Can't vote on a resolution that might affect the outcome of an election? In the first place, an election hasn't even been called, and they've only begun to collect petition signatures. Second, as my reader points out, just last week they endorsed the school bond issues, which was intended to affect the outcome of Tuesday's election. And I seem to recall that the Council voted back in 2003 to endorse Vision 2025. Third, what is the controlling legal authority for Jackere's advice? Did he dig out another obscure citation from some obscure jurisdiction -- Nunavit ice fishing regulations, perhaps? Hoyle's rules for canasta? And, finally, every vote the Council takes could have an impact on the outcome of an election. It's a political body, for Pete's sake!

Would Jackere allow the Council to vote on a resolution that expressed opposition in principle to the idea of at-large seats for the council? That wouldn't be about any specific proposal that is now or will be before the voters.

What happened is apparent: Poor Susan Neal doesn't want to go on record supporting this proposal, even though she almost certainly supports it, and her district is the base for most of the support. Or perhaps she's trying to protect potential mayoral candidates Tom Baker and Bill Christiansen from having to go on the record in support. So rather than say she doesn't want to go on the record, she gets cover from Jackere. This bunch is all about shielding public officials from accountability to the voters for their views and actions.

The following press release announces the formation of a group to oppose the plan to dismember three Tulsa City Council districts and replace them with three seats elected citywide:

Tulsans Defending Democracy

"that we here highly resolve... that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish...."

Abraham Lincoln, from the Gettysburg Address, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863

A Bipartisan group from all parts of Tulsa will announce its formation and its plan to defend democracy. The group will work to preserve fair representation and will fight the ill-conceived petition drive to create 3 At-Large City Councilors with four year terms. Ordinary citizens will have their City Council representation diluted by reducing council districts from 9 to 6 unless this undemocratic plan is stopped.

Where: Embers Restaurant, 81st and Harvard, 9 am, Thursday, November 10, 2005.

For More Information:

herb.beattie@sbcglobal.net  Herb Beattie    749-4586  Dist. 9 

mruouthere@sbcglobal.net    Mona Miller     496-1481  Dist. 2 

bbrdarrow@cox.net           Becky Darrow    369-4487  Dist. 8 

rpearcey@mac.com            Ray Pearcey     853-1726  Dist. 4 

Councilors Chris Medlock and Jim Mautino will speak and field questions at a "town hall" meeting this Wednesday, November 9, from 6 to 8 p.m., in the auditorium of Martin East Regional Library, 2601 S. Garnett Rd. Topics will include the December 13 vote on a new county capital improvements tax, the City of Tulsa's "third-penny" sales tax for capital improvements, due to expire next summer, proposed charter amendments, and other topics pertaining to city government.

Tomorrow during the Tulsa City Council's 10:00 a.m. Urban and Economic Development Committee meeting, Councilors Jack Henderson and Jim Mautino will present a resolution against the at-large councilor proposal being pushed by Tulsans for Blue-Blood Government:

9. Resolution against the proposed initiative petition which seeks to replace three City Council positions elected from specific election districts with three City Council positions elected for the entire city. (Henderson/Mautino) 05-1536

I'm sure Councilors Henderson and Mautino would appreciate support from the public at this meeting.

Some other items of interest, at the 8 a.m. Public Works Committee meeting:

12. Resurvey of screen wall, sign, and trees at Wind River Development on 121st St. between Delaware & Yale Avenues. (Christiansen) 05-1383-2

13. Council discretion and authority with regard to proposed Yale bridge development project. (Christiansen) 05-779-5

14. Discussion with Administration regarding events center naming rights agreement, convention center improvement funding, and any change from the public presentation to voters in the allocation of Vision 2025 funds between the events center and convention center improvements. (Medlock) 05-1533

15. Update from Administration on the status of the Ethics Advisory Committee described in the ethics ordinance. (Turner) 05-1314-2

16. Allowing non-supervisory employees to unionize or bargain collectively. (Turner/Henderson) 05-1486

That item 12 is connected to the bridge issue -- the pro-IVI people have said they can't move that bridge because it would interfere with the Wind River upscale housing development underway at 121st and River Road.

Also, the first item on the 10 a.m. agenda is interesting:

Charles R. Ford - Appointment to the Tulsa Development Authority (TDA); term expires 7/31/08; (replaces A. Adwon). [UED 11/8/05] 05-1406

Adam Adwon is the brother of Mitch Adwon, a close advisor to Mayor Bill LaFortune. Mitch Adwon is said to be involved with the backers of the proposed soccer stadium development in the "East Village" section of downtown. Since TDA-owned land would be involved in any such deal, this looks like a move to eliminate a potential conflict of interest.

Adam Adwon's replacement, Charles R. Ford, is the former State Senator for District 25, representing far south Tulsa and Broken Arrow until he was term-limited for the 2004 election. (It was called Senate District 51 prior to the 2002 redistricting.) Ford lives a couple of blocks east of Southern Hills Country Club. Ford is a distinguished public servant, but he represented and lives in a suburban part of the city. Given that TDA deals with property in the older, urban part of Tulsa, it would make more sense to appoint someone who actually lives and works in Tulsa's urban core.

A look at what's new from bloggers who blog about Tulsa politics:

Mad Okie sees Tulsa at the crossroads. The Oklahomilist elaborates on the idea:

This is not about liberal or conservative issues. It's not even about Democrats and Republicans, since it is apparent that the same elitist mindset governs many PTB regardless of party.

It's about transparency in government. It's about trust. Explanations. Consultation. It's about equal opportunity, in advance. It's about keeping first things first. And first things for a city should be good streets, safe homes, good schools.

Anything that takes away from priorities, or that diminishes trust and transparency should be fixed, if possible. If it cannot be fixed it should be isolated and avoided. And the public should know why.

Both pieces are well worth reading.

Steve Denney at HFFZ urges a no vote on 4 to Fix the County and has Mona Miller's speech to the City Council on the charter amendment regarding zoning protest petitions requiring a supermajority council vote on zoning changes.

TulTellitarian says the boards of Tulsa Airport Authority and Tulsa Airport Improvements Trust ought to resign.

Chris Medlock, Tulsa City Councilor and Republican candidate for Mayor, has several recent entries on developments at City Hall regarding the haste with which the management team was selected for the new Tulsa arena (less than 24 hours after the interviews were held) and the interesting link with Bill LaFortune's former boss; corrects a Tulsa Whirled article about the vote on a charter change regarding zoning protest petitions, and corrects TulTellitarian's blog entry (mentioned above) about his status on the Council's airport investigation committee (he's never been chairman or vice chairman, and the committee no longer formally exists); wonders about the connecton between Bill LaFortune's insistence on limiting the ethics ordinance definition of a conflict of interest to two degrees of consanguinity and the fact that his uncle, former Mayor Bob LaFortune, sits on the Bank of Oklahoma board of directors; and a couple of conflicting quotes from the Tulsa Whirled a week ago on the value of the arena to Tulsa's prosperity.

Dave Schuttler (Our Tulsa World) has the news that Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn will be on Meet the Press Sunday morning. If you miss the show, you can subscribe to the podcast -- Dave has the link.

Bobby at Tulsa Topics has video up of the meeting on plans for I-44 widening.

Chimchim has some thoughts about downtown redevelopment:

To me the argument is: Where is downtown going to find its life? its energy? The days of dreaming that huge oil companies be attracted to downtown Tulsa, and will rain down sacks of gold coins on to DTU and the chamber of commerce are over. Those organizations need to wake up and realize that it's 2005. They need to see what's REALLY around them -- a vibrant, energetic, creative class of diverse citizens who are PASSIONATE about downtown and all the beauty and potential it holds -- and embrace that. welcome it with open arms.

Steve Roemerman was having fun with anagrams awhile back. Did his anagram for "Tulsa World" inspire Don Danz's adjustment to the paper's logo? It does look a bit sallow, doesn't it?

(Comments disabled for this entry since I'm linking to others rather than posting my own thoughts.)

I want to apologize for suggesting that the backers of the plan to cut the number of Tulsa city council districts and add at-large districts is not a diverse group. Now that I've seen a list of the steering committee, I see that it includes both people connected with Holland Hall and people connected with Cascia Hall.

Here's the list of names, from today's Tulsa Whirled story:

The group's advisory board comprises [committee treasurer Len] Eaton's wife, Patty Eaton, a former Tulsa water commissioner and current member of the city's water board; Howard Barnett, former Gov. Frank Keating's chief of staff; former Mayor Robert LaFortune; former Mayor Jim Hewgley; Norma Eagleton, a former Oklahoma Corporation Commissioner and former Tulsa Airport Authority member; former Councilor Dewey Bartlett Jr., the president of Keener Oil & Gas Co.; former Street Commissioner Sid Patterson; Paula Marshall-Chapman, the chief executive officer of Bama Cos.; Tom Hughes, the owner of Hughes Lumber; and the lawyers David Riggs, C.S. Lewis III and Ray Feldman and his wife, Nancy Feldman, a former professor at University of Tulsa.

Clearly District 9 is not content with having two councilors already -- they want five.

Mad Okie has a report from his neighborhood meeting, and it provides some useful perspective on the airport noise abatement issue and a rebuttal to those who blame the homeowners for being there in the first place.

Dave Schuttler has video of the meeting and a map showing noise contours around the airport.

Tonight's the last of the Mayor's five town halls about renewing the "Third Penny" -- the one-cent, five-year sales tax that funds a specific set of capital improvements for the City of Tulsa.

The meeting is at the Helmerich Library, on 91st, and east of Yale, at 7 p.m. (Note that unlike the other town halls, the one for south Tulsa is not being held at a regional library, but at a smaller branch.)

I've argued for extending the current tax, passed in 2001, for another 14 months, to finish the projects that were promised way back then before starting over with a new set. If you've got an opinion about that, or anything else the Mayor needs to hear, tonight's your chance.

The Tulsa Whirled gave prime real estate -- the top of the Local section on Sunday -- to a story about City Councilor Tom Baker's proposal for a charter review committee:

"I don't necessarily think there is a need to make all of the proposed changes, but rather than continuing this debate, maybe we should put some of those changes through a more serious review process by a broader base of citizens and act on their collective opinion," he said.

"If they feel certain changes need to occur, then we can give it to the voters. Or, if they think not much is wrong, then let's let it ride for a while," he said.

So rather than let the Council, the elected representatives of the people, vet the proposed charter changes and pass them on to the citizens for a vote, Baker wants to gather a handpicked, unelected group to decide which reforms we the people will get to consider.

Does Tom Baker actually have any opinions of his own? Does he convene a task force when he's deciding what to have for dinner? Baker's approach to decision-making bears the marks of his years climbing to the top of a bureaucracy. It allows you to seem like a decisive leader, without actually making any decisions for which you could be held accountable.

At the end of the story, we learn that Baker has a couple of opinions about charter change: He doesn't think there's anything wrong with the recall provisions of the charter, and he doesn't think there's anything wrong with a councilor living outside the district he purports to represent.

Baker on recall:

The attempt to change the charter's provision on recall, which Baker said he thinks worked, points to the unsuccessful attempt to oust controversial Councilors Chris Medlock and Jim Mautino. A group wanted to recall the councilors, followed procedures, an election was called and the voters said no, he said.

Baker conveniently forgets the months of smears that his two colleagues had to endure, the expense of fighting to defeat the recall, and the effect that the process had on the City Council. Makes me wish they'd pursued a recall against him after all -- he might not be so blithe about it.

Baker on residency:

A change that would require a councilor to live in his or her district for the entire term is aimed at Councilor Randy Sullivan, who because of a divorce and court order had to find a new residence and moved out of his district.

It's not aimed at Randy Sullivan, but Randy Sullivan's situation pointed to a loophole that really shouldn't be there. (As I read state law, it isn't there, but it still needs to be spelled out in the charter, for our City Attorney's sake.) The proposed charter amendment doesn't make a councilor a prisoner of his district, but if he chooses to move out, he has to resign, which is only reasonable. There were plenty of places in District 7 where Sullivan could have moved after being booted from his home, but he had the gall to run for re-election after he had already moved out of the district. Anyone who supports the principle of geographical representation ought to have a problem with that.

Which is why Tom Baker doesn't have a problem with that. The hidden agenda of his proposed blue ribbon panel is to push for the addition of at-large members to the City Council, diluting geographical representation, and taking grass-roots politics out of the equation. The powers that be realize that they are losing control of the current form of city government, and they are trying to reel it back in. That's why you have a story that is not particularly timely, focused on one favored councilor, bolstered by a handpicked academic, on the front page of Sunday's local section. The Whirledlings want a council that's under their thumb, and they want an unimaginative bureaucrat as the next mayor.

Roemerman on Record will be quiet for a while, as Steve Roemerman is off to Gretna, Louisiana, just across the Mississippi from New Orleans, with a group from his church to help Convoy of Hope. We'll keep Steve in our prayers and look forward to his report when he returns.

Our Tulsa World has added more video clips from Mayor Bill LaFortune's September 6 third-penny meeting at the Zarrow Library. This is a great service that Mr. Schuttler is doing by filming, converting, and posting these video clips. Too often the claims and promises made in this sort of meeting are lost to history. His summary of the meeting puts the clips in context. In another entry he has the response from Mayor LaFortune and Fire Chief Allen LaCroix to the question, "Are we prepared if Keystone Dam breaks?"

MeeCiteeWurkor has a special comments thread just for registering your opinion of the Tulsa Whirled. He's asking for submissions in a contest -- things you can do with a Tulsa Whirled. And he's about to add a new contributor to the blog.

City Councilor Chris Medlock has a recent entry on his proposal regarding the sales tax money currently going to Tulsa County for "4 to Fix the County." He says that the county is fixed now, and between the Vision 2025 sales tax and rising property taxes, the county is well fixed for funds. By denying a renewal of the 2/12ths cent "4 to Fix" sales tax, City of Tulsa voters could opt to pass the same size sales tax at the city level and earmark it for public safety.

Another noteworthy item on MedBlogged cites two Tulsa Whirled City Hall stories, one from 2002, one from last week. The March 2002 story has Mayor-elect Bill LaFortune saying he plans to have a direct, face-to-face relationship with the City Council, which lines up with my recollection of my first meeting with LaFortune as he started his run for office. The September 2005 story has councilors, including recently-elected Bill Martinson, complaining that LaFortune won't deal directly with the Council on issues like the new third-penny proposal.

Tulsa Downtown reports that new clubs are opening in the Blue Dome district.

Tulsa newcomer Joe Kelley has been trying the immersion approach to understanding his new hometown, and he's posted a list of some of the people he's met with so far, and would like suggestions for others he ought to talk to. About a week and a half ago, I introduced him to the tawook at La Roma Pizza (a Lebanese restaurant disguised as a pizzeria), and we had a very enjoyable conversation. He seems to be a very astute observer and a quick study.

Tulsa Topics has an audio tribute to Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, including their radio theme song, "Okie Boogie," "Cadillac in my Model A," and tributes by The Tractors and Asleep at the Wheel. One thing I love about Bob Wills songs -- you don't need liner notes, because Bob tells you who's playing as the song proceeds.

As always, you'll find the latest and greatest entries from blogs about Tulsa news on the Tulsa Bloggers aggregation page.

On October 7, 1980, the City of Tulsa approved a one-cent sales tax for capital improvements to expire after five years. It was dubbed the "Third Penny," as Tulsa has a 2% sales tax to fund general operations. It's a pay-as-you-go tax -- money is spent as it comes in. The Third Penny tax has been renewed every five years since, most recently in May 2001. Below are the dates the tax was renewed and the term for which it was renewed.

April 9, 1985 -- December 31, 1985, to April 30, 1991
December 4, 1990 -- May 1, 1991, to July 31, 1996
February 13, 1996 -- August 1, 1996, to July 31, 2001
May 8, 2001 -- August 1, 2001, to July 31, 2006

Each Third Penny election establishes a separate fund, which may only be spent on the projects advertised to the voters prior to the election.

Nearly every previous Third Penny fund has run a surplus, which the City Council has allocated to unfunded capital improvements projects. That isn't the case with the 2001 fund. At a Council committee meeting on August 2, Finance Director Mike Kier reported a shortfall of $69.2 million, reflecting the downturn in the local economy thanks to the bursting of the telecom bubble. That means that nearly $70 million in basic projects -- streets and sewers -- that we've been waiting to have for five years won't get done by the time the tax expires.

The rule of thumb is that a one cent city sales tax will raise $60 million in one year. It would take about 14 more months to erase the shortfall and pay for all the 2001 Third Penny projects.

There are two options: The first is to lump any unfinished projects in with a full slate of new projects for another five year extension. Mayor Bill LaFortune seems to be headed in this direction, as he holds town hall meetings gathering public input starting tonight. This would mean only 80% of the new tax would go for new projects. There's a danger that new projects for the 2006 Third Penny would be funded and completed ahead of the carryover projects from the 2001 Third Penny.

Another danger of this approach is that it would mean that the Mayor and Council will be putting together this entirely new slate of projects in the midst of a mayoral campaign that will pit at least one sitting councilor (probably more) against a sitting mayor. The renewal election would probably be held at the same time as the primary or general election. It would be the first time that a Third Penny vote has coincided with a mayoral election. Bill LaFortune would be in an excellent position to manipulate the list of new projects to help him secure renomination and a second four-year term.

If a five-year Third Penny election coincides with the mayoral primary or general, it will mean that there won't be a major capital improvements funding package during the term of the new mayor. The general obligation bond issue we just voted on back in April won't be up again until after the 2010 elections. In the past, it's been the tradition to space the bond issue and Third Penny votes out by 2 years -- Third Penny in 1996, bond issue in August 1999, Third Penny in 2001. The bond issue should have been up again in the summer of 2004, but the Mayor's office delayed and delayed.

The least controversial way to move forward, the way that will guarantee that all 2001 projects will be completed as soon as possible, the way that is most likely to win the voters' approval, is to vote in February or March to extend the 2001 Third Penny for another 14 months. No new projects -- just finish what we started. The tax would then expire at the end of September 2007, plenty of time for the new mayor, with a fresh mandate from the public, to put together a new five-year Third Penny package which reflects the new mayor's priorities.

Here's the list of the Mayor's town hall meetings on the Third Penny. If you'd like to see a vote just to extend and complete the 2001 package, this is an opportunity to make sure the Mayor hears you. All the meetings start at 7 p.m.

Tuesday, September 6: Zarrow Library, 2224 W. 51st St.

Wednesday, September 7: Aaronson Auditorium, Central Library, Fourth and Denver, downtown.

Monday, September 12: Rudisill Library, 1520 N. Hartford Ave.

Tuesday, September 13: Martin Library, 2601 S. Garnett Road.

Monday, September 19: Helmerich Library, 5131 E. 91st St.

I attended Thursday night's Tulsa City Council meeting, when they once again went through the list of proposed charter amendments, and the public had the opportunity to comment. Here are some points I made and some I intended to make, but cut for the sake of time:

Councilor Bill Martinson had complained at Tuesday's committee meeting that the list of amendments needed to be "whittled down". He particularly wanted to get rid of the requirement for a councilor to resign if he ceased to reside in his district. (It's worth remembering that the backers of absentee Councilor Randy Sullivan, who would be affected by the amendment, also backed Martinson.) Recall that in 2004, Oklahoma voters had nine state questions plus as many as six offices on the ballot. One might disagree with the outcome, but Oklahomans were able to handle the complexity just fine. As in 2004, if all the remaining charter amendments are put to a vote, some, like the residency requirement, will be no-brainers, others will be controversial, but we can trust the voters.

Many of the amendments are not new, but have been proposed before. It's just that previous councils have declined to send them along for the voters' consideration, and so there's a significant backlog. Next March it will have been 10 years since any charter amendments have been sent to the voters. (Here is the list of all amendments since the adoption of the 1989 charter.)

Here's the list they were working with on Thursday (PDF file), with the longer, earlier list following. I'll use the numbering from that first page in my comments below.

Three items have to do with residency: 1a, 1b, 6.

The charter frequently uses the term "qualified elector" as a qualification for office, and in Article XII that term is defined as "a registered voter of the City of Tulsa, registered to vote as provided by the laws of Oklahoma." Unfortunately, this doesn't mean you actually live in Tulsa. As long as you live in a place when you register to vote, it's OK, under Oklahoma election laws, to keep your registration there, even if you move away. Item 1a would add the requirement to be a resident to the definition of "qualified elector."

Item 1b would require appointees to authorities, boards, and commissions (ABCs) to be qualified electors residing in Tulsa for a period of 90 days. Item 6 would require a councilor to live in his district and to resign if he moves out. If you're an elected or appointed city official, you ought to forfeit that office if you don't live in the city. If you're elected or appointed to serve a specific district, you ought to forfeit that office if you no longer live in the district. Here in America, we value geographical representation.

Items 1a and 1b were previously sent to the City Attorney for an initial draft. Thursday night, the Council voted 7-1 to send on item 6. The lone dissenter was Bill Martinson.

Item 4 would establish a time frame of 60 days for the Mayor to make appointments to ABCs. The Mayor can ask for an additional 60 days with Council approval. If the appointment still hasn't been made after the extension, the Council would be allowed to fill the position. This is necessary because under state law, the current appointee continues to serve after his term expires, until a replacement is approved. As things are today, if a Mayor wants an ABC member to remain, but doesn't think he can get Council approval to reappoint him, he can simply delay bringing the member up for reappointment, allowing the member to continue to serve and effectively bypassing the wishes of the Council. Terms expire periodically so that the Council and Mayor can decide whether an ABC member is representing the best interests of the City of Tulsa. This amendment would ensure that members of ABCs have a mandate from the people we elect to represent us. Item 4 was approved for an initial draft on August 18.

Item 5 would authorize the City Council to hire its own attorney independent from the oversight of the City Attorney. This is an item that I proposed at least five years ago. If checks and balances are to be effective, the legislative branch needs independent advice from an attorney whose sole responsibility is to serve the interests of the City Council. This is especially important when the Council and Mayor are at odds. Item 5 was approved for an initial draft on August 18.

Item 7 has to do with city election dates. There are only five or, rarely, six weeks between the city primary and the city general election. A state law passed this year (HB 1378) requires that there must be at least 35 days between the primary and the general election. We will meet that requirement in 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2012 using our current election dates, so I'm not sure why the City Attorney is saying we may be forced to move the primary to an earlier date. If we do move election dates, moving the primary closer to New Year's would be the wrong approach. Move the general later in the year, or, my favorite option, move the whole election cycle to the fall of odd numbered years. It would be better for grass-roots campaigns if the elections could be conducted when there are more hours of sunshine and warmer weather for knocking on doors. It would be better for all campaigns if the month of December didn't fall in the midst of prime campaign season. Item 7 was approved for initial draft on August 18.

Items 3 and 10 require supermajorities for zoning changes in certain circumstances. Item 3 is the same proposition that was supposed to be on the April ballot (but the dog ate someone's homework), requiring a 3/4 supermajority to approve a zoning change if affected property owners or neighboring property owners got sufficient signatures a protest petition. Passing this would bring Tulsa back in line with state law and with our ordinance, which the City Attorney ruled a violation of the Charter. The only outstanding issue was whether to enshrine the minimum percentages for a protest petition in the Charter, and the consensus seemed to be to do so. Item 10 would impose a supermajority for any zoning change to property under Historic Preservation zoning. I'm concerned about unintended consequences with this one, and I'm not sure about enshrining a particular zoning overlay district in the Charter. Item 10 was approved on August 18 for initial draft. Item 3 we still have from when it was approved for the ballot this spring.

That leaves us with the two recall items, items 2 and 9. I refer you to my thoughts on reforming recall from a couple of days ago. Councilor Tom Baker brought forward a proposed amendment for the recall process, which was presented only after the public comments were over, so we neither saw it nor were able to comment on it. In any event, it was approved by a 7-to-Martinson vote for an initial draft by the City Attorney.

I left before item 9 -- complete removal of the recall provision from the charter -- was voted on. It failed to advance by a 4-4 vote, with Christiansen, Henderson, Mautino, and Turner voting yes, Baker, Martinson, Medlock, and Neal voting no. Medlock's vote was a bit of a surprise, but he expressed concern about voter confusion if two separate recall propositions -- mending it and ending it -- are on the ballot. Personally, I think the voters can handle it, and I'd like to see it move forward.

By the way, my nine-year-old son was with me for the whole two hour meeting. His GameBoy didn't work, but he sat there very quietly and patiently. I'm very proud of him.

Tonight at the Tulsa City Council meeting at 6 p.m. you'll have the opportunity to voice your thoughts on the list of proposed amendments to the Tulsa City Charter. The initial working list is here (PDF format). From that list, items 3, 4, 8, 12, 14, and 17 are off the table -- that covers nonpartisan city elections, adding councilors at-large, making the City Attorney's office either elected by the public or jointly appointed by Mayor and Council, term limits, removing department heads from civil service protection, and changing to a council/city manager form of government.

Good news: One item that didn't make the cut at last week's meeting was reinstated for discussion this week -- requiring a councilor to live in the district he represents. This ought to be a no-brainer, and I think voters will be shocked to learn that this requirement isn't already in the Charter.

I was at Tuesday's committee meeting at which the proposed amendments were discussed. Regarding reform of the recall process, the council seemed to divide into three groups: (1) those who wanted the recall process completely removed, with the possibility of bringing it back at a later date after it had been thoroughly studied and reformed; (2) those who want to leave the recall provision in place, but reform it now; and (3) those who want to do nothing now.

I had the opportunity to speak and proposed a compromise between positions (1) and (2), for which Councilors Medlock and Christiansen expressed support. The Council could put two questions before the voters -- an outright repeal and an amendment of the existing process. If voters approved both questions, the repeal would supercede the amendment, which would be moot. Even if voters defeated the repeal, they might still approve the amendment, which would be preferable to leaving the current system in place, with all the ambiguities and problems unaddressed.

Reform of recall should address three aspects of the process:

(1) The number of signatures should be standard across all districts. Under the current process, the number of signatures is based on turnout in the last general election, which means it will be different depending on whether the previous general was a high turnout mayoral election or a lower turnout, council-only election. Under the current system, it isn't clear how many signatures are required if an official was elected without facing a general election opponent. We should standardize either on a percentage of registered voters or on a percentage of the number of votes cast in the previous regular mayoral general election.

(2) How the signatures are verified needs to be clarified, so we avoid the semantic games that were played in the recall of Councilors Mautino and Medlock. Make it clear that the signatures are to be compared to the signatures in the official voter registration records, regardless of whether the signatures are contained in books or on cards. The charter amendment could specify a particular standard for signature verification or could direct the Council to adopt a standard.

(3) If an official is removed from office by recall, there ought to be an election to replace him, regardless of the time remaining until the next election. Under the current system, the replacement would have been chosen by election or appointment, depending on when the vote was certified and the vacancy officially existed. Another approach to this problem would be to make one year before the next general election the last permissible date to hold a recall election.

More later on the other proposals.

At last Thursday's Tulsa City Council meeting, a list of charter changes was on the agenda and about half of them were dropped off the list. The Council is deciding which proposed charter amendments will be presented to the voters at next March's general election. Further discussion of the list is on the agenda for tomorrow's Urban and Economic Development Committee meeting, 10 a.m., in the Council committee room on the second floor of the City Hall tower. If there are items on the list that you want the chance to vote on, or items that were dropped that you'd like brought back for further consideration, be there tomorrow if you can, and plan to be there Thursday night when the list is back before the full Council.

Here's the list of proposed charter amendments that emerged from last Tuesday's Council committee meeting and was discussed at last Thursday's regular Council meeting.

I was disappointed at the decision to drop the residency requirement (item 9). That ought to go without saying in a representative form of government, but since we have a councilor (Randy Sullivan) who lives outside the district he purports to represent, apparently we need to spell it out, and provide a process for determining that a member no longer resides in his district and declaring the seat vacant. (In fact, there is already such a provision in state law, but since it requires the Council to act against one of its own members, and there is room for interpretation in any conflict between state law and city charter, it's best to spell out the process in the charter.

I was also disappointed at the decision against the idea of removing city department heads from civil service protection. If government is to be accountable to the voters, the mayor has to have the ability to bring in a department head who will cooperate with his proposed reforms. It's pathetic that in a so-called "strong mayor" form of government, the Mayor can tell the voters, "Sorry, I wish I could make the changes in Department XYZ that I promised in the election, but the department head doesn't see things my way, and there's nothing I can do about it." The President gets to choose the heads of Federal departments with Senate approval; why not let the Mayor choose the heads of city departments with Council approval?

That's all the time I have to write about this tonight, but I hope you Tulsans will take an interest in this, attend the meetings if you can, watch it on TGOV 24 if you can't be there in person, and make your opinions known. The issues up for debate are there for a reason. The right amendments will help us have a city that is run for the benefit of all Tulsans, not just a favored few.

MeeCiteeWurkor has posted a poll for the 2006 Mayoral Election.

Dan Paden rebuts the opinion section of Sunday's Whirled

Mad Okie doesn't think much of the cheerleading for Tulsa as a tourist destination, but he's got some ideas for how we can capitalize on our strengths, and they start with stopping the destruction of our history, particularly along Route 66. I like his idea of using the Rose Bowl as home to a Route 66 museum.

As an aside, remember the building at 11th and Lewis atop which the big Meadow Gold neon sign once stood? The sign had to be dismantled and stored because the building's owner (a car dealer) wanted to demolish the building for parking for used car storage. The car dealer has abandoned 11th and Lewis for another location and the car lots where the building once stood are completely vacant.

Finally, and this one isn't about Tulsa specifically or by a Tulsa blogger, but Charles G. Hill drove through the Oil Region of Pennsylvania, an area that draws 50,000 visitors annually to an oil heritage festival, an event we aren't likely to see here: "It occurs to me that Oklahoma is far too embarrassed about its own oil patch, that we'd like to think we're so over that." Perhaps that because painful memories of the last oil boom and bust are still fresh to many, while Pennsylvania's oil boom dates back about 100 years. What we need to get over is any embarrassment about the black gold that built our state, and find a way to preserve and present our oil heritage to visitors. It may not be a mainstream interest, but plenty of folks lived and worked in the oil patch or had ancestors who did. About eight years ago, we played tour guide to a woman who was born in Whizbang (Denoya), a boom town in Osage County, lived many years in Seminole, and had last seen Tulsa in 1936. Let's bring back pride in Oklahoma's oil heritage, and maybe we could start by re-airing Bob Gregory's "Oil in Oklahoma," a TV series produced by KTUL in the '70s.

(Great minds think alike -- I promise I had not seen Charles' headline about OKC's underground Chinatown before I wrote mine.)

Despite fears of yet another delay, the Tulsa City Council actually passed an ethics ordinance tonight, unanimously. Steve Roemerman has the scoop.

Tulsa District 6 City Councilor Jim Mautino is holding a town hall meeting next Wednesday, June 29, at 7 p.m. at Martin East Regional Library, near 26th and Garnett. Jim will be talking about district matters as well as the recall election on July 12 -- he's one of the two targets. If you support Jim, show up to show your support. If you're wondering what to believe, show up, ask questions of him, and judge for yourself. You'll find a man who is passionate about encouraging quality growth and development in his district, and someone who knows his district inside and out. He's a good man, and we're blessed to have him on the City Council.

Be sure to keep Jim and his family and Chris Medlock and his family in your prayers as the well-financed barrage of attack ads hits over the next three weeks.

"The City Attorney shall be the chief legal advisor and attorney for the city and all offices, divisions, departments, boards, authorities, commissions, and agencies thereof." -- Tulsa City Charter, Article III, Section 4

There's more evidence today that Mayor Bill LaFortune's appointment of Alan Jackere as City Attorney is a slap in the face of the reform-minded citizens who worked hard to elect him Mayor.

Two weeks ago, the City Council took up final consideration of an ordinance governing ethics for city officials, whether elected, appointed, or employed. Mayoral staffers (and former Councilors) Sam Roop and Clay Bird spoke on behalf of the administration, asking for more time and more input from those who would be affected by the new administration. Even though the ordinance had been in work for the last eight months, Councilor Medlock proposed and the Council approved continuing the item for two weeks. Since that meeting, there have been three work sessions and a committee meeting. Representatives from Mayor LaFortune's administration and the City Auditor's office participated in the meetings. An attorney from the City Attorney's office was present for most of the work sessions as well, although it was said that she didn't have much to say in the meetings. It appeared that consensus had been achieved among all the participants on nearly every point, and that the way was clear for the Council to pass an ordinance which the Mayor would sign.

Then this afternoon at 5 p.m., an hour before the Council meeting was to begin, City Attorney Alan Jackere delivered a memo outlining about a dozen objections and concerns about the draft ordinance. He stated that he spent the last two days looking over the draft and developing this list. Most of the concerns were minor, some seemed to be significant, but the thing to notice is the timing. If the City Attorney regarded himself, as he should, as the servant of the people we voted into office, he or a deputy would have been actively involved over the eight months that the ordinance was in development and particularly over the last two weeks as the final version was being hammered out, raising concerns and helping to put the language into proper legalese. Many of the concerns Jackere raised applied to the version that was before the Council two weeks ago, and he should have raised his voice at that time, or shortly after, if he were truly interested in helping these elected officials achieve their goal of enacting an ethics ordinance.

Jackere's last-minute objections had one purpose -- give Cockroach Caucus councilors cover to vote for further postponement or to vote against the ordinance. It was obvious from the councilors' comments that a vote would fail by a 4-5 margin.

In response to this 11th hour surprise, Chris Medlock made a smart move, but it angered some of his allies. He proposed continuing the item for one more week, until next week's Council meeting, to allow time to incorporate the City Attorney's concerns and to make sure a majority of the Council is on board. If Medlock had not taken the initiative to postpone for one week, it's very likely that a Cockroach Caucus councilor would have proposed, and succeeded in getting, a delay of a month or more, past the recall election, in hopes that there would be two fewer votes for a real ethics ordinance with teeth.

Tomorrow evening, Thursday, June 16, the Tulsa City Council will consider adopting an ethics ordinance which will govern all elected officials, city employees, city appointees to authorities, boards, and commissions, and trustees of Tulsa's public trusts. You can read the proposed ordinance online in PDF format. (Warning: It's a big file. They appear to have printed the document, and scanned it in full color mode, then converted the scans to PDF. They could have used Acrobat to convert the original digital document directly to PDF and produce a much smaller file.) Here's another, smaller PDF file, showing recent markups, but I'm not sure how recent.

There will be a rally in support of adopting the ethics ordinance on City Hall Plaza at 5:15, just before the Council meeting. The Mayor and a number of councilors (the usual suspects) have been dragging their feet on this, and I suspect they hope to drag it out beyond the recall election in hopes that Medlock and Mautino won't be around to help get it passed.

Tulsans deserve a government that is run for the benefit of all Tulsans, not just a favored few. When important decisions are being made about land use and public infrastructure, the decisions need to be made by people who don't have a personal stake in the outcome. We've waited over a decade for an ethics ordinance, and this one has been in the works for over a year. It's modeled after successful ordinances in use in many other cities. There is no good reason to delay action.

Please call or e-mail your councilor -- 596-192#, dist#@tulsacouncil.org, and replace # with your district number -- show up for the rally at 5:15, and if possible, stay to address the Council during the meeting. Let them know you want openness, transparency, and ethics in city government.

Tulsa City Councilor Chris Medlock will hold a town hall meeting Tuesday night, June 14, at 6:30 pm, at Cityplex Towers (a.k.a. the City of Faith), 81st and Lewis. The meeting will be on the first floor under the east tower. While the forum is principally for Councilor Medlock's District 2 constituents, anyone is welcome to come, listen, and ask questions. According to Councilor Medlock's website, topics will include Vision 2025 Neighborhood Funds, remediation schedule for Fred Creek, planned improvements for 81st & Delaware, an update on recent zoning issues, new developments in district (particularly the new Tulsa Hills development at 71st Street and US 75), and the upcoming recall election.

If you support Councilor Medlock's efforts at City Hall, this would be a great opportunity to come and show your appreciation. If you don't think you like what he's doing, or you're skeptical or unsure, this is a great opportunity to see for yourself and ask your questions face-to-face, without the Tulsa Whirled editing and rearranging his replies.

(This entry's timestamp has been set forward to keep this entry at the top through Tuesday evening.)

The proposed City of Tulsa ethics ordinance is on the agenda for a special City Council meeting on Friday, June 10, at 10 a.m., in the City Council committee room (Room 201 of the City Hall tower).

That's a very convenient time for various special interest lobbyists, a very inconvenient time for the rest of us, who would like to see more accountability at City Hall. Hope at least some pro-disclosure citizens can be in attendance to balance things out a bit.

On the blog Cosmic Rantings, AJ Coyner, a Tulsan and a physics grad student at Rice University in Houston, has a nice synopsis of the situation at Tulsa City Hall, which those of you coming in late may find helpful:

It's been a fairly quiet month here for notable stories but I have to think the brilliant politicians and puppeteers of Tulsa Oklahoma for the latest bit of political comedy I've seen. It appears a three page code of ethics with actual penalties for not disclosing conflicts of interest is complicated enough to require an additional month of study. Nevermind it's been in the works in its present form for more than a year and had been previously informally approved by all concerned parties. I know those of you not from there are probably thinking what could possibly be wrong with Tulsa? Trust me there are enough parallel storylines to compose about a 15 page entry. Luckily my caffeine-induced ADD will not allow me to expound beyond the following:

Two city councilors are being recalled. One of the councilors not under recall lied on his election forms and doesn't live in the district he represents. One of the allegedly clean councilors is under investigation by the FAA for unfair business practices at the airport. Something to the extent of increasing holdings and preferential signage because he appointed his best customer to head the Tulsa Airport Authority. The chairman of the council got a death threat last week because he wants to continue the airport investigation. One former council was rewarded for a controversial vote change with an $80,000 raise and a cabinet position in a city whose budget cannot afford to light the freeways but can afford to pay him.

That's just the tip of the conflict of interest iceberg. yet the situation is not worthy of a simple 3-page code of ethics. Maybe they'll have it in place when the airport gets shut down and I have to fly back to OKC and hitchhike 90 miles to get home.

In a nutshell.

I was watching a replay of Thursday's Tulsa Council meeting, where former Councilor (now Chief Administrative Officer) Sam Roop and former Councilor (now Mayoral Chief of Staff) Clay Bird spoke to prevent the passage of an ethics ordinance. Their line is one we've become accustomed to hear from Mayor Bill LaFortune's administration: "We're supportive of the concept, but this isn't the right time." And the right time never seems to come.

Seeing Sam and Clay in the same camera shot reminded me of a lunch that happened sometime in 2001. Former Street Commissioner (and my colleague from two sales tax fights) Jim Hewgley set up a lunch at St. Louis Bread on 15th Street so that I could meet zoning attorney Bill LaFortune, who was getting ready to run for Mayor. I had expected that it would be just me, Bill, and Jim, but Bill was accompanied by Councilors Sam Roop, Clay Bird, and Randi Miller. The three Councilors wanted me to know how Bill would work with the Republicans on the City Council to achieve the kind of reforms that Mayor Savage had routinely blocked. They were excited that Bill would be a Mayor who would treat the Council with respect, as a co-equal branch of government.

Today -- well, Bill has certainly treated Sam and Clay well, giving them high-paying jobs in his administration. Their job is to appear before the Council and tell them that the Mayor won't be cooperating with them on the reforms they are trying to achieve. Meanwhile, I hear that Councilors have a very hard time getting a meeting with the Mayor.

Sam and Clay seem pretty happy with the outcome, even if it doesn't match the picture they painted for me over lunch at St. Louis Bread.

As mandated by the City Charter, every odd-numbered year the Tulsa City Council receives recommendations for amendments to the City Charter, evaluates the suggestions, and, if a suggestion is supported by a majority of the Council, the amendment is placed on the following year's general election ballot.

We're in the first phase of that process, and suggestions are due to the Council by July 1. You'll find details on the Council's home page. Suggestions for charter amendments can be e-mailed to suggestions@tulsacouncil.org or you can fax them to 596-1964.

John S. Denney has submitted a few suggestions and has posted them on the Homeowners for Fair Zoning newslog. His amendments have to do with zoning, the City Attorney, and disclosure of conflicts of interest for councilors. He also supports eliminating the recall process entirely; officials could still be removed for cause in accordance with the process defined by state statutes. I especially like his suggestion that the City Attorney's position should be removed from the classified service (civil service). I'd extend the idea to include all city department heads -- the Mayor should be able to appoint whom he will to run city departments, with the advice and consent of the Council. As it stands, the Mayor has very little control over who will carry out his policies, which makes city government less accountable than it should be to the people who pay for it.

(By the way, in response to a comment on an earlier entry -- I am not the same person as Michael S. Bates, the human resources director for the City of Tulsa. He and I are among about half a dozen Michael Bateses registered to vote in Tulsa County.)

An election result like this ought to convince you that first-past-the-post is a lousy way to run an election. Never mind for the moment who won -- none of the candidates came anywhere near a majority.

Ideally, you want a system where voting for your favorite candidate can't help your least favorite candidate win. You want a way to handle races with more than two candidates so that the winner is the candidate who would have beaten each of the other candidates in a head-to-head election. You want a system where no candidate -- not a Ross Perot, nor a Gary Richardson -- can be a spoiler.

In this election, there is no way to know for sure if Martinson would have beaten Phillips or Harer or even Nichols in a head-to-head race.

Adding a two-candidate runoff gets you closer to the ideal system I described above, but with the top three so close, there is still the possibility of the order of finish varying had the minor candidates not been in the race. Between them Nichols, Harjo, Weaver, and Jackson received 601 votes, and there were only 63 votes separating 2nd and 3rd place, 74 separating 1st and 3rd. If only the top three had been in the race, where would those votes have gone? We can't know, but any two of the three might have wound up as the top two.

Louisiana has a system where all candidates run against each other, regardless of party, and if no one gets 50% of the vote, the top two candidates face off in a runoff. In 1991, with twelve candidates in the race, disgraced ex-Governor Edwin Edwards received 34%, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke received 32%, incumbent Governor Buddy Roemer received 27%, and the remaining nine candidates received 7%. The runoff was "between the crook and the Klansman," but we can't know what the initial result would have been if the nine minor candidates had not been in the race. Roemer may well have received enough of that 7% to put him in second place instead of Duke. There's little doubt that in a head-to-head race with either Duke or Edwards, Roemer would have won. There was a similar result in the 1990 Democrat primary for Governor in Oklahoma (David Walters, Mike Turpin, Steve Lewis) -- the top three clustered together, and enough minor candidate votes that any two of the top three might have made the runoff if the minor candidates had been eliminated.

What voting system eliminates those sorts of anomalies? Instant runoff voting (IRV) does. Under IRV, voting is simple. Voters rank the candidates in order: I mark a 1 next to my favorite, then mark a 2 next to the name of the candidate who would be the my choice if my favorite weren't in the race, and so on down the list.

It's called instant runoff voting because it's equivalent to having a series of runoff elections, eliminating the low vote-getter each pass and choosing among the remaining candidates. The advantage of IRV over a series of runoff elections is that you only have to open the polls once. IRV is used to elect the President of Ireland, members of Parliament in Australia, and here in Tulsa it was used at the 1st District Republican Conventions of 2000 and 2004 to elect delegates and alternates to the Republican National Convention. I first experienced IRV in college -- we used it in our fraternity to elect officers.

At the very least, Tulsa needs a runoff in special elections, but it would be better still to use IRV in all elections. As a charter city, Tulsa could choose to do that.

The final unofficial returns in the Tulsa City Council District 5 special election, from the Tulsa County Election Board, with all precincts reporting and absentee ballots included:

Although no official announcement has been made, word around City Hall is that acting City Attorney Alan Jackere will be appointed City Attorney, and Mayor Bill LaFortune has said an announcement will be made tomorrow.

I spoke to the Mayor as he was leaving tonight's neighborhood meeting about the proposed Yale Avenue bridge. Here is a link to a 2 MB WMV (Windows Media) file of the interview, which runs about nine minutes. (Sorry for the video quality -- I am still learning how to get video from the camera to the hard drive, and I probably should have picked a higher resolution or some better compression settings.) In our conversation, I asked the Mayor how he thought the appointment of a Democrat holdover from the Savage administration would be viewed by the conservative Republicans who supported his election, and I asked him how he thought neighborhood associations would react to the appointment of an attorney who was involved in controversial zoning opinions surrounding the 71st and Harvard F&M Bank case, decisions which undermined and ultimately nullified the protest petition process. He didn't have an answer when I asked if Jackere had ever issued an opinion that went against developer interests.

All right, you say, this British election stuff is mildly interesting, but what does it have to do with the situation in Tulsa? Plenty. Britain's "first-past-the-post" electoral system has a fundamental flaw that works against enacting the will of the majority, and Tulsa's upcoming City Council special election -- no primary, no runoff, no majority required -- has the same flaw, only to a greater degree. The flaw requires voters to do more than simply vote for their favorite candidate, if they want to ensure that the outcome is at least acceptable to a majority of voters. Strategy is required.

First-past-the-post means no majority is required to win a seat. Whoever gets the most votes wins, no matter how small the percentage of the total vote. If 20% of the electorate loves Candidate Smith, and the other 80% hates him, but are split evenly between five or six candidates, the hated Mr. Smith wins anyway. In the 2001 UK general election, the winning candidate received a majority of the vote (greater than 50%) in less than half the constituencies. 333 seats out of 659 had a winning percentage below 50%, 26 seats had a winning percentage below 40%, and in two seats, Argyll and Bute, and Perth, both in Scotland, the winning percentage was just under 30%. (Thanks to the UK Elections Directory for making the 2001 results available in spreadsheet form.)

Winning without a majority is common in the UK because there are three nationally competitive parties -- Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat -- and in Scotland and Wales, there's also a pro-independence party that has a significant base of support, (Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru, respectively). If voters who supported the winning candidate in the last election became disaffected, there were at least two other places they could take their votes, and an unpopular MP could stay manage to in office if his opponents split the rest of the votes evenly. This is how Tony Blair's Labour Party managed to retain a majority of the seats in the House of Commons, despite taking only 35.2% of the nationwide vote, down from 40.7% in 2001. If the entire 5.5% swing away from Labour had gone to the Conservatives, there would have been moving vans at Number 10, but most of it went to the Liberal Democrats, the third place party. If a voter's main goal had been to get rid of Tony Blair as prime minister, the smart thing would have been to vote for whichever party stood the best chance of beating the Labour candidate in his constituency, even if that meant a Tory voting for a LibDem or vice versa. It's called tactical voting, and anti-Tory activists tried to convince anti-Tory voters to give it a try in 1992 and nearly succeeded -- the Conservatives barely managed a majority of the seats despite winning nearly 41% of the vote.

In Tulsa on Tuesday we have an election which will determine which of two factions -- the Cockroach Caucus and the Reform Alliance will gain overall control of the City Council. The two factions are fundamentally divided over policy and philosophy (although the Cockroach Caucus would like you to think that it's all a matter of personality and temperament). There are four serious candidates in the race -- two, Bill Martinson and Andy Phillips, have the support of elements of the Cockroach Caucus, and two, Charlotte Harer and Al Nichols, are supported by pro-reform activists. There is a real danger that pro-reform voters could form a majority of those who vote on Tuesday but still lose the election by splitting that pro-reform vote between two candidates.

I can illustrate the danger by telling you about the results in the South Belfast constituency. In Northern Ireland, there are two main political sympathies but four main parties -- two nationalist parties that want all Ireland united in the Republic of Ireland (Social Democratic and Labour Party, Sinn Fein), two unionist parties that want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom (Democratic Unionist Party, Ulster Unionist Party). To oversimplify, within each grouping there are two parties that share a central aim but differ on how best to achieve that aim. All four parties competed for the South Belfast seat, which had been held by an Ulster Unionist.

In Thursday's vote, unionist parties received 51.1% of the vote, while nationalist parties received 41.3% -- the rest of the votes went to three minor parties which are neither unionist nor nationalist. Even though a majority of voters supported unionists, the winning candidate was a nationalist. Most of the nationalist votes went to the SDLP candidate, who took 32.3% of the vote, while the DUP and UUP candidates split the unionist vote almost down the middle -- 28.4% and 22.7% respectively. If there were a runoff, the DUP candidate would almost certainly have won, but there isn't going to be a runoff -- just a "winner" who had two-thirds of the voters against him.

In such a situation, the only way to ensure that the winner is someone acceptable to the majority is for each voter to conduct the runoff in his head before he goes to vote. A voter should ask himself, "Of the candidates acceptable to me, which one has the most support already? Which one has the best chance of winning?" That question is easier to answer if polls have been conducted, but you can still make an educated assessment by looking at the segments of the electorate that are likely to back each candidate.

The South Belfast scenario may well play itself out in Tulsa's District 5, but the stakes are higher here. If the reform candidates split a majority of the vote and lose the election, it will be cold comfort to say that we would have won if there had been a runoff. We'll have to suffer for the next 11 months with the Cockroach Caucus back in control of the Council.

The situation here is complicated by the fact that each of the factions has a serious candidate from each political party. That's part of the data that has to be considered in casting a strategic vote. You may not care what party label a Council candidate wears, but some voters will, and that affects which candidates have the best chance of winning. Charlotte Harer's long list of endorsements by elected Republicans like Senator Jim Inhofe and Congressman John Sullivan will carry a lot of weight with those voters who care most of all about electing a good conservative Republican.

Al Nichols, a Democrat and a reformer, is a good man and would be a good councilor. His credentials as a neighborhood activist are impeccable, and he has the best understanding of land use issues of any of the candidates in the race. I don't believe that neighborhood activists and voters concerned about land use constitute a sufficient base of support to win the election. Nichols would have to win a certain number of voters who are simply looking for a Democrat to vote for. Unless they disagree with him on a specific issue, most Democrat voters will vote for Andy Phillips -- they saw his name on the ballot and voted for him just over a year ago.

I believe that Charlotte Harer is in the best position to put together a winning coalition. Her support from prominent Republicans gives her a head start, and the district does lean Republican. Now that she's the only woman in the race, she'll get all the votes of those who simply want more women on the Council. She's solidly pro-reform at City Hall and that should win her some crossover votes from pro-reform Democrats.

I'm going to ask some people I greatly respect and admire to do a hard thing. We share the same goals for city government. I wish it weren't necessary to make this request, and if we had a better voting system, like Instant Runoff Voting, it wouldn't be necessary. Under IRV, you could give your first preference to your favorite without worrying that you might help elect your least favorite candidate. But we don't have IRV, or even a simple runoff. So here goes:

I urge Al Nichols and his supporters to throw their support behind Charlotte Harer for the sake of keeping the Council in the hands of the reformers. You've fought a good fight, and as a former candidate I have some idea of how hard it would be to drop out at the last minute after knocking on hundreds of doors and making hundreds of phone calls. For the sake of the ultimate aim -- reforming city government -- I believe such a sacrifice is necessary. The only thing that would change my mind is a scientific poll or comprehensive survey showing Al in first or second place.

Tulsa City Council District 5 candidate Nancy Jackson withdrew from the race earlier in the week and has thrown her support behind Cockroach Caucus standard-bearer Bill Martinson. Her voice was used a few days ago for an automated phone call on behalf of Martinson to District 5 voters, accusing the Republican Party of being unfair to certain candidates in the race.

In response to Jackson's accusations of unfairness, Tulsa County Republican Jerry Buchanan issued the following statement at a press conference today:

It has been my intention as the Chairman of the Tulsa County Republican Party to give every Republican Candidate in the City District 5 every opportunity to any and all information available from the party. We have maintained a neutral position for all candidates because it is not only fair, but the right thing to do.

Nancy Jackson, a former candidate of the upcoming city council race, has been prompted to use a pre-recorded phone message to blanket the constituents of District 5.

I would like to read an excerpt of the message containing the material:

"Hello, my name is Nancy Jackson and even though I have withdrawn my candidacy from the District 5 race, I wanted to tell you why I have given my full support to Bill Martinson. The adversarial nature of the local Republican Party officials toward candidates other than their chosen one in this race has been apparent from the start. First by encouraging candidates to rethink the candidacy and withdraw so that the heir-apparent, Charlotte Harer, would be the only option for the voters. Following that, they withheld access to valuable party lists to all of the candidates except for Charlotte."

Any candidate that might feel that information was not available to them is only because they did not ask for it. I have repeatedly called the Republican Candidates to see if they needed anything or any help with their campaigns. Ms. Jackson was asked if she had any needs from the Republican Party and which I was told that all was going fine and that she appreciated being asked. Later calls made were either ignored or not returned.

The Tulsa County Republican Party has not endorsed or given extra help to any Candidate competing for the Tulsa City District 5 seat. Any persons that might be misguided into stating so is mistaken or is stating untruths. Those that would use smear tactics, un-truths, inaccurate statements about our party are encouraged to disengage from the outside forces that are inherently trying to disrupt a fair and honest election. It would almost seem that there are those that would have a self interest in ruling our city government that are toying with a free and democratic election. The City of Tulsa is trying to fill a position vacated by Sam Roop with an individual that has Tulsa's best interest at heart and not the interest of someone or a group that have their own selfish motives. I understand that Ms. Jackson's campaign did not go her way, but to blame the Republican Party with untruths and trying to discredit a fellow Republican candidate with untruths is just not consistent with Republican Values.

Jerry Buchanan has been scrupulously even-handed in his dealings with these candidates. Whatever resources the county party has at its disposal -- and those resources are not as impressive as you might think -- they've been available to any Republican candidate.

As Republican chairman, he has expressed the concern that, in a first-past-the-post special election, with no primary and no runoff, too many Republican candidates would split the GOP vote and allow a Democrat to win with a minority of the vote. It's a simple political fact, and several sensible candidates assessed their chances, their willingness to commit time and resources to the race, and chose instead to drop out and support another candidate. Buchanan would have been negligent of his responsibilities if he had ignored the significant risk to the party's ability to retain a seat it has always held.

But the party chairman doesn't control the endorsements made by Republican elected officials and precinct leaders. Senator Jim Inhofe and Congressman John Sullivan, State Rep. Sue Tibbs and State Sen. Brian Crain are supporting Charlotte Harer because they've known her and worked with her for years in the party, and they know that she's a solid conservative and a hard worker.

As far as I'm aware, the other Republicans in the race have never been involved beyond checking the Republican box when they registered to vote. Checking that box entitles them to even-handed treatment from the party organization, but it doesn't entitle them to the loyalty and support of Republican officials and activists. Charlotte Harer has earned that loyalty and support. She has served for over four years as one of Tulsa County's representatives on the Republican state committee, and as president of the Tulsa County Republican Women's Club, she has increased membership from 50 to 250, building up a corps of women who stand ready to donate time and money to Republican candidates and causes. If anyone would deserve special treatment by the party organization, it would be Charlotte Harer.

Charlotte Harer, Republican candidate in the Tulsa City Council District 5 special election, could use your help tomorrow morning to get her message out to the voters. You don't have to be a District 5 resident to help. Volunteers will be gathering at 9:30 a.m. at her home at 2927 S 67th East Ave. For more information, call Charlotte at 664-7596 or on her cell phone at 639-1044.

The local chapter of the League of Women Voters had candidates for next Tuesday's Tulsa City Council District 5 election respond to an extensive questionnaire, and Tulsa Topics has posted it online. The candidates were asked about their reasons for running, non-partisan elections, the recall provisions of the City Charter, privatization, economic development, zoning, and whether a council seat should be a full-time position.

In his responses, Bill Martinson, the candidate of the Cockroach Caucus, sidesteps the question about recall ("The recall provisions do not apply to this race"), says he'll follow the recommendations of the professional staff and TMAPC when it comes to zoning decisions, and thinks the job of Councilor can be handled on a part-time basis, "[b]ased upon [his] perception of the role of the city council, as supported by conversations with a number of present and former council members." Yes, Bill, if you want to be a rubber stamp, it doesn't take much time at all. Show up, vote how you're told and go home. No need to read reports or research issues if you've decided not to exercise independent thought.

Andy Phillips disqualifies himself in my eyes by referring to "bickering and squabbling" by the current council. It shows that he hasn't been paying attention and that he doesn't appreciate the important issues that have been debated over the last year. He also sidesteps questions about zoning and land use.

Meanwhile on his blog, Chris Medlock makes a strong case for supporting Charlotte Harer.

Steve Roemerman was at Monday night's candidate forum for the Tulsa City Council District 5 election and his report is on his blog.

The big surprise of the night: Nancy Jackson dropped out of the race and threw her support behind Cockroach Caucus candidate Bill Martinson. I was never quite sure why Ms. Jackson was running, and I'm not sure she knew either. When she spoke at a meeting of Republican precinct leaders from the district just before the filing period, she was the only candidate who refused to answer a question about her opinion on abortion and refused to say whether she would vote to allocate any of the city's federal block grant money to Planned Parenthood. (Bill Martinson was not in attendance at that meeting -- last minute conflict came up.)

When you go to Steve's report, pay close attention to the candidates' responses to the question about zoning -- it's very telling.

NOTE: After I posted this entry, I received a couple of e-mails from readers with more details on the switch to blue uniforms, details that make the changeover seem quite reasonable, and I present those below.

Last night after the TulsaNow forum, a number of us gathered at James E. McNellie's Pub on 1st Street for $3 burgers, something wherewith to wet our whistles, and some local political chat.

I was told that the Mayor and the police chief plan to spend a half-million dollars buying new blue uniforms for our police officers. Why? The decision-makers think they look sharper than the green and khaki that the officers currently wear. These uniforms are not only dark blue, but I'm told that they will be 100% wool. Imagine, my informant said, it's a hot Oklahoma summer day, and you're wearing a bulletproof vest and some other layers under a wool shirt made of a heat-absorbing color.

I was also told that Tulsa's two police helicopters are equipped with obsolete Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) systems. The systems have been in service for 13 years, six years beyond their expected useful life. The company that made the FLIR systems is out of business, and a former employee, out in California, bought up all the spare parts and repairs the systems to keep them running. If the guy gets hit by a bus, we're stuck if our current systems stop working. Repairing the FLIR system in a helicopter means incurring the time and expense to send it out to California.

A FLIR system, which makes heat visible, is very useful for tracking someone in the dark. Last summer, two Tulsa police officers won an international first-place prize for using FLIR in an arrest:

At the event FLIR Systems was proud to announce the winners of the 2004 Vision Award competition. First place was awarded to the Tulsa Police Department�s Tim Smith (pilot) and Tim Ward (Tactical Flight Officer). The winning video featured the apprehension of four suspects who fled first in a vehicle and later on foot. The suspects were wanted in connection with a gang-related double homicide. After the suspects were apprehended, the tape was later used by the department to recover the weapon ditched during the chase, which was determined to be the weapon used in the homicides.

It would make sense to replace the old systems with something new, if we could afford it. We wouldn't have to worry about availability of parts or support. A new system would draw less power and provide sharper images. A new system would allow eyes on the ground to see the FLIR image, which is currently only available to the pilot.

How much would it cost to buy a new FLIR system for both of the TPD's choppers? Half a million dollars, or what we're paying to outfit our officers in itchy dark blue wool.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

After reading your piece on the uniform change for the cops, I passed the information on to a reporter, thinking it might make for a good news story. The response I got tends to indicate you should consider checking your source. You implied in your article that the mayor and chief chose the color. In fact, the change has been approved by a majority vote of the force. That fact was, of course, noted in the link you provided---for those that chose to go there. The reporter I contacted has probed the matter. She said the uniforms cops now wear are made of virtually the same material the new ones will entail, rendering the 100 percent wool issue somewhat neutral. She also said cops pay for their own uniforms. Yes, they pay for them with an allowance from the city, but that allowance will not be increased with the change. So it is perhaps erroneous to claim the city is going to dish out $500,000 to make the switch. And, the new uniforms will be cheaper, according to my source. There are, apparently, more makers of blue uniforms than green. Price competition allows for $40 pants instead of $70 pants, for example. It seems to me the only financial change here is one of a little more pocket money for cops, in that they will be spending less of their allowances on uniforms. There is no dispute on the issue of FLIR. But the two issues are unrelated.

MORE: Another reader, a Tulsa Police reserve officer, writes:

When TPD was advised by the sole remaining supplier of the green shirted uniform, that due to low demand for this uniform that it would probably not be available in five years or less, the Department formed a Uniform Advisory Committee. This Committee was to research and advise for possible replacement of this soon to be unavailable uniform. The committee advised to go to LAPD blue.

Green Uniform Facts:

1. The uniform is already a blend of wool and polyester.
2. The uniform is only available in a single fabric weight for summer or winter.
3. The uniform is not available in female sizes, forcing female Officers to get something close and then visit a tailor for costly fitting.
4. The uniform is significantly higher in cost than the blue.

LAPD Blue Uniform Facts

1. The uniform is available in three different weights including a tropical weight.
2. The uniform is available in a full range of female sizes.
3. The uniform is available from a number of uniform manufacturers.
4. Due to the popularity of this uniform it is significantly lower in cost.

Who made the decision to change the uniform?

The decision to change or keep the current uniform was put to a vote by the Officers. They were given the choice of :

LAPD Blue
Keep the green
Go to something else.

Blue won narrowly over green with something else a very distant third.

Cost to the City:

Each Officer receives $625.00 a year uniform allowance. There are 780 Officers. If the City provides a basic issue of the new uniform, this allowance will not be issued for the current year meaning there will be no additional cost to the City for this uniform change. There is no $500,000 additional cost to the City.

An item 8.F. has been added to the agenda for tonight's Tulsa City Council meeting. It reads:

Consensus of lack of confidence in Alan Jackere as City Attorney in either a temporary or permanent position, and requesting the Mayor to appoint one of the internal candidates as next City Attorney.

I am told that the Mayor is trying to get the item pulled off of the agenda.

For whatever reason the agenda item and its supporting resolution (which details the case against Jackere) do not yet appear on the Council website.

UPDATE: The item was left on the agenda, and the motion failed on a four-four tie, breaking as you would expect.

As disappointed as I was when Bill LaFortune appointed Alan Jackere as acting City Attorney, it was a relief to know that this man, with his creative ways of interpreting our charter and ordinances, was not a candidate to become City Attorney. It was also a relief to know that there were some excellent candidates among the four internal applicants, all four of whom were certified as qualified. There's a civil service rule, the "rule of three," that says if you have at least three qualified internal candidates for a position, you must promote from within.

Jackere became acting City Attorney on July 1, 2004. Evidently, Mayor LaFortune isn't sufficiently enamored of any of the three internal applicants to make the appointment. Now, after an initial lack of interest, Jackere has thrown his hat into the ring for the permanent position.

Here's the scenario I see unfolding: LaFortune's backers want Jackere or someone like him who will continue misinterpreting the law to suit their financial interests. None of the other internal applicants for the job are sufficiently inclined in that direction. Jackere changes his mind and applies for the position. Now LaFortune can technically fulfill the requirements of the rule of three by appointing Jackere to the post, even though he didn't apply by the deadline for internal applicants.

I'll say it again: Every day that Alan Jackere remains as acting City Attorney is another day in which Bill LaFortune demonstrates his contempt for fairness and the rule of law. If LaFortune makes him City Attorney, we're stuck with him for as long as he wants to stay, for all practical purposes. Even if we replace LaFortune in 2006, his successor will be burdened with a City Attorney at odds with a reform-minded Mayor and a reform-minded majority on the City Council. What a rotten legacy that would be.

This Friday night and Saturday, the South and East Alliance of Tulsa (SEAT) will present Community Conference 2005 at Christview Christian Church, 25th and Garnett (just north of Martin East Regional Library). Friday night's session will feature rotating round-table discussions with elected officials, including Bill LaFortune, members of the City Council, County Commission, and various boards and commissions.

Saturday will feature a variety of seminars -- I'll be leading one in the afternoon session on city issues from the neighborhood perspective. Topics include crime prevention, disaster preparedness, zoning, the city public works department, property taxes, legal aid, parks, Route 66, historic preservation, urban development, environmental awareness, building and running a neighborhood association, and many more. You can find all the details here on the home page for the conference.

Last year's first-ever conference was very well done, and SEAT volunteers are working hard to make this year's another success. In addition to all the good information, they're bringing in good food. Friday night's roundtables will feature a chocolate fountain. Saturday morning breakfast will be catered by Panera Bread, and Sooner Barbecue is handling lunch, which will be presided over by Jim Cremins, a very entertaining speaker. The cost is $20 for Friday night, $30 for Saturday, including food.

If you're active in the community or interested in becoming active, the conference will help you learn a lot in a short time. To sign up, phone (918) 439-1432.

Mee Citee Wurkor has a solid analysis of today's Whirled article about the lawsuits that have been filed against the City and against several Tulsa City Councilors. The article is a sort of editorial posing as news analysis, featuring carefully selected quotes that all support the common theme: "The Council is irresponsible to ignore the excellent legal advice of my pal, Alan Jackere."

(One of the subtle entertainments of a City Council committee meeting is to watch P. J. Lassek and Alan Jackere, sitting next to each other near the front of the room, each intently watching the discussion and each chomping rhythmically on a wad of gum. I could swear they always end up chewing in sync.)

We have an acting City Attorney that fails to understand that the elected officials are his clients, and he exists to serve their interests. If he renders advice, they are free to ignore it, but he is still obliged to provide whatever legal support they need to accomplish their purposes.

I'll say it one more time, just in case the 11th Floor hasn't been paying attention: It's now been nine months since Martha Rupp-Carter's resignation as City Attorney was effective. Mr. Mayor, you can replace Alan Jackere at any time with one of several good candidates to be a permanent City Attorney. If you value fairness and the rule of law, you'll take care of that this week.

In a departure from recent tradition, Council Vice Chairman Tom Baker was passed over for the chairmanship of the Council, which rotates each April between political parties. Instead, Roscoe Turner was selected by the Democratic caucus on the Council (Turner, Baker, and Jack Henderson) to take the party's turn with the gavel, and the whole Council approved him by a vote of 7-1 -- Susan Neal cast the only "no" vote.

The Republican caucus, now dominated 3-2 by associates of the Cockroach Caucus (Neal, Christiansen and Sullivan, against Mautino and Medlock) chose Susan Neal as the nominee for Vice Chairman. Neal was approved by the Council by a 5-3 vote, with Mautino, Medlock, and Turner dissenting. It's ironic that in April 2003, Sam Roop and Chris Medlock offered to support Neal as Vice Chairman, because they did not want to see Randy Sullivan becoming Vice Chairman and then Chairman. Medlock and Mautino opposed Neal's nomination this year because of her refusal to join nearly every other Republican elected official in the Tulsa area in opposition to the attempt to recall Mautino and Medlock from office.

In other City Hall news, the City will not pay the legal expenses of the five councilors being sued by F&M Bank for their vote rejecting the final plat on the 71st and Harvard property. The topsy-turvy reason: Because the five being sued constitute a majority of the Council, any vote by the Council to cover their legal fees would lack a quorum, because the five would have to recuse themselves. So an official action of the City Council, approved by the majority of the Council, will not be defended by the City. The acting City Attorney, Alan Jackere, who should be working to defend the official action taken by the Council, refuses to do so. Mayor LaFortune continues to demonstrate his contempt for the rule of law and for fairness for all Tulsans by allowing Jackere to continue as acting City Attorney. There are some excellent candidates who have applied for the job, and it's about time LaFortune acted to fill the vacancy.

The Tulsa City Council District 5 special election is for all the marbles. With Sam Roop's departure, the Council is split 4-4 between the forces of reform and the forces of reaction, between the Faithful Four and the Bought and Paid Four.

This election poses a special challenge. Under Tulsa's City Charter, a special election has no primary and no runoff. There is one election, and whoever is first past the post wins the seat. With eight candidates in the race, someone could win with only 13% of the votes. While it's a situation that instant runoff voting would handle flawlessly, the rules are what they are.

Under these conditions, it is essential for reform-minded residents of District 5 to rally around a single candidate. Unfortunately, one candidate, whom I believed to be a reformer, doesn't have the maturity to appreciate the political realities. This candidate has run off whining to the Tulsa Whirled, giving them ammunition, in the form of baseless charges, to use against the good guys.

Filing closed today at 5 p.m. for the Tulsa City Council District 5 special election on May 10 -- six Republicans, two Democrats are in the race.

Joe Conner, R
Charlotte Harer, R
Allen Harjo, R
Nancy Jackson, R
William Martinson, R
Al Nichols, D
Andrew Phillips, D
David Weaver, R

I'll tell you what I know about these folks in a later entry.

Today, voters in the City of Tulsa will vote on a $250 million general obligation bond issue, which will be repaid by an increase in the property tax rate amounting to an extra $30 per year for a $100,000 home. I'm voting for all six items and hope you will, too.

Union Public Schools has a runoff for one school board seat. I've been very impressed with Tom Seng, a parent of Union students who wants to see the district focus on academics. He's rightly concerned about the amount of money the district spends on bricks and mortar for non-essentials.

Tulsa Public Schools has a runoff in office 3 (north Tulsa) between Joda Trimiar and Lana Turner.

Bixby, Broken Arrow, Glenpool, and Skiatook all have City Council races on the ballot.

I've said this on the radio, but I don't know if I've posted it here yet. I'm supporting the City of Tulsa General Obligation Bond Issues that are on the ballot this coming Tuesday. I've even got "YES" signs in my front yard. You can find details of the projects that the bond will pay for here.

Yes, I know it means city property taxes will go up, but they've been going down the last few years, and they won't return to their previous peak. The extra cost is about $30 a year on a $100,000 home. The City of Tulsa has a backlog of $4 billion in capital improvements needs -- sewer and water line replacement and extension, arterial street widening, residential street rebuilding, along with improvements and replacements for city-owned buildings. Through the third-penny sales tax and these GO bond issues, we're just keeping pace as the needs continue to pile on. We're still building out the infrastructure for land the city annexed in 1966, and at the same time, we've got to replace infrastructure in the older parts of the city. We really should have voted on this a year and a half ago, but it was delayed to make way for Vision 2025. While I would have preferred many of the Vision projects to go to the back of the funding line behind more critical infrastructure needs, that didn't happen, and the infrastructure needs are still there.

There has been some talk about defeating the GO bond to send a message to City Hall. If that happened, it would send the wrong message. The Cockroach Caucus would argue that the failure of the GO bond was the fault of Mautino and Medlock and their allies, and the defeat would be used as ammunition in the campaign for their recall as well as in next year's election. There's been scuttlebutt that at least one branch of the Cockroach Caucus would like to see the bond defeated to damage Bill LaFortune and soften him for defeat by their handpicked replacement. The time to send a message to City Hall is on May 10, when the replacement for District 5 City Councilor Sam Roop is elected -- we need to make sure we get someone in that district who wlil keep the Reform Alliance in the majority.

(In the interest of full disclosure, it turns out that my street will be rebuilt if one of the GO bond questions passes, but I'd already decided to support the bond issue before I knew that, and I'm voting for the items that have nothing to do with me.)

Earlier this week, in three installments, the Tulsa Whirled and KOTV released the results of a poll of 500 likely voters about Tuesday's bond issue, satisfaction with the progress of Vision 2025, and the popularity of the Mayor, the City Council as a body, and each individual councilor. The poll showed the bond issues passing, a majority satisfied with progress on Vision 2025, the Mayor with a 60% approval rating, and the Council with a 34% approval rating. On the individual councilors the undecideds were around 50% on each. The decided voters broke 50-50 for and against Chris Medlock, Jim Mautino, and Roscoe Turner; the other councilors had a majority approving. The poll has a margin of error of +/-4%.

The supplied answers to one of the questions about the Council were just bizarre:

We wanted to know if voters think the current conflict among members of city council is helping or hurting the city. When asked if the conflict is helping or hurting the city's growth and development, 60 percent say the conflict is hurting the city by preventing important growth and development. 22 percent say the conflict helps the city by raising questions about the city's growth and development. 9 percent say it's just business as usual. Another 9 percent had no opinion.

It would make sense to ask the "helping/hurting" question without qualification, but adding the reasons is more typical of a "push poll," in which the poll is really a vehicle for delivering a partisan message to the voter. What answer would you give to that question if you feel that the conflict is helping the city by exposing long-hidden problems in city government? Interesting, too, is that they didn't give the voter a chance to say which side he blamed for the conflict.

It's possible that this is the one poll in twenty that is outside the margin of error -- the odds are 19-1 against drawing such an unrepresentative sample. How the pollster qualified likely voters is another factor that can affect the result of a poll. Did they simply ask the respondent, "Are you likely to vote?" Pollster Ed Goeas has said that older voters tend to underestimate their likelihood of turning up at the polls, while younger voters tend to overestimate. A more sophisticated approach uses a voter's actual history of showing up at the polls, as recorded in the state's voter database. If the sample of voters for this poll was drawn from the general voting population, I would expect different results if the sample were taken from those who regularly vote in municipal elections.

That said, I'm not surprised by the results. Although I would have been happy to know that most voters in the city agree with me, the reality is that most people aren't paying close attention, and they will tend to have a positive view of local officials unless they're given some specific reason to believe otherwise. Many people still depend on the Whirled for their understanding of local events, and Councilors Mautino, Medlock, and Turner have been hammered in the news pages and on the editorial pages since they took office. It is surprising that Vision 2025 only has a bare majority of support, lower than its margin of victory in 2003.

Bobby's got the scoop over at Tulsa Topics on the full slate of community meetings for Tuesday -- a meeting on the widening of I-44, a meeting about AEP's tree trimming policies and your rights as a homeowner, and a District 9 meeting about the general obligation bond issue, plus the usual morning of Council committee meetings. No recall related items this week, but the public works committee meeting at 8 a.m. will include status reports on the Vision 2025 projects for the City of Tulsa.

That meeting on tree trimming is sponsored by the Tulsa Audubon Society and a number of neighborhood associations. Midtown Tulsa has a wonderful canopy of mature trees, but they interfere with the power lines during storms. Fast-growing "volunteer" trees often sprout and quickly get established along fences, which often means that they grow right up into the wires. AEP has a program to get rid of tree growth that could cause outages, but they don't have an absolute right to cut down any tree they like, any way they like. The meeting is at 5:30 p.m. at Wright Elementary School, on 45th Place west of Peoria. Here's the description:

This forum has been arranged in response to complaints from many homeowners and other concerned homeowners about damage which has been done to their properties by AEP and its contractors. The speakers will include attorneys who specialize in utilities' and property owners' rights and responsibilities regarding utility easements. They will advise citizens regarding actions they should consider before the contractors arrive on their property and their rights and responsibilities when workers enter the property. They will also have recommendations for owners of properties which are unnecessarily damaged during maintenance activities in the utility easement.

For information, contact Herb Beattie at 749-4586 or herb.beattie AT sbcglobal.net (substitute an @ sign for the word AT).

This morning on KFAQ I made a statement that I believed to be correct but was inaccurate. Jim Burdge was NOT on Terry Simonson's 2002 mayoral campaign team. (It had been my understanding during the campaign that he was.) Terry informs me that he did not have a campaign manager as such, but the members of his campaign team (including Janet Sullivan, Ky Vargus, and Tom and Debbie Gutmann) each handled certain key tasks. Burdge was not involved in any of the campaign meetings, and as far as Terry is aware, Burdge was not given any work to do for the campaign. My apologies to Terry for my error. I will repeat my correction on KFAQ on Monday morning.

The Tulsa City Attorney's Office has issued an opinion, authored by Michael C. Romig, stating that there is an irreconcilable conflict of interest for board members of the Metropolitan Tulsa Chamber of Commerce (MTCC) serving on the City's Economic Development Commission (EDC). According to the opinion, the conflict is created by the contract between the City and MTCC. The EDC oversees performance of that contract. The opinion states that the conflict cannot be resolved by abstaining from debate or votes. The City Attorney's opinion is grounded in an Oklahoma Attorney General's opinion last year regarding the state's constitutional prohibition of conflicts of interest (Article X, Section 11).

The City Attorney's opinion says that there is no inherent conflict of interest for ordinary members of MTCC serving on the EDC, but they would have to exercise personal judgment on any given issue as to whether they could in good conscience vote in the interest of the City and not in the interest of MTCC.

Councilor Chris Medlock will be on KFAQ with Michael DelGiorno at 7:40 a.m. Wednesday to discuss this ruling.

Just a reminder -- Tulsa Topics should be on your list of daily reads. The latest entry is an in-depth preview of Thursday night's Council meetings, including an audio clip of what Bill Christiansen was saying about the 71st and Harvard situation last Thursday night. On Monday he posted a detailed preview of the Council's Tuesday committee meetings with links to relevant background information.

It's not all political -- Bobby writes of a visit to Swan Lake, which inspired some research into the 1934 Chicago World's Fair.

Beyond the blog, Tulsa Topics has a media page, with clips from recent public meetings.

You'll also find the beginnings of a Wikipedia of the Tulsa political and business scene. A wiki allows you to register and contribute your own knowledge to the collection. If enough folks get involved in limited ways, it could grow rapidly into a wonderful resource for understanding the background to the news.

Monday morning on KFAQ I reported what Mayor Bill LaFortune has been saying about the upcoming general obligation bond issue -- that your property taxes will be lower than they are now if the bond issue passes.

Turns out it depends on how you look at it. The Mayor is comparing the sum of the last five years, which includes a very high number in 1999, with the sum of the next five years. Here's the city's levy per $1000 net assessed value from FY 1999 through FY 2011.

In a nutshell, the bond issue will make your property taxes will go up, but not as high as they have been in the past.

UPDATE: Chris Medlock has posted his account of the story that appeared in the Saturday World.

I can't remember if I've used this analogy on this blog, or perhaps just in other forums, but I've observed that the Tulsa World sometimes operates like a volleyball team, with the newsroom providing the "set" with a well-slanted news story, providing the editorial board just what they need for the "spike" -- the "facts" required to "prove" whatever point the editorial board is trying to make.

A week or so ago Councilor Chris Medlock made an offhand comment, during an off-the-record conversation with a Tulsa World reporter. He mentioned that a high-ranking city official came to him to relay an offer -- support granting an easement over city land for the proposed private toll bridge across the Arkansas River and the recall would be called off. Someone decided to turn the offhand, off-the-record comment into a news story.

Commenter Jeff Shaw makes an excellent point about Mayor Bill LaFortune's accusation that the Tulsa Commerce and Legal News is responsible for the failure to publish notice of the charter amendment election and thus for the removal of the charter amendment from the April ballot:

I would look for an denial from the publisher they made a mistake. It is my view and experience that these type of accidents don't happen on the publication end of things. Legal publications are very very important with regard to due process of law, and they take it very seriously. It's tantamount to malpractice.

If a newspaper fails to run a legal notice as required, public hearings and court proceedings have to be delayed, at a cost to the people and the government body involved. A newspaper that specializes in legal notices would have all sorts of safeguards in place to avoid exposing the paper to liability for failure to publish.

If it is the newspaper's fault, the City should be able to sue for the $100,000 it will cost to hold a separate special election for the charter amendment. The newspaper may even have "errors and omissions" insurance to cover the situation. The charter amendment represents a promise made to the property owners of this city, to restore this protection at the earliest possible opportunity. If the Mayor is serious about keeping his promise to the citizens, he'll pursue damages. Otherwise, we'll have to assume he's more interested in keeping the promises he made behind closed doors to the developers' lobbyists.

Who's to blame for the mistake that forced the Tulsa city charter amendment off the ballot? The mistake, if it was a mistake, meant that the unanimous will of Tulsa's elected officials was thwarted, with only two ways to undo the damage: Schedule another city-wide election at a cost of $100,000, or delay the amendment until next March's city general election. Mayor Bill LaFortune's administration has given conflicting answers and doesn't seem anxious to pursue sanctions against the person or persons responsible for the damage to the democratic process.

There are a lot of important issues on tonight's Tulsa City Council agenda.

• The Mayor has nominated a replacement for planning commission member Dell Coutant (the only member that has respect for the Comprehensive Plan). His name is Owen Ard, and I understand that he lives in Maple Ridge neighborhood and is in real estate. Once again, the Mayor appears to be bowing to his Cockroach Caucus masters by NOT replacing the commissioner who most needs to go -- Joe Westervelt. That must have been some woodshedding they gave Bill out at Homebuilders' Hall.
• Former District 7 City Councilor Terry Doverspike has been nominated to the Economic Development Commission to replace Jono Helmerich. While Doverspike may not be the Chamber booster that his predecessor on the Council, John Benjamin (now a Bixby resident), was, Doverspike is not likely to be the kind of skeptical outsider we need to oversee the spending of Tulsa's economic development money.
• An item about allowing the Council to handle appeals from the City Board of Adjustment.
• An attempt to put off the charter amendment and the city bond issue until May.

And there's more. It all starts at 6 p.m. tonight at City Hall.

Kramer, in "The Fusilli Jerry" episode of "Seinfeld":

"Have you ever met a proctologist? They usually have a very good sense of humor. You meet a proctologist at a party, don't walk away. Plant yourself there because you will hear the funniest stories you've ever heard. See, no one wants to admit to them that they stuck something up there. Never. It's always an accident. Every proctologist story ends in the same way... 'It was a million to one shot, doc, million to one.' "

I thought of that quote when I heard what happened at City Hall Tuesday morning. It seems to capture the difficulty the Mayor's administration has taking responsibility for their decisions.

Mayor Bill LaFortune's chief of staff Clay Bird came down to the City Council's Urban and Economic Development committee meeting to say that due to some freak oversight on the part of the City Clerk's office, necessary paperwork wasn't filed in a timely fashion, and therefore a proposed charter amendment won't be on the April ballot with the bond issue. The purpose of the charter amendment, which passed the Council unanimously, is to restore the supermajority requirement for a zoning change in which a formal protest is filed by a sufficient number of property owners affected by the change.

The committee meeting will be broadcast on TGOV (Cox cable channel 24) sometime between 1:00 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. tomorrow and every day through the rest of the week. I'm told it's must-see TV. Some of the Councilors seemed quite excited that the charter amendment would not make the April ballot. Now there's talk of delaying the bond issue yet one more month, to May, along with the charter amendment, the District 5 special election to replace Sam Roop and the recall elections in District 2 and 6, all on the same day, with the Cockroach Caucus hoping for a clean sweep -- stop the charter amendment, elect a John Benjamin crony in 5 and get rid of two good councilors in 2 and 6. The Cockroaches apparently hope that a single, relatively high turnout election will ensure that their deep pockets will overwhelm the volunteer efforts in support of Medlock and Mautino and the charter change.

I'm not buying the excuse that it was a mistake by the City Clerk's office. There have been too many coincidental mistakes -- agendas not getting posted and the like -- and they always seem to favor the Cockroaches. If it wasn't an intentional slip, perhaps it's because the City Clerk's office is too busy expediting the processing of recall petitions (which will please the Cockroaches) to handle other important business.

We hear that the Mayor got verbally beat up by some development lobbyists recently, and in the process of saying "uncle!" he promised to stop speaking out against the recall of Medlock and Mautino. If that's so, perhaps he also promised them to find a way to scuttle the charter change and speed up recall. The Mayor doesn't dare come out openly against the charter change and for the recall, beacuse he'd lose his political base, but if he supports the charter change and opposes the recall, he risks offending the men who might bankroll him to the next level of his 8-8-8 plan (eight years as mayor, eight as governor, eight as president).

It seems that the Mayor wants what the Cockroach Caucus wants, but he doesn't want the public to hold him accountable for enabling the Cockroaches to get their way. Like the proctologist's patient, he finds it easier to pretend it was all an accident. Sorry, I'm not buying that -- rectocranial inversions like that don't just happen spontaneously.

I've laid off the Tulsa blogging today -- other news has caught my attention -- but I'll get back to it tomorrow. In the meantime, Bobby of Tulsa Topics has been blogging about more shabby treatment inflicted on a neighborhood association, with the aid of the neighborhood's own city councilor.

Bobby also makes sure the Tulsa World knows precisely whom to contact about the copyright infringements found on the pro-recall Coalition for Reprehensible Government's website. And he reports that now even subscribers can't get to the PDF files on the World's website. (TRACKBACK: Ron Coleman comments over on his blog.)

Homeowners for Fair Zoning has more about the misuse of continuances as an anti-neighborhood tactic in zoning cases.

On the TulsaNow forums, there's talk about the released plans for widening I-44 between the river and Yale. I'm disappointed to see that there is no provision for mid-mile crossovers, which means that the expressway will continue to be a kind of Berlin Wall separating north from south, with bottlenecks at the section line "checkpoints."

Just got word that City Hall has confirmed the rumored staff moves I reported earlier: Mayor Bill LaFortune is appointing City Councilor Sam Roop as Chief Administrative Officer, and Mayoral aide Clay Bird will become Chief of Staff. There's one additional bit of information: Fire Chief Allen LaCroix will do double duty as Chief Operating Officer. Good men all, but the Mayor seems to have stuck to one of his guiding principles: Don't hire anyone who could outshine you. He missed a chance to add energy, ideas, and experience to his administration, and in the process may have permanently alienated a key ally.

The biggest surprise for many City Hall observers is that Terry Simonson was not named to one of these key posts in the Mayor's office. The buzz for a couple of months was that Simonson, who had served under the two previous Republican mayors (Jim Inhofe and Dick Crawford), would be brought on board to try to bring some focus and direction to the last year of Bill LaFortune's term. Some say that the push to put Simonson on the Mayor's staff was coming from Terry's old boss, Sen. Jim Inhofe. (Folks who heard Inhofe's appearance on Thursday's Michael DelGiorno Show remarked that he was unusually willing to comment -- and not in a positive way -- on city matters, a topic he usually sidesteps. The subtext to his comments might well be expressed by this Walt Kelly poem.)

Although a lot of folks had qualms with his coziness with former City Councilor and Chamber-Pot-in-Chief John Benjamin during his 2002 campaign for mayor, people know that Simonson has done some serious thinking about how City Hall ought to be run and how to make city government more efficient and effective. His thoughtfulness is evident in his many op-eds for Urban Tulsa Weekly and on his own website in the during his last run for Mayor. Although I don't always agree with him on policy, there's no doubt in my mind that his presence on the Mayor's team would have been a good thing for the city and a good thing for Bill LaFortune. Had LaFortune been wise, he would have found a way to get Terry on his staff from the first day of his administration.

Instead of being offered a key role on the 11th Floor, there's a rumor that Simonson has been offered the job of interim airports director, which brings with it the thankless task of cleaning up the mess left by Brent Kitchen and the Savage administration. In that position, he'd be based out at Tulsa International Airport, well out of the City Hall loop.

Meanwhile, some folks are asking if there is some connection between Sam Roop's new job and his reversal on the reappointment of Jim Cameron and Lou Reynolds to the Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Board. It's hard to imagine that the Mayor would have hired him if he had stuck with his initial "no" vote.

(I wish I could claim credit for the headline, but it's by another amateur punster from Tulsa.)

I have it on good authority that Mayor Bill LaFortune plans to appoint Clay Bird as his chief of staff and City Councilor Sam Roop as the City's Chief Administrative Officer.

This is an interesting move as it throws the balance of power on the Council into question, and it may represent an attempt to break the Reform Alliance majority by other means, as the recall effort seems to be faltering. Depending on how soon the appointment takes place, the new City Councilor will either be chosen in a special election or appointed by the remaining members of the Council. Replacing by appointment would be a messy business, with the Council split 4-4 between the Reform Alliance and the Cockroach Caucus. Unless the City Attorney's office comes up with yet another creative interpretation of the City Charter, a vacancy before March 14, 2005, means that a special election will be called to fill the seat. (An example of a creative interpretation -- saying that because it's less than a year before the 2006 election filing period the vacancy must be filled by appointment.)

If Roop takes the job, it will also remove him as a possible primary challenger to LaFortune in 2006. It will be interesting to see if other possible challengers are handled in a similar way.

Meanwhile, the Cockroach Caucus seems to be attempting an end-around to break up the Reform Alliance. Councilors Bill Christiansen (District 8) and Randy Sullivan (formerly a resident of District 7, which is now unrepresented) have been seen schmoozing Councilors Roscoe Turner and Jack Henderson, the two Democrats in the Reform Alliance, and it's rumored that the South Tulsa Rotary Club (of which Sullivan and Christiansen are members) is promising a substantial amount of money for projects in north Tulsa, the area represented by Henderson and Turner.

If the strategy is to buy Turner's and Henderson's loyalty, it won't work, and it demonstrates the Cockroach Caucus's contempt for their integrity and the Caucus's failure to understand what motivates their service. It would be easier for certain special interests if all public officials were venal, but the rest of us can be thankful that at least a majority on the Council have higher motives.

Way back on Monday, I attended the Downtown Kiwanis club luncheon as the guest of my friend John Eagleton. Ken Neal, editorial page editor of the Tulsa Whirled was the speaker of the day. John knew I'd be interested in hearing Ken speak, since I've written about him and the emissions of his editorial board quite frequently.

Ken has a folksy voice and manner. He spoke very briefly about the paper and the editorial section he oversees, and then threw it open for questions, what he called a "horsewhip the editor" session.

I had a pile of questions I could have asked, but narrowed it down to just one. He had just been asked a question about the mix and selection of syndicated columnists on the op-ed pages, and in fact, they now have a decent assortment, including some of my favorite conservative columnists -- writers like Thomas Sowell, James Lileks, and Paul Greenberg.

I commended Mr. Neal on the diversity of his syndicated columnists but asked why there was a lack of diversity of opinion on local issues. He seemed puzzled by my question. I pointed out that you never read Julie DelCour writing that Ken Neal was wrong about something or Ken Neal writing that David Averill was wrong about something. The board is uniformly supportive of any tax increase -- something Neal openly acknowledged a few weeks ago. The board is also uniformly negative about the reform majority on the Tulsa City Council.

His reply was about what I expected: The Whirled is a private company, not a public institution. We have the right to push our opinions and our ideas.

I wasn't questioning the Whirled's right to publish what they wished, just suggesting that the lack of diverse opinion on local issues was a flaw in need of correction. Neal went on to cite the decades of experience of each of the editorial board members, many of them with years of experience covering City Hall. Because they're all so intimate with the way City Hall works, naturally they're all in agreement over how City Hall ought to be run.

The answer to the next question shed further light on the matter. Kiwanis Club president Rick Brinkley very delicately and politely asked a question about the ethics of the Whirled's coverage of Great Plains Airlines, in which World Publishing Company was invested. Brinkley pointed out that as a matter of practice broadcast media disclose potential conflicts of interest: If ABC reports on a new film from Disney, they make mention of the fact that Disney is ABC's parent company. Neal brushed aside the comparison to broadcast media and said that they have all sorts of ethical standards that cover any conflicts of interest they may have as journalists, although he avoided the issue of conflicts of interest involving the newspaper's owners and their other business interests.

Regarding Great Plains Airlines, Neal pooh-poohed the idea that the newspaper abused the readers' trust in order to help anyone get rich. Neal pointed out that the Lortons, owners of the paper, are already rich. (And we all know that all wealthy people are contented with the amount of wealth they have.) Neal said, "Everybody in town thought it [public subsidy of Great Plains] was a great idea. It was a Chamber deal."

That says it all. Neal and company have a huge blindspot when it comes to dissenting opinion. They sit in their bunker on Main Street, with their decades of listening only to the conventional wisdom, and they honestly can't see any other way of running the city. The city's problems are of course not the fault of the powers-that-be and their policies, but the fault of the people who are doing the complaining.

It's cliched to refer to Pauline Kael's quote about Nixon's landslide -- "No one I know voted for him" -- but it fits this bunch.

In fact, there were many voices objecting to the city's financial involvement with Great Plains, including two then-City Councilors, Randi Miller and Clay Bird, who voted against the deal. A story in the Whirled some time back used their no votes as a way to needle Sam Roop and Roscoe Turner, councilors who voted for the deal but are now critical of it and are involved in the investigation of the airport.

To the Whirled editorial writers, and their allies in the Cockroach Caucus, city politics is utter simplicity. If it's a "Chamber deal," it must be good, and of course, "everybody in town" thinks it's a good idea. Anyone who disagrees is by definition a naysayer, an anti-progress crank, and therefore is beneath notice, no matter how well he can argue his position. The result is an inbred intellectual environment with imbecility as a predictable result.

No wonder the Whirled is so mystified and threatened by the presence of a majority of dissenters on the Council. They don't understand that there are tens of thousands of Tulsans unhappy with the way the city is being run and looking for leaders with fresh ideas.

One more interesting quote from the Q&A session: In response to a question about changing Tulsa's form of government, Neal said, "When you don't have a strong mayor, and you have a strong-mayor system, you run into problems." Neal advocates adding three at-large councilors and making the Mayor a member of the Council as well. The purpose behind such a move would be to make it much more difficult for grass-roots leaders to secure a majority on the Council.

I about flipped. I had tuned in late to the live broadcast of the Tulsa City Council and as the meeting ended, I heard Council Chairman and non-Councilor Randy Sullivan say something like: "On Tuesday, please remember the unrepresented citizens of District 7." Had Sullivan finally become embarrassed by the fact that he hasn't lived in his district in over a year? Had he resigned?

No. Nothing as good as that. He'll be out of town Tuesday when the Council will have a special meeting to vote on placing a charter amendment on the same April ballot as the general obligation bond issue. The amendment will allow Tulsa to have city ordinances that require council supermajorities in certain circumstances. You'll recall that the City Attorney's office claimed that the Charter's requirement of a majority vote to approve ordinances precluded any supermajority, and thus the provision was null and void that required a supermajority for zoning changes protested by a sufficient number of nearby property owners. At the time, the councilors universally expressed their regret at how badly the 71st & Harvard zoning protest had been handled, and universally expressed their support for fixing the problem. We will find out Tuesday which councilors were in earnest and which were insincere.

In the meantime, District 7 residents continue to be unrepresented even when Randy Sullivan is in town. I am still amazed that so far there hasn't been a movement by District 7 residents to protest his absence from the district. If you're a District 7 resident, I'd love to know if you think Sullivan should continue to serve, despite his non-resident status, and if so, why. Drop me a line at blog at batesline dot com.

In case you missed it, here, in MP3 format, are Michael DelGiorno's Monday morning interviews with Dawn Eden and with me, as heard on Talk Radio 1170 KFAQ. Warning: Files are large (3.5 MB and 2.4 MB respectively). These will only be available here for a few days.

Reader K. A. Hruzer writes to note that TGOV, Cox Cable's local government access channel, has rather limited access:

I'm frustrated that I cannot see/listen to our City Council Meetings.

TGOV is a COX Cable proprietary offering, which is good. However, less than 1/3 of local residents subscribe to COX Cable. Besides omitting those disproportionally too poor to afford a cable subscription, newer technologies such as VOOM, DISH or DirecTV are on the increase. None of these people have access to our local government activities in this manner.

I'm sure the powers that be wish to minimize this form of coverage; at least keep to the minimum definition of any 'Open Records' requirements.

I expect more.

In fact, it is not expecting too much that minutes of Council meetings be posted on the City Council website and archived for research purposes. A full transcript taken from the video would be even better. For that matter, streaming video posted.

IAC, it irks me that I have to wait for the 'Whirled' to 'report' their version of events, then, try to decipher what really happened.

This morning, I had the thought that better live coverage of the Council meetings should be strived for. The COX thing is good, and should be commended. But, the access is too limited. I wondered if you might try to influence your friends at KFAQ to do a live audio feed on the meetings? I don't know a thing about markets, time slots, etc. with regard to radio. The 6:00-7:xx time slot might be an important one for their revenues. In that light, even a replay late that evening would be better than none. And, those of us wishing to use exact quotes would be satisfied.

Anything which makes us less dependent upon the 'Whirled' for our information is good. Sure, blogs are good, too. But, they often don't get updated for days and are also subject to perspectives and opinions. So, the horses mouth is always best.

K. A. makes a great point. TGOV is a major breakthrough for citizen awareness of city government, broadcasting meetings of the Council, Council committees, the Board of Adjustment, the planning commission, and the Airport Authority, as well as some special programming. At the same time, because it is only offered through the local cable system (as a condition of their franchise agreement with the City of Tulsa), satellite subscribers and rabbit-ears users don't have access.

I don't see KFAQ preempting Laura Ingraham to broadcast commercial-free Council meetings. Anyway, you miss a lot without the visuals to let you know who is speaking.

Streaming video over the Internet would be the way to go -- it would be accessible at public libraries and at home for broadband Internet subscribers. Citizens would be able to watch the latest meetings any time, rather than just during designated rebroadcasts. And it would be possible for bloggers and others to link to and comment on specific excerpts.

The technology is not cutting edge, but there would be some cost involved to set it up and to pay for the bandwidth and the server software. Video is already being converted to digital format -- you can buy DVDs of Council meetings.

Interesting article in today's Whirled about Attorney General Drew Edmondson's opinion issued in response to a question about conflicts of interest on state boards and commissions. You'll find the opinion, which was released on December 15, here. The Whirled article starts here and continues here. I haven't read through the opinion yet to see whether the Whirled article gives an accurate account of the opinion.

The question came from former State Senator Ben Robinson, and concerned the Environmental Quality Board, which oversees the state Department of Environmental Quality.

A couple of interesting points:

Mere abstention from voting may not be sufficient to avoid a conflict of interest. A board member could have considerable influence over a decision even without casting a vote.

Title 60 trusts are excluded from the constitutional provision on which the opinion is based, but some trust board members also hold positions on related city boards, which would be subject to the conflict provision. The story mentions that the board members of the Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority, a public trust, and also board members of the Tulsa Utility Board, a body established by the City Charter, and the members of the Tulsa Airport Improvement Trust are also members of the Tulsa Airport Authority.

The story mentioned Councilor Sam Roop's potential conflict of interest involving a new business venture seeking to provide networking services to the city, and Councilor Roscoe Turner's service on the board of a charity which sought Community Development Block Grant funds. It was interesting that no mention was made of Councilor Bill Christiansen's status as an airport tenant, and the controversy over airport rules which seemed to put his sole competitor at a disadvantage.

The City Council majority was right to raise this issue and to demand full disclosure, not only for the bodies covered by this AG opinion, but for all city authorities, boards, and commissions.

www.tulsaworld.cc features photos and video taken around Tulsa, particularly concerning local politics. This page has lengthy video excerpts from last Thursday's Council meeting and the debate over reappointing Jim Cameron and Lou Reynolds to the water board, including Councilor Jim Mautino's speech, in which he lays out the facts about the TMUA's neglect of areas within Tulsa city limits while they rush to serve the suburbs. The site also has extensive coverage of problems with the airport noise abatement program. Good to see a site devoted to eyewitness coverage of local events.

This evening the Council will once again consider the Mayor's reappointment of Jim Cameron and Lou Reynolds to the Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority, the quango that controls Tulsa's water. It's been amazing to see how much anger has been directed at the Council majority for refusing to approve the reappointment, and how much energy has been spent trying to change their decision.

A passing mention in today's "Bleat" by James Lileks may help to explain why it matters so much to some people. He's writing about the historical novel Pompeii, by Robert Harris.

The hero is the local official in charge of the water supply for the cities around Pompeii, and most of the book concerns his efforts to fix a break in the aqueduct. ... Of course, water is a commodity, so there�s corruption of the �Chinatown� variety.

That's a reference to the 1974 film starring Jack Nicholson, set in Los Angeles in the early 20th century, and loosely based on controversies surrounding the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which carried water from the Owens River valley to the San Fernando Valley, making it possible to develop the valley, and making some land speculators very, very rich.

Here's the plot summary from IMDb:

Hollis Mulwray is a chief engineer of the water department. Ida Sessions, pretending to be his wife Evelyn, asks P.I. JJ Jake Gittes to investigate his adulterous ways. Jake takes photos of Hollis with a young lady. Hollis then turns up murdered, which Jake decides to investigate. Jake finds more than he was looking for. He discovers a plot to buy cheap, unwatered land for low prices, water the land, and sell it for millions of dollars. The plot is masterminded by one Noah Cross, who is Evelyn's father and Hollis' one-time business partner. His investigation leads him to an affair with Evelyn and a discussion with Noah Cross, both of whom seem curiously interested in the girl Hollis was seen with.

Subtract the murder and adultery subplots, and what you have left is a plot to direct public resources to help certain connected developers become very wealthy. The vehemence of the effort to keep Cameron and Reynolds on the water board make some folks wonder if something like that could happen here.

If you care about this issue, tonight is the time to show up and be heard -- 6 p.m. at City Hall.

Tulsa City Councilor Chris Medlock takes a trip down memory lane, back to his special election primary run for State House District 69 in 1994, back when the Tulsa Whirled editorial board actually liked him, and gave him their endorsement:

ON Tuesday, Republican voters in Tulsa's House District 69 will pick someone to represent them in the state House of Representatives. They should do themselves and the rest of Tulsa a big service by picking Chris Medlock.

Of the three GOP candidates, Medlock is the clear choice. At 35, he is a well-educated marketing and research analyst for the T.D. Williamson Co. ...

He is intimately acquainted with the need for adequate higher education facilities for Tulsa. He has been a staunch supporter of public school reform and new business development.

He also will provide Tulsa with another strong voice against crime. Articulate and knowledgeable on legislative issues, Medlock is exactly the kind of young person Tulsans should be encouraging to enter the political arena.

The voters in District 69 should have no hesitation in voting for Chris Medlock.

What's changed in ten years? As Chris himself notes, in 1994, he was considered the least conservative of the candidates, which would have won the admiration of the Whirledlings. Over the intervening years, Chris moved to the right, part of an even longer journey from a liberal, irreligious upbringing. Once pro-choice, Chris is now decidedly pro-life. Once a Unitarian youth minister, Chris is now part of a Presbyterian congregation. Having known Chris for nearly six years, I suspect several factors played a part: reading socially conservative thinkers and authors like Bill Bennett and Robert Bork, the experience of being surrogate dad to two teenage girls (a Russian exchange student who "adopted" Chris and his wife Cheryl, and the daughter of his late brother, who died the Saturday before his first election to the Council), and the prayers of conservative Christian friends in the Republican Party, who admired his energy, intellect, and boldness, and hoped to see those abilities put to the service of better principles.

Those prayers have been answered. Chris Medlock is the kind of city councilor we've needed for a long time, and the fact that powerful, shadowy forces have lined up to try to remove him from office is an indication of how sick and corrupt Tulsa's political culture is.

When first elected, Chris did not expect to be viewed as a radical. But as he witnessed the City's treatment of ordinary citizens, as he observed the way city trusts, boards and commissions operate, as he looked at the ineffectual economic development efforts of the Chamber bureaucracy, he could not in good conscience let the status quo continue without accountability.

Chris never expected to be at odds with Mayor Bill LaFortune expected to work side-by-side with Mayor Bill LaFortune to help the Mayor implement his promised reforms. But as Chris pursued his principled course, and as the Mayor purged voices for reform from his inner circle of advisors and chose to listen to the siren song of the Cockroach Caucus, they naturally found themselves on opposite sides of issues like economic development reform.

The Whirled and its publisher and their allies are pursuing their own interests, which are rarely and only belatedly disclosed. Chris didn't set out to alienate the Whirled, but in pursuing what is best for our city, he has come up against the cozy arrangements that suit the Whirled and the shadowy bunch backing the recall just fine.

An anonymous commenter to Chris's entry tracks the Whirled's decline over the same period. To paraphrase the Whirled circa 1994, the readers should have no hesitation in canceling their subscriptions. And the voters should have no hesitation in supporting Chris Medlock through this recall attempt.

Jim Rice, a Tulsa businessman, commissioned a song in support of the "Gang of Five," the alliance of reform-minded Councilors given a majority by the voters nine months ago. Two of those councilors are being targeted with a recall petition by entrenched special interests, whose ultimate aim is to grab back control and have a City Council that will serve those special interests without question.

The song is a parody of the Merle Haggard hit "Fightin' Side of Me" and Homeowners for Fair Zoning has the song on its multimedia page. It's a word of warning to the members of the Cockroach Caucus, and to others, like Mayor LaFortune, who play footsie with the Cockroach Caucus -- don't mess with our councilors, who are doing their best to serve all Tulsans, not just a favored few.

Rice was on the Michael DelGiorno show on KFAQ 1170 this morning talking about why he commissioned this song. He owns Central Towing and Recovery, and he's one of several towing company owners trying to get the city to use more than one service. Right now, if Tulsa Police needs a car towed, they call Storey Wrecker, which has an exclusive five-year contract. Cities as large as Oklahoma City and as small as Catoosa, the Tulsa County Sheriff's Department, and the Oklahoma Highway Patrol use multiple towing services, rotating calls among them, which improves response time, and spreads the work around. The City Council reformers heard the concerns of Rice and other wrecker owners and put the issue on the agenda to gather information and discuss whether there might be a better approach.

Towing for municipal governments can be a lucrative business, particularly if the towing company has the right to sell off unclaimed vehicles. The Chicago Sun-Times did an investigative series on the City of Chicago's towing business, and found that the city was selling unclaimed cars to the towing company (whose owner is a major donor to Mayor Daley's campaigns) for scrap prices, less than $130 each, no matter how new or well-maintained the car was. The towing company turns around and auctions the cars off at market values and pockets the difference. The owner of the unclaimed car is still stuck with the responsibility for whatever fines prompted the car being towed and for towing and storage fees -- none of the profit the towing company makes goes to satisfy those debts. The system is ripe for abuse and the Sun-Times documents several cases.

Meanwhile, Rice said on KFAQ this morning that he was called at home on his unlisted phone number by Tim Bartlett, an employee of the City of Tulsa in the Public Works department, who pushed for him to support the recall effort against Councilors Jim Mautino and Chris Medlock. Rice said that Bartlett suggested that Rice's efforts to get city business would be frustrated if he refused to play along.

There is something very wrong about a city employee, protected under civil service with the intention of insulating him from politics, using that position to coerce others to participate on one side of a political issue. Even if Bartlett was calling from his own phone on his own time, it was his position with the city that made his warning/threat to Rice credible. The matter should be investigated, and if Bartlett made such a phone call, it ought to cost him his job. It ought also to cost whoever -- his boss at Public Works, perhaps? -- put him up to making the call.

At some risk to his business, Rice didn't agree to play along with the Cockroach Caucus, and instead decided to find a way to show his support for these councilors who were willing to hear the concerns of local business owners.

Music can do far more than mere words to rally support and boost morale. Thanks to Jim Rice for giving us a battle hymn for the cause of reform in Tulsa.

Tulsa City Councilors Jim Mautino and Chris Medlock have just submitted their responses to the preliminary recall petitions. The response, limited to 200 words or less, must be submitted by the target of a preliminary recall petition within five days after the official has been served with the preliminary petition. The response will appear side-by-side with the 200-word reasons for recall on the supporting petition. The City Clerk will approve the form of the supporting petitions, which must be signed by 488 qualified District 6 electors in the case of Jim Mautino, 622 District 2 voters in the case of Chris Medlock.

Here is the response submitted by Councilor Chris Medlock. The response submitted by Jim Mautino is identical, mutatis mutandis:

Councilor Jim Mautino and I are honored that you, our constituents, elected us as your voice in city government.

We both took an oath to be good stewards of your government. We further promised, during our campaigns, to ensure that Tulsa�s city government serves all Tulsans and not just a favored few.

We promised to serve you with integrity. By keeping these promises, we have angered many who have previously benefited financially from old practices.

We agree with Mayor LaFortune who said recall �hampers our effort to find real solutions to the problems facing� Tulsa.

We agree with the League of Women Voters of Metropolitan Tulsa when they say this recall:

• Would be a waste of time, energy and money.
  
• Contains accusations in this petition that do not specify reasons for recall which are consistent with Oklahoma law.
  
• Effectively disenfranchises you, the residents of District 2.

Jim Mautino and I thank you for allowing us to serve you as Tulsa city councilors. We promise to continue to work hard ensuring your business in city government is conducted with integrity.

I have a good excuse when something newsworthy happens, and I don't get around to writing about it for days or weeks or ever. It's just little ol' me writing this thing, and I have plenty of other responsibilities that have a higher claim on my time.

I don't know what the Tulsa Whirled's excuse is. The Whirled has a huge staff, plenty of paper, plenty of ink, and plenty of webspace if they run out of paper and ink on a given day.

Saturday the Whirled finally did a story about the League of Women Voters press release opposing the recall of two Tulsa City Councilors. The League's statement was released on Monday, November 22. The Whirled's story was buried on an inside page at the back of the first section, in the edition with the lowest circulation in a given week, 12 days after the League's statement was released.

Today the Whirled published a story about a City Council committee meeting (jump page here) that happened on Tuesday, five days earlier, at which meeting the possibility of increasing the upcoming bond issue amount from $238 million to $250 million was discussed. The story headlined the Local section of the Sunday edition. The headline, "Bond issues may keep council at odds" suggests that that rowdy "Gang of Five" is arguing and bickering for no good purpose. The story itself doesn't convey that impression at all. It mentions Councilor Chris Medlock pushing for $450,000 in funding for a new bridge over Fred Creek -- the existing bridge acts as a dam and exacerbates upstream flooding. Medlock's proposal is supported by the Mayor. The story quotes Councilor Jim Mautino as concerned about the higher bond issue amount causing a net increase in property taxes. Nothing in the story suggests that there were any heated words or significant disagreement -- no one was "at odds". And isn't it interesting that only Medlock and Mautino are quoted. I think the intention was for the reader to read the headline, glimpse the names Medlock and Mautino in the body of the story, and move on without reading it, but with a mental association between the words "at odds" and these two councilors.

Story delays, story timing, story placement, headline selection -- just four more ways the Tulsa Whirled practices media bias to advance its business interests and those of its cronies.

Thanks to Jace Herring and the crew at BlogHosts for getting us back online. BlogHosts and their customers were offline for about 15 hours because of a server problem. Even though BlogHosts is going out of business at the end of the month, they're still devoted to fulfilling their responsibilities as a hosting provider.

Meanwhile, I got a mention in the Whirled this morning, so I'm told. No time to write more this morning, but you can read what I wrote about Lake Sunset LLC here.

Tulsa City Councilor Chris Medlock responds on his blog to editorial page editor Ken Neal's column in Sunday's Whirled about the attempt to recall him and colleague Jim Mautino. Medlock zeroes in on this Neal remark:

Now a group composed of upset business operators, developers, home builders and civic activists and many of the hundreds of citizens who serve without pay on the city�s authorities and agencies, have mounted a recall action against Medlock and Mautino. The movement is in its first stages and most veteran observers of City Hall are appalled that Tulsa has come to what amounts to a city civil war.

Medlock points out that the Whirled has only identified two people backing the recall effort -- Jon Davidson and Herb Haschke, who signed the ethics forms for the recall campaign committee. So does Ken Neal know something that the Whirled doesn't want us to know about this shadowy group? Medlock takes Neal's statement apart and gives his readers a translation, which you should go and read.

If we're in a city civil war, then Ken Neal is the fool who fired on Fort Sumter, desperate to preserve an old order that is passing away.

I spent part of today at the library, using the Whirled's online archives to see what the Whirled wrote about Great Plains Airlines from its first appearance on the scene as Sunwest (sometimes Sun West) Airlines in 1999. There is a lot of information to sift through.

The Whirled's parent company, World Publishing Co., paid $700,000 for 233,333 shares of preferred stock in the airline in November 2000. (The Whirled claims it paid $100,000 in cash -- the remainder was $600,000 in advertising space. The Whirled didn't bother to disclose its investment in Great Plains Airlines until February 16, 2003. By that time, the taxpayers of the State of Oklahoma and the City of Tulsa had donated millions of dollars in subsidies to support this airline that never came close to delivering on its promises. Throughout this period, in which public officials were deciding whether to continue to pump more money into the venture, the Whirled ran positive stories promoting the airline and its potential. You will look in vain for even a hint of skepticism or concern.

A newspaper has the trust of many citizens and decision-makers in the community. It's assumed that the local daily is doing its best to inform us completely and accurately -- that they wouldn't have any reason to distort or conceal information.

The F&M Bank zoning controversy and the Great Plains Airlines scandal have exposed to the public the extent to which the business interests of World Publishing Co. and its owners skew the Whirled's coverage of local government.

If the Whirled wishes to regain the trust of its readers they should stop using their news pages to defend the company's actions and instead recuse themselves from coverage of the story. Let's have a newspaper from another part of the country with no Tulsa business ties come in and investigate the story.

There's a vigorous discussion about the release of findings about Great Plains Airlines and the Tulsa Airport Authority and the significance of the Whirled's ownership over on the TulsaNow forums. Go read it and weigh in with your own thoughts.

UPDATE: You can find the Tulsa Whirled's stories in today's edition starting here on the front page, with a jump page for one of the stories plus a timeline of events here, and jump page for the other story plus the June 2003 list of investors here. The Whirled's editorial defense is here.

No time to write today, but check in Monday morning here and on KFAQ for my analysis and perspective.

Can't avoid making one comment: I guess the Tulsa Whirled has to be under a cloud of suspicion before it will provide detailed information on a story to its readers.

The findings of the first phase of the City Council's investigation into the operation of Tulsa's airports were released today, published on the City Council's website. You'll find the main body of the report here and the "abbreviated addendum" here.

(Be warned that the addendum is PDF file that has been optimized within an inch of its life. It appears that someone scanned in the addendum documents to create a PDF in Adobe Acrobat, then decided it was too large for people to download, so he ran optical character recognition on the result, keeping only the text found by the OCR and throwing away the image of the original. Hopefully, this will be corrected before long, because what is on the web now is hard to decipher.)

I'm just starting to dig through this. I didn't see the presentation of the report at the City Council meeting, so I'm probably missing some context, but this is what it looks like to me: Great Plains Airlines appears to have been a scheme to take a relatively small amount of private money, allow influential citizens to buy in at a very low cost, in order to pry loose a much larger amount of public money, ultimately for the enrichment of a few stockholders.

First among the preferred stockholders is World Publishing Company (WPC), publishers of the Tulsa Whirled, purchasing 233,333 shares of preferred stock of Great Plains Airline Holding Co. for $700,000. That represents a majority of the 445,699 shares of preferred stock sold at $3 a share, for a total value of $1,337,103. That investment also represents a majority of the capitalization: 6,495,137 shares of common stock were sold at either 1 mill (one tenth or a cent) per share or five cents per share, for a total value of $31,926.14. So the total price of issued stock was $1,369,029.14.

There was a dispute some months ago about what share of Great Plains Airlines was owned by World Publishing Company (WPC). Michael DelGiorno reported that WPC owned a majority of Great Plains Airlines. WPC sent legal nastygrams and insisted that it only held 3% of the stock. WPC's answer was misleading, honest only in a narrow technical sense -- if you divide the number of WPC's preferred shares by the combined number of common shares and preferred shares, you get 3.592%. But if you consider the price paid for the shares, the Whirled's parent company had invested 51% of the private money invested in Great Plains Airline Holding Co. The Tulsa Whirled's parent company had the biggest financial stake in the airline, the most to gain.

The price of the common stock is strange -- selling a thousand shares for a dollar is no way to raise capital for a startup business. The list of names of investors seems to point to an explanation. Many of them were in a position of influence to smooth the way for public financing and subsidy for the airline: Steven Berlin, former CFO of Citgo and a member of the Tulsa Industrial Authority (TIA); Don McCorkell, former Democrat State Representative and an influential lobbyist; Thomas Kimball, head of economic development for the City of Owasso a friend to then-Gov. Frank Keating; Bob Cullison, former Senate President Pro Tempore; Patrick Schnake and Steve Turnbo from the PR firm of Schnake Turnbo, plus Lauren Brookey, formerly a partner in that firm; Margaret Erling Frette, lobbyist and wife of John Erling, once the highest-rated local talk show host; Clyde Cole, former President and CEO of the Metropolitan Tulsa Chamber of Commerce; Van Scoyoc Associates, a DC lobbying firm specializing in government grants. While some of these people invested a tiny amount for their common shares, what would have happened to the value of their shares if an initial public offering (IPO) had occurred (especially if it had occurred before the tech bubble burst)?

I'll be combing through the report over the next few days. I hope you will, too, and I'd enjoy reading your observations, if you'll e-mail them to me -- or head over to the TulsaNow forums for an online discussion.

The case for the reappointment of Jim Cameron and Lou Reynolds to the TMUA (on tonight's Council agenda) and the case for the policies they've been pursuing were undermined by two articles on the front page of the Tulsa Whirled this morning.

First, Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson announced (jump page here) that the state has reached an agreement with poultry integrators to pay for the clean up of chicken litter from Oklahoma watersheds. With the state of Oklahoma pursuing this issue vigorously, and apparently successfully, it further undercuts the argument that Cameron and Reynolds on the TMUA are indispensible to pursuing the cleanup of Tulsa's Spavinaw watershed.

Second, the Grand River Dam Authority (GRDA) is cracking down on freeloaders, (article starts on same page, same jump page as above) and it appears that the Oklahoma Ordnance Works Authority may be taking and reselling Grand River water (as much as a billion gallons a month) without payments to or the permission of the GRDA, which owns the water rights for the Grand River. The Whirled article carefully avoids explaining the possible consequences of the GRDA's reassertion of its rights, and instead spends the start of the story rehashing the threat by Owasso City Manager Rodney Ray to stop buying water from Tulsa and buy it instead from OOWA at a lower rate. Reading between the lines, OOWA may not be able to offer those cheap water rates to Tulsa's suburbs now that the GRDA is reasserting control over its water rights, possibly rendering Ray's threat an empty one.

It's "pack the house" night at City Hall at 6 p.m. Three controversial issues are on the agenda: The second attempt at confirming the reappointment of Jim Cameron and Lou Reynolds to the Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority; Councilor Jim Mautino's resolution to direct the Planning Commission to study a change to the zoning code that would allow Board of Adjustment appeals to be heard by the City Council; and the unveiling of the report of the Council subcommittee investigating the airport. This is also the first meeting since Mayor LaFortune's veto of the Economic Development Commission reform plan.

I can't be there, sorry to say, but I hope many of you will show up to support the Reform Alliance Councilors and to sign up to speak in support of their initiatives toward making city government work for all Tulsans, not just the favored few.

I learned today that TMUA board member Jim Cameron's dad, Roy Cameron, passed away and that his services are tomorrow afternoon, just a few hours before what will likely be a contentious public hearing. Condolences to the Cameron family. Several of the Councilors -- both supporters and opponents of Cameron's reappointment -- expressed a willingness to hold off on his hearing until the next Council meeting (the Thursday after Thanksgiving) out of respect for Cameron and his family. There's no hurry, since he will continue to serve until reappointed or someone is appointed in his place. There seemed to be general agreement on the postponement, but then Council Chairman Randy Sullivan and Council Vice Chairman Tom Baker, both part of the Cockroach Caucus, insisted that the hearing move forward, the funeral notwithstanding. Apparently, nothing is more important to them than getting these men reappointed to the TMUA, for whatever reason.

Another thing: The talking point from the administration is that Cameron and Reynolds are essential to moving forward productively on the issues involving chicken poop in Tulsa's water. However much they have learned about the issue, neither of them are hydrologists, biologists, or poultry experts. It seems to me that the OKC law firm that was paid $7.3 million of the $7.5 million settlement is far more important -- they must be if we paid them that much -- and they aren't going anywhere no matter who sits on the TMUA.

Preliminary petitions seeking the recall of Tulsa City Councilors Chris Medlock and Jim Mautino were filed today with the City Clerk's office. More details later. This is just the first phase of the process. You can find details on the recall process here.

It's interesting that this should come two days prior to the release of the findings of the Council's airport investigation. You don't suppose this is an attempt to distract from and discredit those findings?

Speaking of the Cockroach Caucus, the head of the bureaucracy at the Tulsa Metro Chamber, Jay Clemens, will speak to the Tulsa County Republican Men's Club this Friday at the Fountains Restaurant, 6540 South Lewis. The TCRMC monthly luncheon begins at 11:45 am, and the cost is $9 for the Fountains' lunch buffet. There are always a number of guests in attendance, and we usually have as many women as men present.

I'll have to miss it, I'm sad to say, so I hope someone who goes will take some good notes and pass them along to me.

Mr. Clemens, a resident of Broken Arrow, is a controversial figure. Many in the business community would like to see him replaced. They see the Chamber as fiddling while Rome burns -- taking expensive junkets to the Caribbean and Hawaii, continuing to focus economic development efforts on luring large facilities to Tulsa, rather than nurturing businesses that are already here. Insiders talk of a controlling attitude that stifles innovation both within the Chamber bureaucracy and in the city as a whole. During a previous stint in a similar role elsewhere, Clemens received national attention for discouraging a company's plan to bring 500 new jobs to the area because it would "unrealistically drive up wages."

It is widely believed that the Chamber is encouraging the effort to recall Councilors Chris Medlock and Jim Mautino because of the Councilors' efforts to hold the Chamber accountable for how the Chamber spends the City of Tulsa's hotel/motel tax dollars. It should be interesting to see what he has to say to Republican grassroots activists, who enthusiastically support Medlock and Mautino and the reform of the city's economic development approach. It will be interesting to see what they have to say to him in return. It may be a valuable learning experience for Mr. Clemens.

By the way, the Fountains Restaurant serves wonderful bread pudding, which is delicious, and, I am told, also possesses interesting ballistic characteristics when saturated with glaze, but I've never seen that for myself.

UPDATE: In answer to a question, no, you do not have to be a member of the TCRMC in order to attend the luncheon. (Although you are encouraged to join -- dues are $20 per year.)

To the surprise of none and the disappointment of many, Tulsa Mayor Bill LaFortune has vetoed the ordinance reforming the Economic Development Commission (EDC), the city board charged with oversight of the portion of Tulsa's 5% hotel-motel tax which is earmarked for economic development and convention and tourism development. Word is that the Mayor called the ordinance "divisive," presumably because the Tulsa Metro Chamber doesn't like the idea of oversight and accountability for the millions of tax dollars it receives each year.

The Mayor is also reported to have referred to himself in his veto message as a strong and decisive mayor for all of Tulsa. "Strong mayor" appears to mean strong enough to stand up and say a loud no to the ordinary people of Tulsa who are longing for real reform, who expect economic development money to facilitate real job growth, not expensive junkets like the Mayor's recent Chamber-paid trip to Germany and Liechtenstein or the Chamber's trips to Hawaii and Aruba.

I am told that the Mayor refused to meet with Councilor Chris Medlock, sponsor of the reform, prior to issuing his veto.

The Mayor can call himself strong and decisive all he wants, but that doesn't make it so. I'll agree with that assessment when I see him actually do something that earns him the public condemnation of Chamber President Bob Poe and the Tulsa Whirled editorial page. The reforms he vetoed were reasonable and necessary to ensure that the City of Tulsa's economic development money goes to develop the City of Tulsa and is used effectively. The Council's reform proposal would have brought about geographical representation -- no part of our city left behind -- a coherent economic development strategy, accountability, and freedom from conflicts of interests.

Sometimes being divisive means moving forward even when powerful interests disagree, even with four of nine city councilors voted no.

When Bill LaFortune was running for office, he promised to listen to everyone as he made his decisions. The real question, I told people at the time, is to whom will he be listening when he makes his decision. If we didn't know already, we know now.

Tulsa City Councilor Jim Mautino has proposed allowing Board of Adjustment (BoA) cases to be appealed to the City Council. As it stands, once the BoA acts, the decision can only be appealed to District Court. Councilor Mautino's concern is that this situation puts justice beyond the reach of many who are hurt by a BoA decision, and that having the City Council hear an initial appeal would allow grievances to be handled at a lower cost in time and money.

The response from the Cockroach Caucus has been fascinating to watch, and, as always, the Tulsa Whirled editorial page leads the way, proclaiming that Mautino's proposal is a solution in search of a problem. It's a typically arrogant response -- if we don't have a problem, the problem doesn't exist -- but more about that later. Here's some background to help you understand what this is all about.

The BoA gets involved when a property owner's plans or actions run afoul of the City of Tulsa's zoning code. For example: An owner applies for a building permit and is told that his proposed new structure or addition doesn't comply with setbacks from the street or height limits for the land's zoning classification. A business owner applies for a certificate of occupancy -- changing the use of an existing building -- and is denied because the proposed new use isn't permitted by the zoning for the site. A property owner is cited by Neighborhood Inspections (formerly known as Code Enforcement) for a violation of the zoning code.

This week's Tulsa Beacon features the news that the Federal probe into Tulsa's airports is now being extended to Jones Riverside Airport, and particularly examining the Tulsa Airport Authority's dealings with City Councilor Bill Christiansen, who owns Christiansen Aviation, and his only competitor for fuel sales at the airport, Kent Faith's Roadhouse Aviation. Faith's suit against the Tulsa Airport Authority (TAA) and Christiansen was settled out of court. The heart of the matter is the allegation that the TAA adopted rules designed to drive Roadhouse out of business and leave Christiansen with a monopoly, contrary to FAA rules. This will be worth watching.

This week's issue also has a story about Mayor LaFortune's plans to veto the economic development reforms passed by the Council, along with some speculation about who will run for Mayor in 2006.

You can find the Beacon at area QuikTrip stores, among other places. No need to buy the Sunday Whirled, the Beacon has TV and movie listings!

Tulsa's Homeowners for Fair Zoning has launched an attractive new website, which features a "news log," which is in fact a Movable Type blog, used for HFFZ news items, announcements, and editorials. Eventually, they'll add content about the organization and how to join. The news log currently features an editorial in support of Councilor Jim Mautino's proposal regarding Board of Adjustment appeals and an article about the reappointments to the water board, which was featured in an earlier entry here. Add it to your bookmarks.

Tulsa City Councilor Chris Medlock has relaunched his website ChrisMedlock.com as a way to get his perspective on City Hall controversies directly to the public, unfiltered by the media.

For example, there's this article about Mayor LaFortune's response to the reforms to the Economic Development Commission approved by the Council. An excerpt:

So here we are. We have an ordinance in place that broadens the scope and responsibilities of the EDC, so that the members, chosen by LaFortune, can now look beyond the confines of just the Hotel/Motel Tax, to begin looking at all elements of our city's economy. We have an ordinance that requires from any contracting organization (the ordinance never directly mentions the Metropolitan Tulsa Chamber of Commerce) full disclosure of how tax dollars are spent. The ordinance ensures that all areas of Tulsa will be represented, rather than two or three zip codes. We have an ordinance that deals firmly with conflicts of interest and empowers a majority the city council to remove members for cause (note: "cause" is defined in our City Charter. As such, you need better reason to remove an EDC member from the commission than you need to remove a councilor from the City Council).

While it is true that Mayor LaFortune offered the council an alternative ordinance, he did so just hours before we were set to vote on the council's version. I had met with the Mayor and his aide, Tom Warren, on the Wednesday preceding the vote. This meeting was to discuss the handful of minor changes that the Mayor had suggested in the Legislative and Public Safety committee meeting the Tuesday before. As he left the meeting, (ironically to meet with Metro Chamber Chairman Bob Poe), we were all still under the understanding that the Mayor would suggest some small changes to reflect his earlier statements. But that was a faulty assumption.

Rather than some minor tweaking, we got what amounted to a virtual rewrite. Please remember that the ordinance in the form that was ultimately passed, was the result of dozens of meetings with the feed back and compromise of dozens of stakeholders. What the Mayor presented to the council was a document better suited for an opening negotiation, not for an 11th hour alternative. What the mayor proposed couldn't have been more devoid of serious reform, if it had been written by Chairman Poe himself. ...

Last minute delays are becoming a hallmark of this administration. Appeals for "reasonableness" and "not rushing things" can often be compelling. But when they become mantras of confusion or ill preparedness, then ending the discussion and moving on becomes a rational act. What is irrational is to consistently stall in hopes of an issue merely going away, or resolving itself through other's efforts.

The mayor is certainly within his rights to veto. In fact, those of us who voted for the ordinance expected he would do so before we ever entered the council room. However, all acts convey something about the person taking the action. In this case, should the mayor veto, we will learn that he is more interested in the promises that will secure him votes for the next election, rather than keeping the promises that won him the last election.

The site is still under construction, but it should be worth regular visits. I hope Medlock will look into adding blog software to his site, which will make it simpler for him to add new content while keeping the old content available. And a wiki would be perfect for the "Players' List" he plans to add -- as a way to allow Tulsans to explore all the connections between various players in city government.

A revealing tidbit from yesterday's Tulsa Whirled story on the re-renomination of Jim Cameron and Lou Reynolds to the Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority (TMUA):

During Tuesday's interview, Henderson asked the men if they knew Herbert Haschke Jr., treasurer of the Coalition for Responsible Government 2004, which is conducting a recall effort against Medlock and Mautino.

Reynolds said he might have had legal dealings with him, and Cameron said Haschke did some estate planning for his father.

Henderson asked whether the men supported the recall effort. Reynolds said he was neutral about it, and Cameron never answered.

According to the records of the Oklahoma Secretary of State, Haschke and Reynolds are co-incorporators of "THE COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE ASSOCIATION OF TULSA, INC." Haschke and Cameron were co-incorporators of "IHCRC REALTY CORPORATION" -- IHCRC stands for Indian Health Care Resource Center, of which Jim Cameron is secretary of the Board of Directors. BatesLine reported this information a month ago (here and here).

Why did Cameron and Reynolds choose not to be open and direct about their dealings with Haschke? This is one more example of the refusal of these two men to be cooperative and forthcoming with the City Council, and one more reason why the Mayor should fulfill his commitment to name two other Tulsans to replace them on the TMUA.

I received this via e-mail from Homeowners for Fair Zoning, requesting Tulsans to express their opposition to the reappointment of two controversial water board members, which will be on the agenda at Thursday night Tulsa City Council meeting. It includes a good overview of the reasons for rejecting the reappointments:

DON'T CONFIRM NOMINEES WHO WON'T QUESTION THEIR OWN POLICY!

Councilor Sam Roop (e-mail dist5@tulsacouncil.org) is set to reverse a lot of effort of the Reform Alliance of Five City Councilors who, with his support, have declined to confirm the Mayor's reappointment of Jim Cameron and Lou Reynolds to the Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority (TMUA). For background on this issue read BatesLine: Picking at a scab. Although Councilor Roop has announced his intention to reverse his position and confirm these nominees, you are requested to e-mail him your thoughts under the subject caption of "Please do not confirm appointments of Cameron and Reynolds." The confirmation vote will likely be at the 6:00 p.m. Tulsa City Council Meeting on November 18th.

The TMUA is Tulsa's water board. Through bonded indebtedness, the citizens of Tulsa pay for the infrastructure (pumping stations, water lines, sewer lines, water treatment facilities, etc.) which provide our water system, including water to surrounding communities like Broken Arrow, Jenks and Owasso. The Mayor is demanding that two current board members, Mr. Cameron and Mr. Reynolds, be reappointed to TMUA. Aside from potential conflicts of interest, there are several good reasons not to confirm the reappointment of these longtime board members.

Anyone who has been in their appointed positions as long as these two men have has stopped examining the basis for their decisions and policies. As indicated by their discussion before the City Council, if confirmed, they will continue to support a water board policy of extending water service to those areas, inside or outside of Tulsa, which can demonstrate an immediate need for the facilities and at the same rates paid by citizens of Tulsa. Decisions for future extensions of the water system will not be principally based on developing areas within Tulsa. To these nominees, the idea of extending lines within North, East and West Tulsa to interest and draw business development is considered overly speculative. Furthermore, they consider linking loss of sales tax for the suburbs to increased water rates as beyond their purview. They do not view the water
board as a potential revenue generating source for the City.

When some members of the City Council, led by Councilors Mautino and Medlock, tried to question whether it would be practical to charge a higher rate for water service to communities outside Tulsa to offset the loss in sales tax revenue which Tulsa suffers when those communities develop and lower Tulsa's sales tax base, TMUA staff delayed furnishing information and a massive turnout of those who stood to benefit financially by not having the water rates and location of pipeline extensions examined was used to try to intimidate these councilors.

Since Jim Cameron and Lou Reynolds lead and for all practical purposes set the policy of TMUA, their reappointment will also confirm these policies and prevent a highly desirable examination of what Tulsa's future water policy should be. For Tulsa's sake, it's time to examine water policy. Let Councilor Roop know what you think!

We thought the matter was settled. Three Republican councilors -- Sam Roop, Chris Medlock, and Jim Mautino -- signed a letter to Mayor Bill LaFortune saying that under no circumstances would they approve the reappointment of Jim Cameron and Lou Reynolds to the Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority (TMUA) -- Tulsa's water board. Just over three months ago, the Council rejected their reappointment, and the city establishment reacted with outrage and fury, which made ordinary citizens wonder what the big deal was. The reaction reminded some people of the defensive behavior of a guilty husband caught in an affair. My wife thought the word "apoplectic" was a good fit for the Cockroach Caucus's reaction. The uproar reminded me of the scene from "The Wizard of Oz" when Dorothy pours water on the Wicked Witch, and she shrieks, "I'm melting!"

After weeks of contention, the Mayor had finally committed to nominate two replacements, but before he got around to it, Sam Roop went to the Mayor and said that he no longer had any objection to Cameron and Reynolds being reappointed, and encouraged the Mayor to put their names back before the Council.

So here we are again, and thanks to Mr. Roop, the nominations are on this morning's Public Works Committee agenda at 8 a.m. We will almost certainly see the renominations approved, and the Tulsa Whirled will take the opportunity to praise him for his maturity and judgment and at the same time beat up the other four Reform Alliance councilors. The "injury" caused by the contention was healing nicely, and city officials were moving forward, when Councilor Roop ripped the scab off and reopened the wound.

The issue at the heart of the renomination dispute was whether our water board's policy is in the best interest of the City of Tulsa and its citizens. Are the suburbs paying the costs of extending water service to them? Are the suburbs paying a fair rate for our water? Are our water policies fueling suburban sprawl to the detriment of the City's sales tax base? These questions were raised at a Budget Committee meeting later on the same day (July 27, 2004) that Cameron's and Reynolds' renominations were before the Public Works Committee. Here are the online minutes for that Budget Committee meeting:

1. Discussion with Public Works/Environmental Operations and representatives from TMUA Board with emphasis on planning and decision making processes (including unserved areas within the City limits) and calculation of return on investment. 04-411

Discussion or Action At Meeting:

Discussion of this item lasted for more than an hour. Mr. Cameron made a presentation on TMUA and it policies. TMUA has a plan for this decade and the next decade that is demand driven, that is they have decided to take certain actions as demand dictate. There is a process for making service averrable to unserved areas in the City. it is not TMUA's policy to provide the individual development or entitiy with service, they provide major lines only. Those lines are usually a reaction to not an impetus for development. Wholesale customers pay the City at least a ten percent return on applicable investment to date and on investment expected to occur in the next five years. The rate model is the same for all outside customers.

More than one Councilor expressed concern over the City�s present rate of development relative to surrounding communities and the role of water and sewer in this process. Considerable discussion ensued with he eventual conclusion that this topic needs more discussion.

Instead of allowing the Council time to study and discuss the issue with TMUA, the very next day the TMUA voted to authorize extending a water line to the suburb of Bixby. It was a slap in the face of the citizens of Tulsa, through our elected representatives, by making this commitment so quickly after several council members raised concerns.

The only means the Council has to ensure that a board or authority is implementing the will of the people is at reappointment time. The highhanded TMUA action on July 28 required a strong response from the Council, not passive acquiescence.

I am disappointed in Sam Roop's decision to go back on his commitment to oppose these nominations. Like his apology to then City Attorney Martha Rupp Carter in 2002, Roop's pulling back in this case will fuel the Cockroach Caucus' attacks on Roop's colleagues. In 2002, that situation killed the reelection hopes of Roscoe Turner and Todd Huston, and it nearly lost the election for Roop. The apology gave the newspaper a reason to hammer these councilors over and over again. Roop's decision plays right into the hands of the groups actively seeking to remove Councilors Mautino and Medlock in a recall.

Sam Roop has done a lot of good things and taken some bold stands in his time on the Council. Reopening this wound isn't one of them.

Tulsa City Councilor Jim Mautino has proposed a significant change to the process of land use regulation. The usual suspects have reacted with shock and horror, breathing threats of vengeance. It fits the template I posted a couple of days ago: A city councilor makes a proposal to address a need or concern that has been around for a long time, but which has been ignored by previous councils. The city establishment responds as if it is being subjected to medieval torture.

Mautino wants citizens to be able to appeal Board of Adjustment (BoA) decisions to the City Council, rather than having to hire an attorney and go to District Court to reverse or amend the decision. Homeowners say that some BoA decisions can have a negative impact on neighboring properties, but the cost of appealing those decisions is beyond the means of many property owners. Developers are concerned that putting the City Council in the loop will politicize land use decisions and adds a degree of uncertainty and delay that would make many projects uneconomical.

To my eyes, that looks like the starting point of a discussion about what the real problems are and the fairest way to answer both sets of concerns. But for snarling loonies like Tulsa Metro Chamber Bob Poe, it's one more reason to destroy these city councilors.

In another post, I'll get into the technicalities -- what the Board of Adjustment does, how it differs from the planning commission, and some of the problems that have led Councilor Mautino to propose this change. My feeling is that this proposal would be just another patch on another heavily patched and broken land use system that doesn't fit Tulsa's needs any more, as we transition from developing open space to redeveloping in already developed neighborhoods. We need to find an approach that offers more certainty to everyone involved in the process, rather than making the outcome dependent on the skill of lawyers and the whims of unelected board members. We need a system that protects us against land-use situations that really do create problems, while allowing the creativity of the market freedom to work. We need a system that will help us build the kind of city we want to live in. It's time to have that conversation.

I will be back to writing about local politics, although I don't think I've missed much. It's the same old pattern:

1. Member of City Council majority proposes solution to a widely-held concern that has been ignored by the city establishment.
2. Tulsa Whirled reports the story, accompanied by a distorting headline and an unflattering picture of the Councilor in question.
3. Tulsa Metro Chamber Chairman Bob Poe delivers a ranting condemnation in front of a civic group.
4. Mayor Bill LaFortune tries to find a way to appear decisive without making anyone not like him.
5. Tulsa Whirled publishes editorial condemning the foolish Councilors for questioning a policy that has been around for years and that the city establishment is quite content with.
6. Councilor Sam Roop steps away from his erstwhile colleagues and into the spotlight, skull in hand, to recite a soliloquy from Hamlet, so that everyone can see that he's the only real grownup on the Council.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Specifics to be addressed sometime Sunday. There's the EDC thing -- the Mayor was talking about it on KFAQ Friday morning. Then there's Councilor Mautino's proposal regarding Board of Adjustment appeals.

Got first reports today of recall petitions circulating against Tulsa City Councilor Chris Medlock in an east Tulsa neighborhood. Of course, Chris Medlock doesn't represent east Tulsa; his colleague Jim Mautino, also the target of a recall effort, does. The canvassers are going door-to-door and telling people that Medlock wants to sell water to the suburbs for too cheap a rate. (In fact, Medlock is concerned that water rate from suburban water customers is lower than it should be.)

Word is that the recall gang was out Friday recruiting petition canvassers at OSU-Tulsa for $10 an hour. I have also heard that former Tulsa City Councilor John Benjamin, who now lives at 14235 S Toledo Ave in the City of Bixby, south of the river, is boasting that he is organizing the entire effort.

The timing and the cast of characters is interesting. Benjamin is known as a slavish supporter of the Tulsa Metro Chamber bureaucracy. Thursday night, the City Council voted 5-4 in favor of Medlock's Economic Development Commission reforms, rejecting a substitute proposal from the Mayor that would have gutted key reforms. The thrust of the reform effort is to have a City of Tulsa-based committee oversee the City of Tulsa hotel/motel tax dollars which are earmarked for the promotion economic development and attracting conventions and tourists, instead of just signing over the money to the Tulsa Metro Chamber, no strings attached. Sheraton Tulsa General Manager Jon Davidson, chairman of the recall effort, and until very recently vice chairman of the Tulsa Metro Chamber, was spotted in the gallery of the Council meeting during the EDC debate. The day after the EDC vote, the recall plotters are hiring petition circulators and the next day the petitions are out on the street (albeit the wrong street).

Combine all this with Tulsa Metro Chamber chairman Bob Poe's angry phone call to Mayor LaFortune after the Mayor publicly denounced the recall effort, and a picture begins to emerge: The Chamber bureaucracy and the oligarchs who control the Chamber board are out to punish Tulsa's elected officials for daring to hold the Chamber accountable for the $60 million in city tax dollars the organization has received and spent apparently in vain, given the state of Tulsa's economy, which continues to lag behind the national recovery. The Chamber bureaucracy could be a good partner with the city, could understand the need for more accountability, could humbly acknowledge its failure to deliver economic progress, but instead the Chamber Pots are lashing out like cornered rats.

I heard a story recently that illustrates the way the Chamber Pots operate. There's a new group called Young Professionals of Tulsa, whose aims include rediscovering and promoting the "people, places and things that make Tulsa original" -- to that end they're working to raise the money to reopen Nelson's Buffeteria and to revive the Greenwood Jazz Festival. The Tulsa Metro Chamber bureaucrats pushed to make YPT a branch of the Chamber, and when rebuffed, threatened to set up a rival young professionals group and to spread the word that it would be very unwise to join YPT instead of the Chamber's knockoff group.

That insatiable drive to kill anything it can't control is why "Chamber" is a dirty word to Tulsans from every part of the political spectrum, from every part of the city. Apparently that same spirit motivates this Chamber-led attempt to reverse the results of the last city election. They can't even wait a year for the next election. I have hope that the people of Tulsa have the good sense not to be swayed by the Chamber bureaucracy's selfish maneuverings.

NOTE: If you have any reports of recall petitions circulating, e-mail me at blog -at- batesline.com (replace -at- with @). If you can get video or audio or even still photos of the canvassers at work, so much the better.

Based on some response I've received to my earlier entry, concerning Tulsa City Councilor Sam Roop, his new business, and conflicts of interest, I want to emphasize a couple of things:

• I am not saying that Sam Roop is guilty of anything or is trying to take unfair advantage of the city.
• I am saying that there is a built-in conflict of interest between his company's business plan (which sounds like a great service with great potential) and Sam Roop's continued service as a Tulsa City Councilor, for the reasons I stated.
• In saying that Sam Roop must resign, I am not saying he must resign in disgrace because he's done something wrong.
• I am saying that in order to pursue this business without a conflict of interest, Sam Roop should follow the lead of many other public officials -- Rodger Randle, David Boren, Bill LaFortune, and Steve Largent are a few names that come to mind -- who left office early to pursue new career opportunities.
• I am not really interested in what the lawyers have to say about this. I am concerned about divided loyalties tugging a councilor between his own financial interest and the public interest. The letter of the law is beside the point.

Before I say anything else: Tulsa City Councilor Sam Roop is an honorable man. I have no reason to believe he has done anything deliberately to take advantage of his position as a Tulsa City Councilor, beyond using his knowledge as a long-time Councilor of who's who in City Hall, in order to steer city business to his new business venture. He has disclosed his involvement in a new business called American Technical Partners, which is seeking to provide computer networking services to the City of Tulsa. (See Tuesday's Whirled storyhere, jump page here.)

City Councilor Sam Roop said he had no problem asking the city to hire his startup company, American Technical Partners, to provide the city with the next generation of telecommunications technology.

"I realize there may be a conflict of interest because I'm a city councilor, but I have disclosed my interest in this group right up front," said Roop, who has raised potential conflict of interest issues with recent city board appointments....

After Roop had several meetings with employees of the city's Telecommunications Department, American Technical Partners submitted a proposal last month to study the city's options for setting up a wireless broadband communications network using WiMAX technologies.

The company asked for a fee of $25,000 to do the study. ...

"I'm in an unique position where I understand the technology world and the municipal world because I've been in both of them. I know what technology can do to save municipalities money," he said.

American Technical Partners is approaching not only Tulsa but many other cities in the state and in the country, he said.

(Emphasis added.)

It's the sort of thing former elected officials do all the time -- they use their knowledge of government to identify and develop goods or services that would be useful to the government they used to serve, and then they use their contacts and goodwill inside the government to help make the sale.

But Sam Roop is not yet a former elected official. And that is a distinction that makes all the difference.

To say that a public official has a "conflict of interest" doesn't mean that the person is evil or corrupt. It simply means that he is in a situation where what is in the public interest, which he has sworn to uphold, doesn't necessarily coincide with his private interests. It may be that the smartest, wisest, best money the City could spend would be to hire Sam Roop's company to setup broadband wireless networking, or it may be the stupidest idea ever. But either outcome would be fine for Sam Roop's company, once the city's check clears.

I'm sure Sam Roop would be scrupulous enough to avoid voting on awarding a contract with his own company. But the public interest demands more than avoiding such a direct conflict of interest.

"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" wrote Jeremiah. A conflict of interest creates ethical blindspots. When considering a course of action for the City in his role as a Councilor, there will always be, simmering below the conscious level of Sam Roop's mind, some calculation as to the impact of his policy decision on his company's dealings with the City. At a conscious level this will cause him to discount information that would lead him to a conclusion that might hurt his relationships with the people who could make or break his firm. This will happen to Sam Roop, not because he is a bad person, but because he is human.

Our city government has gone through a tough couple of years, and the City Council has had to make some tough decisions -- freezing and cutting budgets, investigating inefficiency and possible wrongdoing at the city's airports, revisiting the city's water policy, to name a few. Every tough decision means the possibility of offending someone, often someone in management who would be in a position either to grease the skids or to block the path for a contract with Sam Roop's firm.

The mere appearance of a conflict will raise questions about Sam Roop's decisions, particularly on controversial issues, particularly when he has changed his position on a controversial issue. Tulsans will reasonably wonder: Why did Sam Roop suddenly see the wisdom of having Tulsa water customers pay for a new water line for Owasso? Sam Roop's company is trying to sell its services to "many other cities in the state." Owasso City Manager Rodney Ray is only human, and if Sam Roop, Tulsa Councilor, had voted to cut the line, Ray probably wouldn't be very receptive to a proposal from Sam Roop, entrepreneur. That thought may never have consciously entered Sam Roop's mind, but the question will always be there. The same questions will hang over whatever decision he makes on appointments to the water board or the investigation of the airport authority -- both authorities are potential customers of Roop's new company.

There's a further question, beyond a conflict of interest: Sam Roop met with employees of the Telecommunications Department, according to the story. According to the City Charter, Article 2, Section 19:

Except for the purpose of investigation under Article II, Section 17, of this amended Charter, the Council and Councilors shall communicate on matters of city business with the executive and administrative service solely through the Mayor, the heads of each division and department of the City, as well as such other persons as the Mayor shall designate.... Violation of this Section by any Councilor shall constitute willful maladministration and be sufficient grounds for removal from office as provided by the laws of Oklahoma.

This scenario -- a City Councilor meeting with city employees in the interest of personal gain rather than the public interest -- is precisely the sort of inappropriate influence this section of the charter is intended to prevent.

"No man can serve two masters," Jesus said, "for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other." Sam Roop cannot honestly do his job as a City Councilor and try at the same time to be a vendor to the City of Tulsa. Sam Roop is a good man, but he is a man nevertheless.

In his years as a councilor, Sam Roop has taken some stands that made people in city government angry. I have praised him in the past for being willing to make the right choice even if it meant offending someone. Our City Council majority has had the boldness to make the right choices in part because all five were immune from pressure on their employers. But now, as a businessman seeking to do business with city governments, Sam Roop can't afford to anger any city official, and that's going to blunt his effectiveness as a watchdog for the people of this city. He can't afford to anger the officials in other cities, and that's going to blunt his ability to champion Tulsa's interests when they conflict with the interests of other cities.

I like Sam Roop, and I'm happy for him that after a long stretch of unemployment, he has found a way to earn a living, a way that could be very lucrative. I wish him well in his new business. But as he pursues this new business, there is only one ethical way to handle his Council duties.

Sam Roop must resign from the City Council.

Reforms to the Economic Development Commission will likely be before the Tulsa City Council for a final vote this Thursday night. There was some controversy this last week over the composition of the Commission, particularly about the requirement to have at least one member of the EDC from each City Council district. Mayor LaFortune and several members of the current EDC objected to that provision, and at their urging, Councilor Chris Medlock, who is sponsoring the proposal, dropped it, which brought strong and understandable opposition from northside Councilors Jack Henderson and Roscoe Turner. (Whirled coverage here and here.)

I can understand wanting to bring together the best business minds in the City, wherever they happen to live. But the EDC will be developing a strategy for economic development for the City, and it's important that we don't neglect those parts of the city that are most in need of economic growth.

There are ways to ensure representation for all parts of Tulsa, while providing the Mayor with more flexibility in naming members of the EDC. One idea would be to designate broad areas, areas that have often been overlooked, from which at least one member must be chosen -- for example, at least one each from west of the river, north of I-244 (maybe at least two, as it's a larger area), and east of US 169.

Another approach would be to require at least one or two members to live in an area federally designated as underprivileged, designated for urban renewal, or designated as enterprise zones. These are areas where a lot of city, state, and federal funds are targeted for economic improvement, and we ought to make sure the people who live there are represented as economic development plans are drawn up.

I'm confident there's a compromise that can be reached that will ensure that all parts of the city are represented, so that these important reforms can move forward, and so that our own city government will again be in charge of our own city's economic development strategy.

Last Wednesday Tulsa City Councilor Chris Medlock got a call from a Tulsa Whirled reporter looking for comment on a story she was writing about that day's meeting of the Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority (TMUA -- Tulsa's water board). The gist was that the head of the Southwest Tulsa Chamber of Commerce was claiming that Medlock was obstructing a new housing development outside the Tulsa city limits and outside Tulsa's fence line in the Berryhill area. This is an area that Medlock has proposed to bring within the City's fence line to ensure that Sand Springs or Sapulpa cannot annex it. You'll recall that Sapulpa recently extended its boundaries several miles to grab the Town West shopping center near the Turner Turnpike entrance -- an area just outside Tulsa's city limits. Mr. Gray wants the City to pay for part of the sewer extension to this new development, but he opposes the fence line extension to ensure that this area we help to develop ultimately ends up in the City of Tulsa's limits.

They ran the story Sunday, top of the page of the Local section. (Starts here, jumps here.) The story does a decent job of letting Medlock respond to the complaint. But the real story is that the Whirled's editors have decided to spotlight any complaint against Chris Medlock, no matter how trivial or baseless. A public official is bound to have at least constituents disappointed with some decision, but you would expect the newspaper to put those disappointments into perspective. Instead, the Whirled seems to have set aside space in its highest circulation edition for a weekly shot at the councilor who poses the biggest threat to the cozy deals of which the Whirled is so fond.

The bottom line on this particular issue is that Tulsa has a limited amount of money to pay for sewer line extensions and the City Council wants to prioritize connecting unserved areas that are already within the city limits.

Chris Medlock has posted the e-mail he sent to the Whirled reporter on the TulsaNow forums here. For your convenience, it's reproduced here after the jump.

Although it won't be voted on tonight, the proposed reforms to the City of Tulsa's Economic Development Commission is on the agenda for Council discussion during tonight's Tulsa City Council meeting.

The proposed reforms make a few changes to Title 5, Chapter 4 of Tulsa Revised Ordinances. You can see the current ordinance here. The intent is to have the EDC as the focal point of all the City's economic development efforts, whether they involve city departments, city trusts, or economic development work outsourced to the Tulsa Metro Chamber bureaucracy and other contractors.

I refer you back to an earlier entry, a collection of links to Tulsa Today's coverage of the Tulsa Metro Chamber's many years as sole-source vendor for economic development services to the City of Tulsa. The articles ask whether, after sending $60 million to the Chamber bureaucracy over the years, Tulsa now has a healthy and developed economy. It's time to change what we are doing, because what we have been doing hasn't worked.

Here are the significant changes:

• Specific duties: The EDC will become specifically responsible for developing an economic development plan and overseeing the implementation of that plan.
  
• Geographically-balanced membership: The EDC would go from as many as 21 members to 15 -- one from each Council district, 4 at-large (who could be non-Tulsa residents), and the Mayor and a Councilor selected by the Council to serve ex officio. All of the members (except the Mayor and the Councilor) would be appointed by the Mayor and confirmed by the Council. Geographical balance will ensure that the EDC will be concerned with the development of the entire city.
  
• An open bidding process: In contracting for economic development services, the EDC must go through the standard bidding process used for other city contracts, where the EDC issues a request for proposals, explaining the criteria for winning the job, and bidders submit their proposals for evaluation. Instead of just signing over the hotel/motel tax revenues to the Chamber bureaucracy, the Chamber bureaucracy will have the opportunity to be a part of the competitive bidding process. The Chamber bureaucracy may get some of the work, or possibly all of it, but they'll have to compete to get it. Competition is a healthy thing. Other chambers, like the Southwest Tulsa Chamber and the Greenwood Chamber may get a share of the work to develop their own parts of town.
  
• Oversight: The EDC will make quarterly reports to the Council. If EDC approves contracts over a certain amount, the contract must be reported to the Council, and cumulative contracts with a single vendor for more than $20,000 must also be reported (no getting around the reporting requirement by giving one contractor lots of small contracts). An EDC member could be removed -- for cause -- by a majority of the EDC or a majority of the Council.
  
• No conflicts of interest: This is important: "No appointee shall have been a member of the Board of Directors, officer or employee of any entity awarded a contract by the Economic Development Commission within the twenty four months prior to confirmation by the Council." This will ensure that the EDC won't be a puppet of any organization that seeks to do work for the EDC. The language needs to be cleaned up a bit -- not clear if the twenty-four months provision refers to when the contract was awarded or when the appointee served on the board. And for completeness' sake, forbid commission members from serving on any such board during their terms of office.
  

Although these are sensible and modest reforms, the leaders of the Chamber bureaucracy are predictably unhappy about all this, because it means they will be answerable for the public money they spend, money they seem to feel entitled to spend anyway they like. The head Chamber bureaucrats and their supporters on the Chamber board will no doubt be there in force tonight to glare at the Councilors, particularly Sam Roop, whom they believe (wrongly, I think) they can influence to join the Cockroach Caucus in obstructing these reforms. It would be nice if tonight the Councilors could see the smiling faces of many ordinary Tulsans who believe it's time for this kind of constructive change to our economic development. I hope the Mayor, who has been advocating strengthening the EDC since he took office, will be there voicing his support.

The meeting starts at 6 p.m. in the Council chamber at City Hall.

Still no word as to that list of 25 or so members of the committee seeking to oust Tulsa City Councilors Jim Mautino and Chris Medlock. At this point, we only know of the two names that were required to be on the ethics filing for the Coalition for Responsible Government -- the chairman, Jon Davidson, and the treasurer, Herbert Haschke. Maybe the other 23 are figments of someone's imagination. Or maybe they've vanished since last Tuesday.

I credit Mayor Bill LaFortune's clear and public statement last Tuesday opposing the recall with slowing the momentum of the effort. I've heard that Tulsa Metro Chamber Chairman Bob Poe called the Mayor after his statement and asked angrily "What did you do that for?" I think the recall backers expected to start a war between the Mayor and the Council that would not only help them topple the Council majority, but would also damage the Mayor, which I think is part of this group's hidden agenda. Instead, the Mayor and the Councilors have affirmed the need to move forward together, particularly to ensure the passage of a critical bond issue in February.

I've heard that Jon Davidson is continuing to try to recruit support behind the scenes. He is the GM of the Sheraton Tulsa Hotel, part of Regency Hotel Management. Regency CEO David Sweet may not be aware that the GM of his Tulsa property is involved in a controversial campaign to depose popularly elected councilors and that his employee is on the opposite side of the issue from the Mayor of Tulsa. If you'd like to make Mr. Sweet aware of this, here is the contact information:

Mailing Address/Main Phone Numbers:
Regency Hotel Management
3211 W Sencore Drive
Sioux Falls, SD 57107
Phone: (605) 334-2371
Fax (605) 334-8480

Starwood, the company that licenses the Sheraton name, may also be interested in the potential impact of Davidson's actions on the goodwill that its brand enjoys among Tulsans. Here is the corporate contact information:

Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, Inc.
1111 Westchester Avenue
White Plains, NY 10604
Phone (914) 640-8100
Fax (914) 640-8310

Investor Relations Contact
Dan Gibson
Senior Vice President, Corporate Affairs
Phone (914) 640-8100

Vince Sposato's passing last week stirred up memories of his last run for office, for Tulsa Water and Sewer Commissioner in 1986, by one of Sposato's opponents in that race, Stan Geiger:

I was saddened to read of the demise of Vince Sposato. I went to school with a couple of his kids (he had a bunch). I also ran against him once, in one of the most interesting elections in Tulsa history.

It was 1986, I believe. I had recently changed my voter registration to Republican, believing my views were more in line with that party than the Democratic Party I signed up with as an 18-year-old. Patty Eaton, Democrat, was Water & Sewer Commissioner---and generally considered untouchable in an election. She had signed up to run for another term, and drew no Republican challenger.

I thought it somewhat un-American to hold an election with only one name on the ballot. So I filed as a Republican.

The Tulsa Whirled devoted a front-page Sunday story to the charge that some of the Reform Alliance Councilors were rude in their questioning of Owasso City Manager Rodney Ray and Jenks Mayor Vic Vreeland. The Councilors involved say they were politely asking questions, some of which may have made the visiting officials feel ill-prepared to respond.

The Whirled has run similar stories in the past, trying to make the Councilors look vicious and intemperate -- for example, saying that Medlock and Turner "grilled" TARE appointee Stephen Schuller, when they simply asked where he worked and if he had any conflicts of interest. The televised replay of that committee meeting revealed the grilling to be a series of short polite questions that lasted at most five minutes.

So this appears to be just one more element of the public relations campaign aiming at ending the Reform Alliance's majority. It's a frequently-used Whirled tactic. The Whirled writers won't attack a public official on the issue that really matters to them, because they know that their positions on most important issues are unpopular. Instead they will fabricate a charge that seems like a reasonable concern, just enough to create a seed of doubt among the supporters of the public official. From some questions I've received, the tactic appears to be working. (Conservatives should understand by now that the same paper that is distorting the record to destroy Tom Coburn and other conservative Federal officials won't hesitate to use the same power for similar despicable purposes at the local level. But a surprising number of conservatives don't seem to have made the connection.

It's good that TGOV gives people a chance to see for themselves what happened. Last Thursday's Council meeting will be replayed on Tulsa Cable 24 tonight at 6 p.m. and tomorrow morning at 8:00 a.m.

It was in the late '70s, and every day on KXXO AM 1300, Tulsa's first all news-talk station, you heard this gravelly voice intone, "I'm Vince Sposato, and I'm mad as hell!" -- followed by a minute of commentary on city government. Vince Sposato was a building contractor, a World War II vet, a father and grandfather, but he was known to Tulsans as an activist who wanted to fix what was wrong with city government. He ran seven times, as a Democrat, for streets commissioner, once for water and sewer commissioner. He never won, but he never stopped trying. And through his political efforts, he had, for a time, a daily radio commentary, just like Eddie Chiles. The station put out promotional bumper stickers, and once in a while you may still see a bumper sticker that says, "I'm mad too, Vince!"

The obituary in the Whirled mentioned that in the '60s, "he fought against urban renewal and the taking of people's homes without just compensation." I was thinking of that as I read Ken Neal's tribute to Sposato in Sunday's opinion section. I give Mr. Neal credit for not speaking ill of the dead, instead remembering him as a devoted family man and a colorful political character. Neal goes so far as to say this:

Granted, he was never elected to public office in Tulsa. Perhaps he was a bit too "New York" for Tulsa voters. In retrospect, I suspect that Tulsa missed a good chance to have a top-notch civil servant.

That made me wonder -- it would be a good project for someone with time to browse through microfilms and vertical files at the Central Library -- whether the Whirled had much praise for Sposato when he was actively involved in politics. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he was condemned as an obstructionist, an opponent of progress, because of his opposition to urban renewal.

Although we were of different parties, I honor Vince Sposato as a pioneer "troublemaker", asking questions and challenging assumptions, wanting City Hall to do its job well and for the benefit of all Tulsans. Citizens like Vince Sposato and Betsy Horowitz believed in Tulsa, believed it could be a better place, and wouldn't be satisfied with answers like "it's a done deal" or "we've always done it this way." For their trouble, these early activists were marginalized, treated as targets for ridicule. Rather than answer the concerns they raised, the establishment's response was to focus our attention on something different or eccentric about them to communicate to Tulsans that their concerns didn't deserve serious consideration. The same process continues today with a front-page story (written by a reporter who wasn't at the meeting) devoted to the charge that some of the City Councilors said mean things to the suburban officials who spoke at last Thursday's City Council debate on the Owasso water line.

Today's Reform Alliance councilors could learn a valuable lesson from Vince Sposato's passing: If you want the Whirled to say something nice about you, drop dead.

UPDATE: If anyone out there has audio of one of Vince's commentaries, or any stories about his political campaigns, drop me a line at blog at batesline dot com.

Getting caught up after some time away during my son's school's fall break:

After granting the Mayor three weeks to make his case, the Tulsa City Council voted unanimously to allow the Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority (TMUA) -- the water board -- to issue $18.5 million in revenue bonds to pay for ten projects, including $4.725 million for Phase 1 a controversial water line to serve new development in the City of Owasso. The revenue bonds will be repaid from future water system revenues -- that means that all Tulsa water customers will be paying for the new Owasso line, not just those who stand to benefit directly.

The Owasso line -- officially called the North Annexation Area Water Line -- has been on a fast track. Until April of this year, the line wasn't a part of the City of Tulsa's Capital Improvements Plan (CIP). The CIP is the City's "to-do" list, and when the City decides to finance capital improvements, they look at this list to determine what to fund. $474 million is the estimated cost of all the water system improvements that have been identified and included in the CIP. (You can download this large PDF file of the CIP inventory. The water system section begins on page 8-35.

Most projects sit on the CIP for years without being funded. Inclusion on the CIP just means we know we need to get around to it some day. That's why it's remarkable that this Owasso water line has gone from being off the radar to fully funded in a matter of six months. The water line was added at the April 22, 2004, Council meeting, without much fanfare. It was approved with a long list of other items that were presented to the Council as routine clerical matters.

It is hard to understand why there has been such a rush to make this happen. There are no imminent plans to develop the area within the Tulsa fence line that would be served by the water line, and Owasso has the resources, thanks to funds earmarked for Owasso infrastructure in Vision 2025, to pay for the line itself. So why is this project being allowed to cut in line, ahead of dozens of other projects that would serve unserved areas within the city limits or that would benefit all users of the system?

The Reason Public Policy Institute (RPPI) is a think tank focused on using the discipline of the free market to make government services more efficient. RPPI has a paper on water-system pricing which recommends the use of system development charges, which would have those who would be served by a water line pay a one-time fee up front for the cost of building it, rather than having current customers pay for connecting new customers. This seems like a fair approach, and it's what Councilor Chris Medlock and others have been advocating.

So why the rush, and why not have those who stand to benefit directly pay for the line? About 2 hours and 50 minutes into the meeting, Deanna Oakley, a north Tulsa County resident, asked a very blunt question of Council Chairman Randy Sullivan. She asked him whether the rumor was true that he and two other councilors and Tulsa Metro Chamber Chairman Bob Poe stood to benefit financially from this water line extension. Sullivan gave a non-answer after several seconds of stunned silence. The rumor is that there are plans for a residential golf development at 106th Street North and 97th East Avenue (Mingo Road). One of Bob Poe's companies, Pittman Poe, developed Bailey Ranch in Owasso and Battle Creek in Broken Arrow, along with many other similar developments across the country. If true, the rumor would explain a lot of otherwise unaccountably frantic behavior on the part of Mr. Poe and the Cockroach Caucus councilors.

In the end, it was Councilor Sam Roop who cleared the way for the Owasso water line to be funded in this package. Without his vote, there were not enough votes to amend the package and replace the Owasso water line with a project that would serve Tulsa. The opponents of the Owasso line felt it was more important to move ahead with the other projects on the list than to hold them up in hopes of persuading Roop or other councilors to see sense on the Owasso line.

The City Council moved ahead by a 6-3 vote last night with a new ordinance setting deadlines for the Mayor to make appointments to the City's Authorities, Boards, and Commissions (ABCs). The Whirled predictably ridiculed the idea in an editorial yesterday -- couldn't figure out how the citizens of Tulsa had suffered any harm from board members continuing to serve long past the expiration of their terms. I say "predictably" because the Whirled editorial board opposes the idea of popular sovereignty and accountability. They prefer a system as close to oligarchy as possible while still maintining some veneer of democratic process.

ABCs have substantial powers over land use planning and the operation of our city's water, sewer, and trash systems, and the airport. While some boards can only make recommendations for consideration by elected officials, other boards (particularly the boards of Title 60 trusts) have considerable power to commit public resources and set policy without review from our elected representatives. The only opportunity for these ABC members to be held accountable to the will of the people is when they come before the City Council for confirmation of their appointment or reappointment. None of these appointments are for life. Most are for terms of three or four years, but those terms are meaningless if appointees are permitted to serve for years beyond the expiration without facing the Council.

Norma Turnbo is a case in point. Her term on the Board of Adjustment expired 17 months ago, in May 2003. The BoA grants variances and special exceptions to the City's zoning ordinance -- decisions that can have a significant impact on property owners. If you don't like a BoA decision, your only recourse is to take it to District Court. No elected official has standing to review their decisions. There's a consensus that Norma needs to go, but nothing can be done unless the Mayor nominates a replacement. Even if she's renominated and rejected by the Council, we're stuck with her continuing to make important decisions, unaccountable to the people of Tulsa.

Congratulations to the Council on passing this ordinance. And congratulations to the Mayor as well -- this will give him some impetus to do what he wants and needs to do to on these appointments.

From Homeowners for Fair Zoning:

IMPORTANT COUNCIL MEETING UPDATE

Date/Time: Thursday, October 14, 2004 at 6:00 P.M.

Two important pieces of legislation are on the agenda for this Thursday�s 6:00 p.m. meeting of the Tulsa City Council. (The Council meeting takes place in Francis Campbell Room/Auditorium adjacent to Tulsa City Hall on the North side.) The first proposes that the Mayor be required to promptly submit his nominees for positions on City commissions, boards and trust authorities upon vacancy or term expiration for the current office holder. See the legislation at: Prompt Mayoral Appointments Ordinance. Currently, the Mayor is trying to keep the status quo in place by refusing to submit new nominees for these important City positions. The second ordinance proposes a restructuring of the Economic Development Commission.

The Reform Alliance majority on the City Council is proposing that $200,000 of the $1,300,000 which was to be given to the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce be instead given to the Economic Development Commission. This is being done because the Chamber has a dismal record of promoting new business for Tulsa and, with the majority of its membership being from outside Tulsa, may not principally represent Tulsa�s interests. Giving the funds to the EDC is an experiment to see if they can do a better job. The Chamber�s President is outraged over this and he and the Mayor have tried to pack the EDC�s decision making body with Chamber members. Councilor Medlock has proposed a more balanced system for appointments to EDC which will spread the decision making body over Tulsa�s 9 Council Districts, one from each, 4 Mayoral appointees and the Mayor and one Councilor as ex-officio members. See the legislation at: Economic Development Commission Ordinance.

You are strongly encouraged to attend and show your support for this legislation. Both the news media and the Councilors take note of your attendance. In light of the dramatic efforts of the Tulsa World�s management to orchestrate a recall for two of these five honest City Councilors (i.e., Councilor Medlock and Councilor Mautino), it is important to let everyone know how proud you are of their efforts at bringing reform to Tulsa�s boards, commissions and trust authorities. Persons wishing to speak will need to determine which agenda item numbers have been assigned to this legislation prior to 6:00 p.m. and sign up to speak on that item. John S. Denney, Attorney for Homeowners for Fair Zoning, will be at the meeting and can let you know the agenda numbers. If you have questions or need assistance, he can be reached during the day at 918-742-5472.

Still haven't seen that list of 25 backers of the recall. Perhaps with the Mayor's public opposition to the recall, they aren't sure they want to come out publicly. Eventually they will be public, when the ethics reports are filed.

Word is that Jon Davidson, chairman of the pro-recall committee, is still soliciting funds and public endorsements for his misguided cause. I wonder if his bosses at Regency Hotel Management in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, know and approve of his involvement, much less leadership, of this campaign. You might want to let the Regency folks know how you feel -- your appreciation of Medlock and Mautino and your disappointment in the Sheraton Tulsa's involvement. Here's the contact info:

Mailing Address/Main Phone Numbers:
Regency Hotel Management
3211 W Sencore Drive
Sioux Falls, SD 57107
Phone: (605) 334-2371
Fax (605) 334-8480

There's also a form for e-mailing a note on the contact page of the website, but a fax or snail mail letter will probably be more effective.

Thanks to Tulsa Mayor Bill LaFortune for speaking publicly and unequivocally in opposition to the effort to recall Councilors Jim Mautino and Chris Medlock. The Mayor spoke Tuesday at lunchtime at a press conference at the Fountains Restaurant, in front of the monthly luncheon of the Tulsa County Republican Women's Club with Mautino, Medlock, and Councilor Sam Roop. The Tulsa Whirled story (jump page here) quotes the Mayor at length. To the Whirled's credit, they put the story on the front page, albeit below the fold.

"It does not paint a true picture of the city of Tulsa," the mayor said at a news conference. "We, the citizens of Tulsa, have worked together to get where we are today. The recall hampers our efforts to find real solutions to the problems facing our city."

LaFortune said the city did not have time to spend on a protracted effort to recall the councilors.

"We do not need three, four or five months of argument," he said. "Instead, we should be using that time to work at City Hall to move Tulsa forward." ...

LaFortune said all members of the City Council "make decisions that they think are in the best interest of Tulsa."

"They are good men and women . . . Their hearts are in the right place for the city of Tulsa," the mayor said. "I do the same thing. I make decisions, which I believe are in the best interest of Tulsa."

Government should be "constructive, not destructive," LaFortune said.

"We may disagree, but removing elected officials from office should only be the solution chosen when there has been a crime or a breach of fiduciary duty," he said.

The mayor said he is not seeing public support for a recall.

"Just today I've been to three different groups and I've asked just average citizens what they think," LaFortune said before speaking at a luncheon of the Tulsa County Republican Women's Club. "To the person, they said it is not good for our city; we don't like seeing it."

LaFortune stressed that he continues to reach out to all nine councilors, encouraging them "to meet on common ground and use a democratic process to solve our differences."

The Mayor is exactly right when he says we don't have time to waste on this divisive issue. To push this issue, especially now, would be selfish and arrogant on the part of the recall supporters. It would be disastrous if a recall were on the same ballot as the general obligation bond issue. I'm glad he said publicly, on camera, and with Medlock, Mautino, and Roop next to him, that he opposes the recall in the strongest possible terms. That should send a strong signal to the organizers.

The press conference almost wasn't a press conference. It was scheduled to be held prior to the Women's Club luncheon, but when the Mayor and Councilors arrived only KFAQ was there, and KFAQ had been alerted by Medlock that the event would occur. Phone calls were made to other media outlets, and it was learned that none of them had received the press release that was supposed to have gone out that morning. So the press conference was delayed for half-an-hour to give reporters time to arrive. Only KTUL didn't show up.

There is concern that some of the Mayor's own staff was working to undermine the impact of the Mayor's statement by ensuring that it happened without the media present. The failure to issue the release may have been an innocent mistake, but it is a crucial mistake, one that could have undone all the good will rebuilt between the Mayor and the Council majority in the last couple of weeks, so crucial a mistake that he would be unwise simply to excuse it. While the Mayor is limited in his control over civil servants, he has the ability to hire and fire his personal staff, and he would be better served by someone loyal to his interests, rather than a holdover from the Savage administration.

I note that the Mayor's press release has not been posted with the press releases on the City of Tulsa home page, or anywhere within the Mayor's portion of the city website.

I assume that all six Republican councilors were invited to participate in the press conference. Wonder why Bill Christiansen, Susan Neal, and Randy Sullivan weren't there.

As we approach the hour for a City Council committee to consider an ordinance reforming the Economic Development Commission, I'd like to call your attention to the thorough reporting done by Tulsa Today over the years about the handling of our City's economic development funds. Here's a link to a Google search that turns up most of the relevant articles.

If you're wondering why many Tulsans involved in local affairs have no respect for the Chamber, these articles will help you understand.

Some excerpts from key articles:

In "Jobs Needed Now", from 2003, we learn how the Chamber's leaders plan to grow the economy. Here's some insight into the thinking of Chamber CEO Jay Clemens, who has taken over leadership of the economic development group temporarily, following the departure of Chamber VP Mickey "No Idea" Thompson to Bixby:

Also, as a staff driven organization, the head of the staff is the ultimate boss and according to the New York Times, Jay Clemens, Executive President and CEO of the Metropolitan Tulsa Chamber of Commerce once said a company�s plan to bring 500 new jobs into an area where he held a similar position would �unrealistically drive up wages.� Not a quote to inspire workers of any community.

And here's an evaluation of the Chamber's overall approach:

For the last twenty years or so the primary publicly funded local economic development effort has been conducted by the Metropolitan Tulsa Chamber of Commerce at a cost of over $70 million. Any local expenditure for that long at that level begs the question of value received. Is Tulsa now economically developed and a center for conventions and visitors? That is the objective of the annual contract the Chamber executes in behalf of the City of Tulsa at a rate of approximately $3 million per year. If they are not doing the job, should we fire them?

A few months ago, Chamber Senior Vice President Mickey Thompson took questions at a meeting of the Republican Men�s Club where he publicly asserted that �big business is more important to Tulsa�s economic development than small business.� The crowd groaned as most knew that statement to be false. Big business is defined as more than 200 employees, but the backbone of Tulsa�s economy has always been small business. Economists by the thousands will testify that small business generates faster higher quality economic growth than big business.

Chamber officials promised to diversify local economic development efforts after the oil crash in the mid-eighties, but surprise � they did not.Now with the severe local depression within energy, telecommunications, and aviation they are not even promising a different approach.

"Chamber in Decline", from earlier in 2003, reports on the Mayor's plans to scrutinize the city's economic development efforts. I don't recall hearing whether this blue ribbon panel was ever actually empaneled.

In his budget presentation May 1, Mayor Lafortune spoke of the importance of economic development and convention and visitor solicitation efforts saying, �We have many agencies, organizations and city departments who work on economic development, but most do so on their own without a coordinated plan among those entities. Of course, the Tulsa Metro Chamber has the lead on Tulsa�s economic development efforts and receives significant funding from our hotel and motel taxes to accomplish this task. At this critical time in Tulsa�s history, with the economy being the victim of so many hard hits, it is crucial that we go forward with the very best economic development plan possible. With this end in mind, I have asked former city councilor Dewey Bartlett to chair a Mayor�s Blue Ribbon Panel of some of Tulsa�s best business leaders to review the City�s economic development efforts and provide recommendations as to how we can improve, and even consolidate these efforts.�

The article also gives us a glimpse of the inner workings of the Chamber, centered on Chamber CEO Jay Clemens, who does not live in the City of Tulsa, and reports on the Chamber's sales pitch to prospective members:

Last year, Tulsa Today, Inc. considered membership in the Chamber and was visited by such a sales person. She asserted that the Chamber �runs� Tulsa, a surprise to gathered Tulsa Today staff. For anyone knowledgeable of public policy issues, that was an assertion of public corruption. The Chamber is a private lobby group and while they may contract with the City of Tulsa to execute specific functions, they do so only at the will of public officials legally elected by the will of the people as outlined in the United States and Oklahoma Constitutions.

And here's an article from 1998 about the hotel / motel sales tax fund and whether the Chamber was effective at what it had been hired to do.

Tuesday's Tulsa City Council committee agenda is full of interesting topics: Economic development oversight, appointments to authorities, boards, and commissions; a change to the noise nuisance law; a change to the zoning code regarding modular housing; and a rezoning at 15th & Utica. If you have time, this would be an interesting day to see what's going on at City Hall.

Two items that address recent controversies will be considered in the Legislative and Public Safety Committee meeting at 1:30 p.m. (All committee meetings take place in the conference room on the 2nd floor of City Hall.)

Mikki spotted this earlier today, south of 41st on Sheridan, and I went back this evening to take the pictures.

A tip of the mortarboard to Community Care College for their show of support for Councilors Jim Mautino and Chris Medlock. Community Care College was named Small Business of the Year for 2004 by the Tulsa Economic Development Corporation.

Several people have emailed in response to my comment about the various numbers being thrown around by Mayor and the FOP about the arbitration of police pay increases. FOP Lodge 93 has a website, and they have posted the text of the arbitration judgment here. They have a few comments at the top of the page, and have highlighted passages they find significant. Their home page has links to additional comments.

I haven't had time to read through it yet, but I wanted to give you a chance to read it yourselves. By the way, the Michael Bates mentioned in the text is Michael S. Bates, Director of Human Relations for the City of Tulsa, and no relation whatsoever to me.

Don Burdick, chairman of the Tulsa County Republican Party, emailed the following statement to me this morning about his meeting with the President and the Chairman of the Tulsa Metro Chamber, and asked me to post it. Here it is:

I would characterize my meeting with Jay Clemens and Bob Poe as a healthy discussion between business and political leaders. In very strong terms, I expressed my opposition to a recall effort for any City Councilor, or Mayor, simply based on policy disagreements. Mr. Clemens and Mr. Poe stated their primary concern was the business climate in Tulsa, and they believed some of Councilor Medlock's positions were detrimental to promoting regional economic growth. My recommendation was for a meeting between these individuals, hoping for a solution to the existing problems. We all agreed that attempting to resolve these differences through articles in the newspaper, on the radio, or on websites was not working... and that face-to-face discussion was the only way. The chance of success may be low, but for the good of Tulsa, it was worth trying. For the record, no chamber official offered to get Councilor Medlock any job for any reason. I left the meeting hopeful that a solution other than a recall effort could be accomplished, and was very concerned that if the recall effort continued, it's impact would be bad for Tulsa. I still have that hope.

I commend Don for trying to make peace and for his strong stand against recall, and he's right that a recall would hurt Tulsa. I'll save further comments for a later entry.

Did some digging to learn more about Jon Davidson, the Chairman of the Coalition for Responsible Government 2004, which is backing the recall of City Councilors Chris Medlock and Jim Mautino.

The Whirled story mentions that he recently resigned from the board of the Tulsa Metro Chamber, but the October newsletter (PDF) still lists him as vice chairman of the Chamber for the Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Davidson is general manager of the Sheraton Tulsa Hotel. I wondered whether the hotel's owners were aware that their employee is launching himself into a divisive political controversy that could hurt the hotel's image in the community. So I went to find out who owns the hotel.

The Sheraton Tulsa Hotel is not owned by Starwood, the parent company of the Sheraton brand. Behind the desk at the Tulsa Sheraton is this sign, which is probably required by the franchise agreement:

The Sheraton Tulsa Hotel is indpendently owned by Tulsa Garnett Hotel Ventures and operated by Regency Hotel Management under a license issued by the Sheraton Corporation.

Some further digging revealed that Tulsa Garnett Hotel Ventures and Regency Hotel Management are both South Dakota corporations, based in Sioux Falls, and owned by the Ramkota Companies. They acquired the hotel, formerly a Marriott, in 1995, renovated and rebranded it as a Sheraton, and installed Davidson as general manager in the fall of that year.

Here is the website for Regency Hotel Management, which currently features the Sheraton Tulsa on the website banner. A link on the home pages reads, "Regency Hotel Management & it�s [sic] affiliates own more than 60 properties in 21 states..." and when you click on the link, then click on the south central region, you will see that the Sheraton Tulsa is listed as one of those properties owned by Regency or one of its affiliates. David Sweet is the registered agent in South Dakota of Tulsa Garnett Hotel Ventures, LLC. Sweet is also the CEO of the Ramkota Companies, Inc., and of Regency Hotel Management, Inc. All three companies share the same registered address of 3211 West Sencore Drive, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Would a South Dakota-based hotel chain with 60 properties really want to be involved in a political controversy in Tulsa? I think it very unlikely that the home office in Sioux Falls has any idea of the controversy and bad publicity the manager of their only Tulsa property is going to be generating. Here is a link to their contact page. If you support Jim Mautino and Chris Medlock, you might want to let Regency CEO David Sweet know, as politely and gently as you can, that their Mr. Davidson is heading up an effort to overturn the election of two members of the City Council (elected with 55% and 59% of the vote, respectively), that you support these councilors, and that you don't appreciate Mr. Davidson's efforts to remove them.

UPDATE on an earlier item: I mentioned the connection between the Coalition's treasurer, Herbert P. Haschke, Jr., and Lou Reynolds, one of the two members of Tulsa's water board who was denied reappointment to the board by the Council majority. Haschke also has a connection to Jim Cameron, the other board member denied reappointment. Haschke and Cameron were co-incorporators, along with Ken Underwood, of IHCRC Realty Corporation, which was incorporated in 1996 and dissolved in 2000.

The Whirled's page one headline this morning (jump page here) is the formation of a PAC to prosecute a recall against Tulsa City Councilors Jim Mautino and Chris Medlock.

Come back later to read my comments on it.

The recall effort against two members of the Reform Alliance majority on the Tulsa City Council appears to be moving forward, with backing from leaders of the Tulsa Metro Chamber and an attorney with connections to R. Louis Reynolds, the real estate attorney whose reappointment to the city's water board was denied by the City Council majority.

Councilors Chris Medlock and Jim Mautino received phone calls Saturday afternoon from Tulsa Whirled reporter P. J. Lassek, asking for comment on news that an organization has emerged to push for a recall of Medlock and Mautino. The group is calling itself the Coalition for Responsible Government 2004, and the registered agents for the group are Herbert P. Haschke, Jr., and Jon Davidson. (UPDATE 10/10/2004: According to the Whirled's story, the group has filed as an issues PAC with Davidson as chairman and Haschke as treasurer.)

Here's what we know so far about Mr. Haschke. He is a member of the board of the Tulsa Authority for the Recovery of Energy (TARE), which controls the city's trash system and the trash-to-energy plant. Haschke was first appointed to the board by former Mayor Susan Savage and confirmed on October 8, 1998, and reappointed by her in 2001. His term expired on July 1, 2004, and so far Mayor LaFortune has not reappointed him or appointed a replacement for him. Stephen Schuller and Sharon King Davis are two of his current colleagues on the TARE board. Lou Reynolds, the attorney who was rejected for reappointment to the Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority (TMUA), served with him on TARE until Savage appointed Reynolds to the TMUA in January of 2002.

Haschke and Lou Reynolds have another connection. On March 27, 1995, Haschke, Reynolds, and David Cox incorporated The Commercial Real Estate Association of Tulsa, Inc. Haschke is also listed as registered agent for the association.

Haschke, 65, is registered to vote at 4311 East 68th Place. That address is on the same block as 4345 East 68th Place, the address at which City Council Chairman Randy Sullivan is registered to vote. (It is believed that since his divorce, Councilor Sullivan no longer lives at that address. Sullivan's current address is not known, but he has been spotted frequently in the 91st & Yale area, outside his district.)

Haschke is president of the board of directors of Hospice of Green Country. You can see a picture of him here. (The list of guests in that article is interesting -- a who's who of leading Democratic activists and donors, including Coleman and Sharon King Davis, Jim and Sally Frasier, Jim East and Kim Holland, Norma and Steve Turnbo. And Tracy Lorton Salisbury, daughter of Whirled publisher Robert Lorton, receives a prominent mention.)

Here's a Google cache of a Texas Monthly article that mentioned a Price Waterhouse partner named Herb Haschke, who was named in a 1990 lawsuit by Willie Nelson for leading Nelson, in the early '80s, to invest in tax shelters that proved to be financial disasters that only deepened Nelson's problems with the IRS. Tulsa's Herb Haschke is a tax attorney, so this may very well be the same person.

An interesting coincidence: A search of voter registration records turns up someone in Wagoner County named Terry Haschke Studenny. We don't know at this point if this person is related to either Herb Haschke or J. Richard Studenny, attorney for the Tulsa Industrial Authority, Tulsa Airport Authority, and Tulsa Airport Improvement Trust.

(Studenny's dismissal was to be considered last Thursday, but the special meeting of TAIT -- called by Mayor LaFortune -- had to be canceled for lack of a quorum, when board member Ron Turner was prevented from returning to Tulsa because of inclement weather.)

Jon Davidson is the Vice Chairman of the Board of the Tulsa Metro Chamber overseeing the Convention and Visitors Bureau, and he is general manager of the Sheraton Hotel Tulsa, a position he has held since the fall of 1995. Some of the City of Tulsa's hotel/motel tax dollars go to the Chamber for support of the Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Earlier this week, Tulsa Metro Chamber CEO Jay Clemens and Chairman Bob Poe (a lifelong Democrat) met for three hours with Tulsa County Republican Chairman Don Burdick, trying to persuade Burdick to support the recall of Republicans Medlock and Mautino or at least not publicly oppose their
recall. Burdick has publicly stated that he opposes any recall and worked to get the support of Republican elected officials for a statement opposing any recall. During the meeting the chamber officals suggested (perhaps in jest) that they should get a high paying job for Medlock so that he wouldn't spend so much time and work so hard at being a Councilor. Asked to comment on this, Medlock joked that if the job was to replace Jay Clemens, and it would get Clemens out of town, he might take the position. (UPDATE 10/11/2004: Don Burdick has sent me a statement about the meeting, which you can find here.)

Stay tuned for more information as it becomes available.

Here the Reform Alliance on the Council and Mayor LaFortune are trying to work together to move the city forward, and KRMG seems to be trying to get the Mayor and Council to start fighting each other with a poll on their homepage that sets LaFortune against "Chris Medlock & 4 other city councilors". Here's the question:

What's Best For Tulsa? Chris Medlock & 4 other City Council members are calling for reforms; Mayor Bill LaFortune & the Tulsa Chamber say they're trying to stunt Tulsa's growth. Who's right?

Medlock
The Mayor
Neither

When I voted, the totals were Medlock with 58%, the Mayor with 30%, and 12% undecided.

Interesting that they are singling out Medlock rather than referring to all five in the list of allowed answers. Also interesting that they say "The Mayor" for the second answer rather than "The Mayor and the Chamber."

You suppose someone out there has an interest in ensuring that the Mayor and the City Council majority never get along?

There was a report that Richard Studenny, the attorney who works as a contract employee of the Tulsa Industrial Authority and the Tulsa Airports Improvements Trust (TAIT), would be fired today at a meeting of TAIT. It didn't happen, and the word is that the Trust didn't have a quorum present, because board member Ron Turner couldn't make it back from Chicago because of weather.

I apologize for the delay in posting this.

I started Tuesday evening at Tulsa City Councilor Jim Mautino's District 6 town hall meeting (written up here), then made it to Hicks Park about 20 minutes into Councilor Sam Roop's meeting. There were about 40 people there, plus a couple of news cameras, and I was pleasantly surprised to see Mayor Bill LaFortune sitting in the back row. A dozen or so were people I recognized as being from outside the district, there just to give Sam their support. Mona Miller of Homeowners for Fair Zoning held a sign saying "Sam's the Man!"

Councilor Roop's talk covered public safety, the proposed general obligation bond issue for infrastructure, and the negative impact that passage of the tobacco tax and the gambling propositions will have on city sales tax revenues. Mayor LaFortune expressed agreement that these propositions would hurt the city's bottom line.

Roop expressed support for the idea of taking a portion of the "third penny" and using it as a dedicated revenue source for police and fire. He or the Mayor (I forget who) pointed out that we are nearing the end of our sewer obligation -- an unfunded Federal mandate that has required us to dedicate a large portion of the third penny funds to sewer system improvements. As that obligation goes away, that could free up enough of the next third-penny to fund public safety and still fund the same amount of long-term capital improvements as in the past, without raising the overall tax burden.

Councilor Roop mentioned that he and the Mayor and some other councilors had had a meeting on Monday, and that there had been a frank but constructive exchange of views. When Sam yielded the floor to the Mayor, I think we got a sense of what was discussed.

The Mayor reaffirmed his opposition to any and all efforts to recall city officials and he spoke of signing a pledge to that effect and pledging to cooperate with the Council for the good of the city.

The Mayor expressed his agreement with the Council majority that candidates for appointment to authorities, boards, and commissions should provide full disclosure of any potential conflict of interest.

Regarding the issue of water lines to the suburbs, the Mayor praised Councilor Chris Medlock's idea that a higher rate of return on new water lines (13% instead of 10%) could compensate the City for lower sales tax revenue resulting from suburban retail growth, and could be used to build out the water and sewer system to connect areas within the city limits that are still unserved.

In speaking of the friction between the Council's Reform Alliance majority and the administration, the Mayor said there were times when the administration should have done a better job of getting responsive, relevant, and timely information to the councilors in response to their questions, and that he should have involved the Councilors before controversial matters like the north Tulsa County annexation proposal were made public. He said that the bond issue is an example of the right way to do it, meeting with Councilors early in the process to get their input.

The Mayor defended the new pay scheme for the police -- the arbitrator chose the City's plan rather than the FOP's plan. I found it hard to follow the figures without being able to see anything in writing. It would be nice to see a chart showing what the officers make now, what they would make under the administration's plan, and what they would make under the FOP plan, and all of it in dollars, not percentages, just to be clear. The Mayor pointed out the sacrifices that non-public safety city employees have made, and said we had to find some money to restore part of what they have lost over the last few years of shortfalls.

The Mayor and Councilor Roop spoke of a proposed charter change that would remove civil service protection for managers in city government above a certain level, basically those managers in a policy-making position, so that they would serve at the pleasure of the Mayor rather than be insulated from accountability by civil service protections. Right now, the Mayor has very little leverage to ensure that city departments are carrying out the policies we elected him to pursue. If a department manager won't or can't comply, the Mayor has very little recourse, which means that the people who are directly in charge of city government aren't even indirectly accountable to the citizens. This is a great and long-overdue idea, and I stand ready to give it my full support.

(There's a theory going around that some City Hall bureaucrats are deliberately feeding conflicting information to the Mayor and the Councilors to get them fighting each other, as part of a strategy to discredit them both and help usher in a Democratic mayor like State Secretary of Commerce Kathy Taylor or maybe even old Slewfoot Savage her infernal self.)

I came away encouraged that the Mayor understands what is at stake and that he is prepared to work with and publicly show support for the Reform Alliance councilors, our "Five Star Councilors".

Tonight I attended parts of two town hall meetings, held by Tulsa City Councilors Jim Mautino and Sam Roop. Mayor Bill LaFortune was at Sam Roop's meeting too, both as a listener and as a speaker. I came away feeling hopeful and optimistic.

Councilor Mautino's District 6 meeting at East Central High School started at 7, a half-hour before Councilor Roop's meeting, so I started out there.

If you've been around Jim Mautino for any length of time, you know that he has a passion for seeing east Tulsa developed. He looks at open fields and sees untapped potential. But he is not willing to see east Tulsa's rolling terrain filled with whatever junk the rest of the city doesn't want. East Tulsa's development can be done in a way that results in a pleasant place to live, work, and do business. It can be done in a strategic way that makes the most of 200,000 cars a day that travel I-44 between the I-244 junction and the US 412 / Creek Turnpike junction -- the busiest section of road in the state -- and translates that traffic into retail sales and sales tax revenue for the city. That's Jim's vision, and as a councilor he's working to ensure that the planning and infrastructure are in place to make this happen.

Councilor Mautino began his town hall meeting -- about 60 were in attendance, a good turnout -- with a presentation, centered around a map of the district. He pointed out areas where new sewer and water lines are going in. He talked of a couple of industrial businesses that were going to be forced to relocate out of Tulsa unless they could get hooked up to the city sewer. The sewer is there now and should help encourage more industrial development in the same area.

Councilor Mautino explained Owasso's retail development strategy, using the roads as a funnel to capture shoppers' dollars from the north, before the shoppers can get to the stores in Tulsa. He pointed out that the road network in east Tulsa could be used to create a similar funnel to capture retail dollars from people traveling through Tulsa or coming into the area from the northeast and east.

Councilor Mautino talked about the former town of Fair Oaks in Wagoner County, annexed to Tulsa in 2001. He's working with the principal landowner and INCOG on planning for connecting roads to encourage retail development along our section of Creek Turnpike. Jim sees the retail potential of the I-44 corridor in east Tulsa -- now mainly auto auctions and trucking related. He'd like to make five-laning Admiral Boulevard a priority, to encourage retail development. He wants Tulsa to work aggressively to get outdoor outfitter Cabela's to locate a retail store in east Tulsa, instead of letting Owasso or Jenks get it and all the sales tax revenue. He spoke of a variety of infrastructure priorities for the upcoming general obligation bond issue, and asked for his constituents' input on projects that matter to them.

I had to leave to go to Councilor Roop's meeting, but in the 40 minutes I was there, I was impressed by Councilor Mautino's mastery of policy details and the clarity of his explanations, working without notes -- just the map on the screen and a laser pointer. While Jim seemed a bit nervous at Wednesday's rally, tonight he was quite relaxed. In dealing with some of the controversy, he tried to steer clear of us vs. them language and to focus on the substance of the matter.

I'm too tired to write any more, and Councilor Roop's meeting deserves its own entry. I'll just say again that I was encouraged, particularly by what I heard from the Mayor.

KFAQ has added to its page on last Wednesday's town hall meeting -- in addition to a story and a slide show of photos, they've posted audio of Councilor Chris Medlock's speech, and hope to add more speeches in the next few days. The speech is here -- it's an 18 MB MP3 file.

Councilor Sam Roop wasn't able to attend last Wednesday's town hall meeting with his reform allies, because of a previous commitment, so he's holding his own meeting Tuesday night (October 5) at 7:30 pm, in the Hicks Park recreation center near 34th & Mingo. This is a chance to give Councilor Roop your support and encouragement in thanks for his long record of working for good government at City Hall.

But if you're a resident of Council District 6, Councilor Jim Mautino would like you to join him at a District town hall meeting, a chance to hear about progress around the district, to hear about the proposed capital improvements bond issue, and to get your questions answered. Councilor Mautino's meeting will be at 7 p.m., Tuesday, October 5, at East Central High School.

Listening to the audio and attending either of these district town hall meetings are three more opportunities for you to hear for yourself what these "Five Star Councilors" are all about, unfiltered by media bias.

A sidebar to the Whirled's story on the Reform Alliance's town hall meeting (PDF here) announced that "GOP leaders plan rally backing Mayor's efforts". It was curious that the list of "GOP leaders" mentioned in the story -- ORU President Richard Roberts, Bama CEO Paula Marshall-Chapman, Howard Barnett, Nordam CEO Ken Lackey -- did not include any Republican public officials or any Republican party officers.

President Roberts has been largely quiet about politics until recent years. Paula Marshall-Chapman was chairman of the Tulsa Metro Chamber a few years ago, and was one of the signatories on the letter warning elected officials and party leaders not to get in the way of the Vision 2025 juggernaut. Barnett is part of the Jones family that once owned the Tulsa Tribune, and was Governor Frank Keating's Chief of Staff. I'm not aware of Ken Lackey's political involvement.

From what I could see, Republican grassroots and leaders alike were at the Reform Alliance's town hall meeting on Wednesday: Three of the six members of the Tulsa County Republican Central Committee -- Chairman, State Committeeman (that's me), 1st District Committeeman -- plus many people who volunteer for candidates and attend monthly Republican club luncheons, and many folks I didn't know who came to the event wearing Bush-Cheney, Tom Coburn, and John Sullivan campaign T-shirts and hats. I'm not aware that any of us were notified about or invited to this "Republican leaders" event.

This looks like something hastily assembled in response to the Reform Alliance's event, in anticipation that the Reformers would focus their fire on Mayor LaFortune. But the Reformers didn't make a target of the Mayor, and they expressed hope that they could work with the Mayor on the issues facing our city. The Reformers also expressed support for the upcoming general obligation bond issue, which the Whirled story said was mentioned prominently in the press release about the event for the Mayor.

I've heard that the Mayor's event was sparsely attended -- maybe 50 people present -- and that several of the speakers mentioned that the Mayor had personally called them to ask them to come and speak in his behalf. I'll pass along more info as I learn it.

Last night's town hall meeting for the City Council's Reform Alliance will be continued next Tuesday, at 7:30 pm, at Hicks Park Recreation Center, as Councilor Sam Roop speaks on his vision for the City and answers questions about his decisions. I encourage you to plan to be there and show your support for Councilor Roop, just as you did last night for the other four Reform Alliance councilors.

(UPDATED -- see note at the end of the entry.)

In my earlier entry, I guessed that there were about 2,000 at last night's town hall meeting on the Civic Center Plaza. This morning's Whirled's story claimed the number was 300, but we had at least that many packed into Aaronson Auditorium at 5:45 p.m. when it was decided to move up to the plaza, something that the Whirled's reporter must have observed as she tried to find her way into the room through the crowd at that time. Far more were up on the plaza already, and people kept arriving as the 6 p.m. start time approached. A teacher at the event told KFAQ that she sent out several people to count the crowd, and that they counted just shy of 3,000. I was told that someone with the library estimated 2,500. Obviously, it's in the Whirled's interest to downplay the rally and the strong show of support.

KFAQ has a story about the event on its homepage, headlined "Taking Back Tulsa". There's a slideshow hotlinked from the page. (The link doesn't work in Mozilla -- you can get straight to start of the slideshow here.) There are some great shots of the creative signs people brought to the event.

MORE: Although I take great exception to his characterization of Michael DelGiorno, "Average Joe" has a great summary of the event over in the Tulsa Now forums, and you'll find it here. He's been skeptical and critical of the Reform Alliance, but he clearly gained some insight from attending last night's event.

If you haven't already done so, I encourage you to register (it's free) and participate in the conversation.

UPDATE 10:00 pm: I am informed that the Whirled's estimate came from a fire marshal and a library official, that they have these estimates on tape, and that the fire marshal's count was taken as Chris Medlock concluded his remarks on the plaza. I am also told that there were only 147 chairs in Aaronson Auditorium, which would mean that fewer than 300 were in the room before we moved up to the plaza.

My point in what I wrote above was not to accuse the Whirled's reporter of deliberately low-balling the attendance, which I don't believe she would do -- although I could believe that higher-ups at the Whirled might -- but to say that with the crowd already present in Aaronson when she arrived about 5:45, a final, maximum crowd estimate of 300 doesn't pass the common-sense test. I've changed my first paragraph to clarify that. I do find it hard to believe that the number present on the plaza during the heart of the event was almost identical to the number present 15 minutes before the scheduled start of the event. As we moved upstairs, there were people on the plaza who hadn't yet made their way downstairs, and more who arrived before and after things got underway at about 6:10, as it took time for people to find a parking spot and make their way to the plaza.

I misunderstood the source of the estimates of 2,500 and 3,000, which I have second-hand, and I've corrected and clarified the first paragraph above to reflect that. I hope to be able to track the estimates back to the original source.

Whatever the actual number, it was a strong turnout, and it reflected the diversity of Tulsa's citizens.

Tuesday witnessed the gratuitous intrusion of politics on the Tulsa Whirled's sports pages. Dave Sittler, once a key member of the team that produced the city's best sports section in the late lamented Tulsa Tribune, has now been reduced to inserting irrelevant criticism of local politicians into his column:

STILLWATER -- You're familiar with the "Gang of Five," right?

No, not that city council Clown Band that seems hell bent on stunting Tulsa's growth. The group I'm referring to doesn't pose as serious a threat as those five 20th century-thinking city council members, who apparently would like to turn Vision 2025 into Vision 1925.

The Clown Band plays in the real world, which in this case they've turned into a five-ringed circus of nasty politics. Here in journalism's "Toy Department," we deal with the games that people are supposed to play for fun.

"Clown band"? It's obvious that Sittler hasn't done any original thinking here. He's just parroting phrases he's heard from Ken Neal and the rest of the inhabitants of the rubber room that houses the Whirled's editorial board.

I figure someone on the top floor thought, "We have some readers who only read the sports section. We need to make sure we properly indoctrinate them as well. Have Sittler insert some irrelevant slams at the Council majority. Better yet, send Sittler home and have a copy editor cut and paste a few grafs from an old Ken Neal editorial."

Or does this opening reflect Sittler's own view of the conventional wisdom? Ordinarily, you don't want to alienate half of your readers before you even get to your topic. Would Sittler open a column with some crack about Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard? Or some snide reference to Kerry's Purple Heart Band-Aids? Political humor usually finds its way to the sports page or the comics page once a characterization has become generally accepted as accurate. If Sittler believes that all of his readers have contempt for the Council's bipartisan Reform Alliance majority, he needs to get out more.

Forget the fact that it repeats inaccurate charges that apply more to the Councilors' critics than it does to them: How rude of the Whirled to inflict their political opinions on people who just want to relax and read about college football.

As Councilor Chris Medlock quipped on KFAQ Tuesday morning: "Penalty on the offense. Unneccessary roughness. Piling on. 15 yards and loss of subscription."

Elsewhere in the sports section, we see evidence that the Whirled is becoming more desperate for ad revenue, resulting in another unwelcome intrusion on the sanctity of the sports section. An alert reader pointed me to Tuesday's scoreboard page -- click here then scroll down to the lower right.

Here's the text of the ad starts off this way:

(NOTE: If you can't see the pictures, it's because your firewall or Internet security program doesn't permit "referrer" messages to be sent to the web server for this site. I have "bandwidth protection" enabled, which prevents another website from directly incorporating images from my site, and unavoidably a browser request without a referrer is handled as if it were an attempt at bandwidth theft.)

It was a magnificent sight. By 5:45 Aaronson Auditorium was packed to capacity -- easily 300 people in there, and more already gathered on the Civic Center Plaza, where KFAQ had their van parked. Michael DelGiorno was doing a live "emergency broadcast", preempting Laura Ingraham's syndicated show and setting the stage for the town hall meeting hosted by four members of the City Council's bipartisan Reform Alliance majority. At about 5:50, Councilor Chris Medlock addressed those gathered in the auditorium, and asked for a show of hands -- stay put or move outside to allow more people to hear. By a two-to-one margin they voted to move up to the plaza.

In the middle, you can see Councilor Roscoe Turner speaking. He was the first of the group to address the crowd, followed by Jim Mautino, then Jack Henderson, with Chris Medlock batting cleanup. As you look at that picture, keep in mind there are hundreds more off the right edge, going west into the plaza at least as far as the library entrance, more behind me, and more all the way to Denver. I'm guessing we had about 2,000, but that's just an educated guess. Here's another view, from behind the councilors looking west:

I couldn't take notes -- I had my daughter on my shoulders a lot of the time -- but there were many memorable moments. Jack Henderson went down a list of institutions that have come after the reformers, following the same pattern: "We don't have a personal problem with the Chamber of Commerce, but the leadership of the Chamber of Commerce seems to have a personal problem with us. We don't have a personal problem with the Tulsa World, but the leadership of the Tulsa World seems to have a personal problem with us." This group is not out to get anyone, but the fact that they ask questions seems to have a lot of people out to get them. Henderson pointed out that there had been councilors in the past who would ask tough questions. He thanked God that there were now a majority who would ask the tough questions.

Chris Medlock started by responding directly to the charges that have been leveled against them, then moved on to speak about the positive aims the reformers have for our city. Medlock made it clear that he was and is a supporter of Vision 2025; he simply wants to make sure that it's done right. Medlock pointed out that the city is very different than it once was, but we are still operating under plans drawn up in the 1970s. When our zoning code was developed, retail was dominated by Froug's and C. R. Anthony's and OTASCO and TG&Y; today, it's Home Depot and Lowe's and Wal-Mart. We can and must work together, without hateful rhetoric, to adopt reasonable reforms so that city government will work as it should for our people.

None of this is verbatim, but hopefully there someone will make audio available online before long.

I was impressed that the councilors stayed positive as much as they could, while defending their record. There were no verbal attacks on those who had been attacking them. There was no demagoguery. Medlock rebuffed a suggestion that DelGiorno made about marching on the VIP reception for the arena unveiling.

I'm fading fast here. It was a great event, and the Councilors, their families and supporters, the citizens who came out, and KFAQ radio should all be proud of the part they played in making this important event successful.

A reader reminded me today that Bob Poe's wild rants against the City Council's Reform Alliance majority are nothing new. It's just the way he does business. His approach to conflict resolution seems to be, "If you don't agree with me, you're evil and must be destroyed."

At the beginning of his term as Tulsa Metro Chamber Chairman, Poe, a lifelong Democrat, attacked Republican state legislators who had taken a pledge not to raise taxes. His tirade puzzled and offended conservative Republican legislators, who are focused on helping Oklahoma businesses prosper. These legislators expected to be working shoulder to shoulder with the leadership of Tulsa's Chamber of Commerce on crucial economic development issues like lawsuit reform and workers' compensation reform. Instead they find themselves dealing with an organization whose leadership is obsessed with raising taxes and boosting gambling as the solution to Oklahoma's problems.

Of course, Ken Neal and the Tulsa Whirled just love Bob Poe's tax hikes, and they love it when Republicans bail on their principles and support feeding more of your tax dollars to a bloated state government:

Poe called on Republicans to avoid signing "pledges" to oppose any tax increase whatsoever. ...

Poe said lawmakers ought to vote for taxes �now,� and promised he would support any Republican or Democrat criticized for a tax vote or any other
measure the Legislature might pass to help Oklahoma through a rough economic
time. ...

Did Poe�s public scolding of legislators help? Maybe.

Will the other major chambers in the state follow his lead?

Will they back him and pressure lawmakers to put aside partisan gain
(for once) and work for Oklahoma?

It�s hard to say. It�s seldom happened in Oklahoma history.

But Poe has certainly given them their marching orders.

Did you catch that? Poe gave the legislators a "public scolding" and gave them their "marching orders." Not private discussions, not cool reasoning, but public scolding. Isn't that the way to get off on the right foot with elected officials? Who could blame a Republican legislator for wanting nothing more to do with the Metro Tulsa Chamber as long as Poe is chairman? Hopefully, for the sake of all the Chamber's members, the next chairman will be able to mend some fences and build a cooperative working agreement with legislators and city councilors. Or perhaps the membership should take action now and rid themselves of a leader who is bringing their organization into disrepute.

(Side note: Ken Neal misidentifies Poe, a lifelong Democrat, as a "solid Republican." Who needs factchecking when the facts are inconvenient?)

There's been a lot of talk about how public "bickering" and harsh words are making the city look bad and frightening away potential employers. But all the harsh words and divisiveness seem to be coming from Bob Poe, the Tulsa Whirled, and other Cockroach Caucus stalwarts like Council Chairman Randy "You're Toast" Sullivan. Meanwhile, the Reform Alliance councilors ask questions, pursue their oversight duties, and work for fairness and oversight with a calm demeanor, and they're accused of "badgering" and "trickery."

Wouldn't the city be better served by Chamber leadership that respected the will of the people as expressed at the ballot box? The people of Tulsa said we no longer want a rubber-stamp City Council. The Chamber leadership and members of the good-old-boy network had the option of reconciling themselves to this change and working in cooperation with the new Council. Instead they are pursuing a scorched-earth policy, and they don't seem to care how badly it reflects on their city.

Here's another tidbit making the rounds. Although I don't have dates of service, I am told that Bob Poe, chairman of the Tulsa Metro Chamber, used to be the chairman of the Oklahoma Transportation Authority (OTA), formerly the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority. This is fascinating, because Poe's firm has been a contractor to the OTA for over 10 years, serving as consulting engineer. Poe and Associates served as chief engineer on the Creek East Turnpike. It seems strange that someone could be both a board member of the OTA and the head of a company with large contracts with the OTA.

A similar situation existed with former OTA board member Bob Parmele, who is co-owner of Cinnabar, a company that, among other things, specializes in right-of-way land acquisition for roads and turnpikes. Parmele's Cinnabar has also done acquisition for Tulsa County projects, while Parmele has been a long time member of the Tulsa County Public Facilities Authority (the fair board).

Makes you shake your head.

Tonight (Wednesday the 29th) at 6 pm, four of the five members of the Tulsa City Council's bipartisan Reform Alliance majority will give their perspective on the state of the city. The Mayor's "state of the city" address was delivered at a fundraising luncheon for the Tulsa Metro Chamber. The Reform Alliance's remarks will be in a public place -- Aaronson Auditorium on the first floor of the Central Library, 5th & Denver downtown -- to the general public, with free admission.

Councilors Jack Henderson, Chris Medlock, Roscoe Turner, and Jim Mautino will be speaking. Sam Roop, the fifth member of the alliance, has a conflict with a college course he's taking, so he'll be speaking at a town hall meeting the next night. Roop's absence will also help alleviate any possible issues with accidentally having a quorum present in violation of the Open Meetings Act.

It is important that everyone who supports their efforts on our behalf show up tonight and show that support publicly. As Michael DelGiorno said this morning, it's no longer a time just for praying and forwarding e-mails, it's time to show up and stand up. You might even want to bring a small sign -- emphasize the positive, why you support what these councilors are doing.

These five councilors have been under a sustained and coordinated attack. Why? Simply for doing their job -- asking questions, exercising oversight over city departments and boards and commissions. Like a dentist discovering a rotten tooth, the Council's gentle probing has produced screams of pain as it finds pockets of decay.

And yes, the Whirled's spinning notwithstanding, the probing has been gentle. Watch the Council meetings and committee meetings on TGOV channel 24. (This week's schedule is here.) The Reformers ask their questions and raise their concerns politely and with a calm demeanor. When questions are dodged, the Reformers press for answers firmly, but without losing their cool. They have demonstrated grace under intense pressure, and I think all of them would credit God's grace for sustaining them through all of the attacks.

Last week's debate over the Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority's (TMUA) $18.5 million revenue bond issue is a great example. (You can catch this one last time Thursday morning on channel 24 -- the rebroadcast begins at 8 am, and the bond issue discussion starts about an hour or so into the meeting.) The Reformers asked questions of Paul Zachary from the Public Works department, Owasso City Manager Rodney Ray, Tulsa Deputy Mayor Steve Sewell, and the head of Owasso's economic development agency.

In the course of the questions, Chris Medlock and the other Reformers made it clear that they do not want to cut off water to the suburbs, and they are willing to sell more water to the suburbs, but they want to ensure that it is at a rate that is fair to Tulsa. At the Mayor's request, the Council voted to delay considering the TMUA bond issue for at least two weeks. Some councilors wanted to proceed with approval for the non-controversial items and defer consideration of the suburban water lines only. After receiving assurances from Paul Zachary that the two week delay would not jeopardize critical projects such as dam repair to Lake Spavinaw and Lake Eucha, the Council voted 6 to 3 to continue the issue to a future meeting. The Reform Alliance split on the issue, with Medlock and Roop agreeing to delay the issue, Henderson, Turner, and Mautino not wanting to delay the projects that have unanimous support, demonstrating that these men are truly exercising independent judgment, not marching in lockstep.

Robert C. Poe is the current Chairman of the Tulsa Metro Chamber, who has gained attention recently for his denunciation of the Reform Alliance majority on the Tulsa City Council. He is the owner of Community National Bank and Trust Company, Poe & Associates (a civil engineering firm), Penterra Co., and Pittman Poe and Associates, Inc.

Poe is a lifelong registered Democrat and an outspoken advocate of higher taxes, such as a gas tax increase (to build roads that would create work for his engineering firm), as well as the proposed tobacco tax that would eliminate city sales taxes on cigarettes, hurting the City of Tulsa and other local governments. That's probably why the Whirled editorial board praises him for his tireless efforts lobbying the Legislature.

At about 9:30 Sunday evening, Tulsa City Councilor Chris Medlock was relaxing, watching a movie and eating ice cream with his family when he got a call from Council Chairman Randy Sullivan.

We've written about Randy Sullivan before. He is not related at all to Congressman John Sullivan or to Dan Sullivan, who is running for election in State House District 71. Randy Sullivan is serving his second term as City Councilor for District 7. He was elected chairman this year over significant objections, and despite the fact that his side, the Cockroach Caucus, was defeated in the city elections. He made threats that ended a private school's efforts to buy the old Children's Medical Center for their new campus. He was F&M Bank's point man on the 71st & Harvard rezoning and tried to prevent homeowners from getting a fair hearing in that case.

So in his phone call to Chris Medlock Sunday night, Randy Sullivan had a simple message for Medlock, which managed to be understood, despite his slurred speech: "You're toast." The recall effort is going forward and Medlock and Mautino are the targets. Randy Sullivan said he had been asked by the Tulsa County Republican Party chairman to join other Republican city officials in signing a statement pledging cooperation and renouncing all efforts to recall city officials. He refused. He would only sign such a statement if Medlock would agree to four concessions. Medlock stopped him at that point. (Through another source, Medlock learned of the concessions -- approval of the Owasso and Sperry water lines and approval of the reappointment of Jim Cameron and Lou Reynolds to the TMUA.)

Randy Sullivan had already publicly expressed his contempt for the Reform Alliance majority on the Council, in response to a question at last Thursday's Tulsa Press Club luncheon, at which Tulsa Metro Chamber Chairman Bob Poe spoke. Sullivan expressed his agreement with Poe's attacks on the reformers.

Back in May, Randy Sullivan incorporated Lake Sunset LLC, which is a real estate development company. You don't suppose he stands to benefit financially from new water lines into north Tulsa County?

Wouldn't it be nice if someone else were head of the legislative branch of our city government?

I have received confirmation from multiple reliable sources about the source of the funding for last weekend's automated phone survey targeting the five Tulsa City Councilors who comprise the bipartisan Reform Alliance majority. The clear intent of the calls was to identify voters who would be willing to sign a recall petition to bring down one or more of the reformers. The ultimate goal appears to break the Reform Alliance majority, and replace it with a majority which will preserve the special deals and special privileges that have dominated Tulsa city government over the past two decades.

I have been told that the phone calls were funded by the Home Builders Association of Greater Tulsa (HBA). They've decided to target Councilors Chris Medlock and Jim Mautino, and the only thing that would get them to stop is if the Council confirms the reappointment of Jim Cameron and Lou Reynolds to the Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority (TMUA) board and approves funding for a new water line to Owasso and a feeder water line to Sperry. The message has been passed on to the councilors in question. (I am told that Council Chairman Randy Sullivan is the message boy.) Needless to say Councilors Medlock and Mautino and the rest of the Reform Alliance have too much character and courage to go along with what amounts to extortion.

What we appear to be seeing is an attempt to overturn the City of Tulsa's election results because the City Council majority is looking out for the interests of Tulsa. Whoever is ultimately behind this wants to continue to control Tulsa's water supply to their own financial benefit. In all likelihood, they've been joined by those who want to derail the investigation of the airport in order to protect their business interests. It appears to be a coup d'état funded and led by people who believe that the City of Tulsa should be their own cash cow.

Why would the Home Builders Association be involved in this effort, especially when the two councilors in question have been strongly supportive of extending infrastructure and encouraging new development in east and west Tulsa?

Why does reading a Whirled editorial invoke the same reaction in me as getting a whiff of dirty diaper? It's an annoying and disgusting task, but it's gotta be dealt with. Especially when, in the course of shooting off their mouths without getting their facts straight, the editorial board accuses the Reform Alliance councilors of shooting off their mouths without getting their facts straight. Yes, the Mayor is in Germany on an eight-day Chamber-funded junket, right after his "State of the City" speech before the Metro Tulsa Chamber, and at a time when the City is reconsidering how best to oversee the way the Metro Tulsa Chamber bureaucracy spends our tax dollars for economic development.

Details and a point-by-point rebuttal after the jump.

The Reform Alliance majority on the Tulsa City Council is pressing ahead with efforts to reassert the City of Tulsa's oversight of the millions of hotel/motel sales tax dollars that the City gives to the Tulsa Metro Chamber bureaucracy every year. The money is to pay the Chamber bureaucracy to promote economic development, conventions, and tourism.

Please note the phrase "Chamber bureaucracy". I don't have a quarrel with the hundreds of local businesses that join the Chamber in hopes of supporting local business or networking with other businesses. What's controversial is the Chamber's bureaucracy -- the full-time staff who spend the money that comes from chamber dues and government contracts, like the economic development contract with the city.

As happens with many organizations over time, particularly organizations with paid staff, the Chamber bureaucracy has lost sight of its purpose and seems more concerned with preservation of its perks and power than with providing the services it ostensibly exists to perform.

Mayor LaFortune in his "State of the City" attack address last week did his best to blur the distinction between the businesses that pay dues to the Chamber and the Chamber bureaucracy, trying to characterize the desire of the Council's reform majority to oversee the Chamber bureaucracy as an attack on the integrity of the Chamber's membership. He knows better, and he has whispered plenty of comments, directly and through surrogates, to make reform-minded Tulsans think that he didn't trust Chamber bureaucracy and planned to reform its relationship with City government. But now it appears to serve LaFortune's purposes to make the City's business community think that the Reform Alliance is hostile to their interests. (LaFortune is currently in Germany on a Chamber-paid junket.)

The Chamber's economic development bureaucracy is led by Chamber Senior VP Mickey "No Idea" Thompson, who said last fall that he had "no idea" how to attract the kinds of information technology jobs that we lost in the thousands at WorldCom and Williams.

For over 20 years the Chamber bureaucracy has served as a vendor to the City of Tulsa, providing economic development services, at a cost to taxpayers of over $70 million dollars. During that period Tulsa has suffered two major economic downturns -- the oil bust in the mid-'80s and the tech wreck and aerospace downturn of the last three years. During that period, most of the corporate headquarters we once hosted have slowly drifted away. Some have suggested that it's time we fired this economic development vendor and hired someone who can do the job.

It's funny too that city tax money is paying for a regional economic development effort, which may or may not benefit the City of Tulsa's growth and the growth of its sales tax base. It is interesting that the CEO of the Chamber, Jay Clemens doesn't even live in the City of Tulsa -- he lives in Broken Arrow.

While it may be able to handle the nuts and bolts of wooing businesses, the Chamber bureaucracy has demonstrated an inability to think and act strategically. That's why the Council wants to put the Economic Development Commission, a board appointed by the Mayor and confirmed by the Council, in charge of developing an economic development strategy and coordinating and overseeing the various city-funded economic development efforts.

To the Mayor's credit, he did reactivate the EDC, as required by city ordinance. The Council majority wants to make sure it will have the authority to do what needs doing. Too much money has been spent, to too little effect. The Mayor has seemed strangely reluctant to support the Council's efforts, and in his speech he denounced any reappraisal of the City's relationship with the Chamber bureaucracy, as noted above.

There's a concept called SMART goals -- the acronym stands for Sustainable, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Tangible. It's an approach to goal-setting that focuses on concrete results, not pie in the sky. The Chamber bureaucracy seems to have focused on inputs -- what it has attempted, as opposed to what it has achieved in the realm of economic development. (The lack of achievement, we are expected to believe, is entirely due to circumstances beyond its control.) The EDC should set SMART goals for what the Chamber bureaucracy will accomplish with the taxpayer money it receives. If it can't measure up, time to look for someone else to do the job.

One more thing: The City Council should require a full annual audit of all the Chamber's finances. I have worked for companies that are Federal contractors, and the Federal government has the right to look at balance sheets, hourly rates, and timesheets to ensure that the government isn't paying for work the contractor is doing for other customers. Because money is fungible, and there is the potential for redirecting government funds from the intended government project to something else, the government must be able to look at records for the contractor's entire business. The City should apply the same standard to major City vendors like the Chamber bureaucracy.

More about those Saturday phone calls targeting certain Tulsa city councilors for recall -- here's another report from Council District 6:

"This is a brief survey about Tulsa city government. Do you support the decisions being made my your city councilor Jim Mautino? Press 1 for yes and 2 for no."

Caller ID was blocked.

Also learned that these calls were received in Council District 1, directed at Councilor Jack Henderson, which means that all five members of the Council's Reform Alliance majority are being targeted.

Channel 2 reported on the phone calls tonight on their 5 and 10 PM broadcasts. The story included an interview with Tulsa County Republican Chairman Don Burdick, who denounced the targeting of the three Republican councilors and asked for those responsible to come clean. Democratic officials were unavailable for comment. The story led off the 5 pm news. (Channel 2 archives the last two weeks of news broadcasts, and the September 19th broadcasts should be up in the next day or two, linked from this page.)

Finally this pithy comment from the TulsaNow forums, by someone going by the handle "sendoff":

Whoever is behind this is squirming like a leech with salt poured on it. These attacks are beyond absurdity, and are becoming downright comical.

Just got word that an automated phone survey is going out today. So far it has been received by people in four Tulsa City Council districts: 2 (Chris Medlock), 3 (Roscoe Turner), 5 (Sam Roop), and 6 (Jim Mautino). The number is showing up on caller ID with a 212 area code, which is Manhattan. The survey is a single question asking for a touch tone response: "Do you have confidence in your City Councilor, ? Press 1 for yes, 2 for no." I haven't heard whether anyone is receiving more than one question, but it seems that different households are getting asked different questions. Another question that was received: "Do you agree with the tactics used by Councilor Chris Medlock?"

It's obvious this is connected with a recall effort. We don't know yet who is behind this and how comprehensive the coverage is. Are they targeting registered voters, people who vote in city elections, or random voters? With some help from you, we can figure it out pretty quickly.

By the way, it would be useful if you answer the question as if you oppose the councilor. Then it will be possible to learn what they are doing with this information. It would also be interesting to learn if a "no" answer leads to further questions.

If you get such a call or know someone who did, please e-mail me at blog AT batesline DOT com, and provide the following information:

• The exact question that was asked -- word for word, if you're able
• The number on caller ID
• Your name, address, zip code and phone number -- this will allow me to analyze the pattern of the calls

This looks like a very expensive operation. It would be interesting to know who is paying for it. If the money is coming from the Chamber, it is effectively being paid for with tax dollars, since the Chamber commingles money from the City and money from other sources. It may very well be an attack in response to Council efforts to bring some accountability to the way the Chamber spends taxpayer funds on economic development efforts. Whoever is behind it obviously feels they have a lot to gain financially by getting rid of the Reform Alliance.

UPDATE 6:00 PM: A call received by a voter in District 6, who relays the gist of the phone call. This is not necessarily verbatim because of background noise:

This is a brief survey about Tulsa city government. Do you support the decisions being made my your city councilor Jim Mautino? Press 1 for yes and 2 for no.

[After pressing 2 for no, the following two questions were heard.]

Would you support a recall election for Jim Mautino? Press 1 for yes, press 2 for no.

Would you sign a petition for a special recall election? Press 1 for yes, press 2 for no.

Pretty clear what the Cockroach Caucus is after.

My question is this: What are the roaches so afraid of that they would spend huge amounts of money on this campaign? Some of the roaches are Republicans, if in name only -- why risk party unity at a time when the party needs to pull together to elect Tom Coburn and gain the majority in the State House?

The motto of the Cockroach Caucus seems to be "rule or ruin".

Tulsa Mayor Bill LaFortune delivered the annual "State of the City" address today.

When the President reports on the State of the Union, he addresses a joint session of Congress, the elected representatives of the people of the United States of America.

When the Governor delivers a "State of the State" address, he addresses a joint session of the Oklahoma Legislature, the elected representatives of the people of the State of Oklahoma.

But when the Mayor of Tulsa speaks on the State of the City, he speaks not to the City Council, the elected representatives of the citizens of Tulsa, but to the Tulsa Metro Chamber, at a fundraising banquet for the Tulsa Metro Chamber.

You'd think he would want to demonstrate some independence from this organization, which is, after all, a vendor to the City of Tulsa (as Councilor Jim Mautino rightly identified it), providing unsuccessful economic development services to the City, which are paid for by $1.5 million annually in hotel/motel sales tax revenue. As a private organization, the Chamber is not required to give a detailed accounting of how that money is being spent, and is not required to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not commingled with dues and privately-raised funds. Money is fungible.

As always, keep in mind that when we speak of the Chamber, we don't mean to disparage the thousands of Tulsa area businesses and institutions that are members of the organization. Most join simply because it's what you do. But the Chamber as an institution, particularly the economic development department, seems to have long ago lost track of its purpose and has become a stagnant organization focused on maintaining its power and perquisites.

The Chamber is paying to send the Mayor on a trip to Germany in the name of economic development. Is the Chamber lobbying the Mayor with taxpayer dollars to keep the taxpayer dollars flowing its way?

I could not be at the speech, which was not open to the public anyway. I did hear a few audio excerpts of the speech. I understand from eyewitnesses that the Mayor was introduced by Chamber President Bob Poe, who delivered a vigorous verbal attack on the City Council's Reform Alliance. Unfortunately, the person recording the event for TGOV 24 (the staffer referenced here) didn't happen to record that segment for our enlightenment. The Mayor didn't refute or disagree with anything Mr. Poe (a Democrat) said and in fact piled on, declaring his commitment to keeping the Chamber on the City government teat and denouncing anyone who disagrees.

I would welcome additional details, and would welcome a recording of the event (including Poe's remarks) even more.

There is more to be said, but the most important question is this: To whom does Bill LaFortune answer? To what constituency does he consider himself accountable? From what I heard of his speech, he gave an unequivocal answer today. Too bad for the rest of us.

The full-throttle media campaign to reappoint Jim Cameron and Lou Reynolds to the Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority continues at the top of the front page of today's Metro section in the Tulsa Whirled (jump page here). Mayor LaFortune wants to call a special meeting of the City Council to specifically respond to Councilor Sam Roop's stated reason for refusing to support the reappointments, namely that the TMUA's settlement of the water-quality lawsuit against poultry producers succeeded only in enriching the attorneys who handled the case and failed to get any money to reimburse the City for the extra expense of treating chicken-poop-befouled water.

Clearly, the Mayor is hoping to get Roop to break his public commitment not to support the reappointment of Reynolds and Cameron. Roop, along with Chris Medlock and Jim Mautino, signed a letter to the Mayor communicating that commitment.

Why this insistence on getting these two men back on the TMUA? Surely the Mayor could find two other Tulsans to nominate as replacements. Cameron and Reynolds would probably be glad to move on to other things at this point. The Mayor's (and the Whirled's) refusal to move on is odd.

Also odd was this week's unprecedented letter from Richard Carter, the Mayor of Broken Arrow:

Normally, I would not comment about happenings in our neighbor city, but the treatment of Jim Cameron and Louis Reynolds by some of the Tulsa City Council members went far beyond my tolerance level.

As chairman of the Regional Municipal Utilities Authority this past year, I have worked with and come to know both gentlemen quite well, and have witnessed firsthand their dedicated service.

They both spend many uncompensated hours working for the benefit of Tulsa citizens and have always demonstrated to me the highest level of competence and integrity.

Mr. Cameron and Mr. Reynolds deserve kudos, not condemnation, and it puzzles me as to what self-serving motive some city coun cilors think they will satisfy by denying the reappointment of these two dedicated, public-spirited volunteers. I sincerely hope that Tulsa Mayor Bill LaFortune will submit both their names again and that the Tulsa City Council will approve them both.

I don't have a problem with Mayor Carter praising these two men, but his slap at the City Council makes no sense. No one on the City Council has condemned Cameron or Reynolds. The majority simply voted no when their names were submitted for reappointment. No one has mistreated these men. They aren't losing salary or benefits. They aren't being deprived of anything to which they are entitled. Their terms have expired and the majority on the City Council believe it's time for a change. Next, please.

At the heart of the reappointments dispute is a debate about whether the TMUA's policies are fueling suburban growth at the expense of the City of Tulsa. And given that fact, it doesn't bolster the case for reappointment to have the mayor of Tulsa's biggest suburb writing to criticize Tulsa's elected officials.

During my appearance this last Tuesday on KFAQ's Michael DelGiorno show, I was asked by Michael to look into the City of Tulsa's recall process. While Mayor Bill LaFortune, Councilor Chris Medlock, and I were all up in New York at the Republican National Convention, there were a number of people calling Michael's show wanting to launch a recall effort against the Mayor.

A recall is not a tool to be used lightly, but it does provide a check against official wrongdoing or neglect of duty when such conduct falls short of criminal conduct. Having supported Bill LaFortune in the 2002 Republican mayoral primary over other worthy candidates, it grieves me to think that he has become so estranged from the city's grassroots that some are unwilling to endure his continuation in office for another 19 months. It appears to many observers that he has not fulfilled the promises of reform and cooperation with the City Council which won him the support of so many Tulsans. In fact, it seems that he has aligned himself with those who want to preserve the status quo at City Hall regardless and set himself in opposition to the Council's Reform Alliance majority.

Article VII is the article of the City Charter dealing with recalls. Here's the timeline of the process, using maximum times for each step:

Ken Neal's weekly rant in Sunday's Whirled takes a new tack in his ongoing campaign against the Tulsa City Council's Reform Alliance. (Nice to see that the term I coined is taking hold -- let's see if the Whirled starts referring to the rest of the Council as the Cockroach Caucus.)

He has now concluded that this majority of meddlesome troublemakers is the result of a structural problem with our form of government -- it makes it too easy for the wrong sort of person to win:

When the average voter turnout per council district is but 2,500 or so, outsiders can shape the election with relatively small amounts of money and that is what happened last spring. Tom Baker, Tulsa's former fire chief and one of the most knowledgeable and reasonable of councilors, barely won with a 24-vote margin.

There was a concerted effort to beat all the sitting councilors because of zoning decisions at 51st and 71st Streets and Harvard Avenue. In both cases, councilors had little choice under the law but to approve the zoning changes.

A slight change in the way Tulsa elects a council would make it much harder for a few well-heeled activists to shape the election.

I could spend all night dissecting the internal contradictions in those three paragraphs. Ken, are they "well-heeled" or are they spending "relatively small amounts of money"? Either way, the point is clear -- the current system makes it possible for well-organized grass-roots campaigns to succeed, and in the Whirled's eyes, that's a bad thing. It means that the Council might be run by "outsiders", strangers to the corridors of power, who will interfere with all the cozy insider deals and relationships that have traditionally characterized Tulsa city government, certainly over the last 20 years.

So Ken's solution is to change the City Charter dramatically, by making five of the Council seats elected at-large, with the remaining four seats elected from much larger districts. Instead of council districts of 44,000 population (already bigger than a state House of Representatives district), five of the councilors would represent all 400,000 residents of the city -- more than half the size of a congressional district -- while the four district councilors would represent 100,000 each, as many people as in one and a half State Senate districts.

Mayor LaFortune opened a new front this morning in the PR offensive against the City Council's Reform Alliance. It took the form of a news story that ran at least once an hour on KRMG. The story was reported like this in the 10 pm newscast:

Some City Hall observers believe continuing opposition to Vision 2025 is the real reason behind feuding on the Tulsa Council. If that's true Mayor LaFortune has a warning for those who may have that agenda: "From their perspective, they should be careful in terms of any kind of roadblocks to 2025 implementation, because within the city of Tulsa two of the propositions passed by 65%, and that is a mandate and a supermajority, and the other two propositions passed by 62%." Recent disputes are pitting one faction against another and against the Mayor on issues from appointments to annexation.

This is toned down considerably from the first version I heard during KRMG's noon newscast. (Sorry, KFAQ, but I can't stand Bill O'Reilly.) The original version used the term "Gang of Five" -- the Tulsa Whirled's term for the Reform Alliance -- and quoted these unnamed observers as saying that four of these five councilors opposed all or part of Vision 2025 at one time or another.

It seemed very odd to me that KRMG would go to the Mayor for a soundbite reaction to a concern raised by anonymous City Hall observers. It also seemed odd that he would have a well-rehearsed answer to this off-the-wall question. Clearly the point of the story is to create an association in the minds of those who hear it, to plant the idea in the listener's mind that behind every debate, behind every difference of opinion at City Hall -- behind the airport investigation and the disputes over northward annexation, extending water lines, reappointments to trust boards, and allocation of Federal block grant funds -- lurks a secret scheme to sabotage Vision 2025.

I learned later that the Mayor had been at some Chamber-related event and took questions. Someone (don't know who, as I write this) made some comments akin to those reported in the story, and the Mayor had a ready response. It has all the hallmarks of a planted question and manufactured news, and I expect there will be a story in tomorrow's Whirled, followed by an another hysterical editorial in Wednesday's Whirled.

I suspect that the PR flacks running this coordinated assault have finally figured out that Tulsans admire councilors who do their job and ask tough questions on behalf of their constituents ("meddle," in the Whirled's view). So on to the next attack. Vision 2025 is popular, they must be thinking, so let's create the impression that these councilors are out to derail Tulsa's express train to prosperity. I suspect they are using focus groups and polls to see which accusations will do the most damage to the Reform Alliance.

The assertion which is the foundation of this story -- that four of the five Reform Alliance councilors opposed all or part of Vision 2025 at one time or another -- is so broad as to be meaningless, as it would include anyone who publicly expressed, for example, a moment's doubt about the wisdom of the $350 million subsidy proposed for Boeing or the value of building new swimming pools when we can't open the pools we already have.

Of the Reform Alliance, only Sam Roop was the only one publicly and uncritically supportive of the entire package. Chris Medlock supported propositions 2, 3, and 4. Medlock opposed the Boeing proposition -- which didn't come to fruition anyway -- and expressed concern only about matters of oversight and the handling of money with both City and County involved. He is also concerned that, as key decisions are made about City of Tulsa Vision projects, that the elected representatives of the people, not the unelected advisory committees, have the final say.

Jack Henderson started out in opposition, but ultimately supported the entire package. I don't know where Roscoe Turner and Jim Mautino stood -- they weren't elected officials when the package was before the voters, and they weren't involved publicly in the debate. By the time the election came along, the debate and election was in the past. I do know that they are very concerned about infrastructure problems in their underserved districts, and I suspect that they would place basic infrastructure well ahead of lifestyle amenities on the city priority list. Whatever concerns these councilors may have about the projects and their implementation, everything points to a desire on their part to make these projects successful at accomplishing their purpose of reviving Tulsa's economic prospects.

The notion that someone who opposed part or even all of Vision 2025 would work to frustrate its completion is nonsense, unless you buy into the paranoid notion that those who opposed Vision 2025 hate our city and want to see it die. (For those who do buy into that, you might want to make yourself a tinfoil hat for protection against mind-control rays.)

As a spokesman for the opposition to Vision 2025, I think I am qualified to speak on this matter. We didn't oppose Vision 2025 because we opposed the individual projects per se -- if we could have had them without raising taxes and without raising government operating expenses, our objections would disappear. We opposed Vision 2025 because we believed (and still believe) that raising sales taxes is not the right way to grow the economy; because we believed that the projects would not solve our short term jobs problem nor lay a foundation for future prosperity; because we believed that public improvements should be funded within existing revenue streams, as existing sales taxes and bond issues expired; because we were concerned that a new arena would be a drain on the public treasury, not a boon; because we oppose favoring certain companies with hundreds of millions of dollars while neglecting the needs of homegrown small businesses; because we think it unwise to put entertainment and leisure facilities ahead of basic infrastructure and public safety.

Now that the tax has passed and all but the Boeing part has gone into effect, those of us who opposed Vision 2025 are committed to making sure that the projects are built as promised, that there is adequate oversight on how the money is spent and managed, that Vision 2025 contracts aren't distributed based on political favoritism, but based on who can provide the best value to the taxpayer. I don't think the arena will fix downtown, but I made suggestions on places to put it that would create more synergy with developments in Brady Heights and the Blue Dome District, and I am pleased that a world-class architect was chosen to design the facility.

In the same spirit, the Council's Reform Alliance is simply concerned that what Tulsa city government does is done right, for the benefit of all Tulsans, not just a favored few. Why would the Mayor, the Cockroach Caucus, or the Tulsa Whirled have a problem with that?

In the full-court press to secure the reappointment of Jim Cameron and Lou Reynolds to the Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority, the Whirled and others have repeatedly praised the two for their role in settling the lawsuit with poultry companies over poultry waste pollution in the watershed of Lakes Spavinaw and Eucha, major sources for Tulsa drinking water. Their leadership, we are told, is why the City must have them continue their service on the TMUA board, and why it was irresponsible for the City Council to reject their reappointment.

Just how good was the settlement they achieved for the City of Tulsa? Here's the front page from the July 17, 2003 Tulsa Whirled (jump page here):

The city of Tulsa and its utility authority will receive $7.5 million from six poultry companies the city sued over pollution in creeks and streams that feed two city water-supply reservoirs, Lake Spavinaw and Lake Eucha. The money will be used to pay the city�s attorney fees and litigation expenses, with none left to reimburse the city for the $4 million it has spent treating taste and odor problems in its water supply.

Of the $7.5 million, $200,000 will go to the city for out-of-pocket expenses, and the remaining $7.3 million will go to Oklahoma City law firm McKinney & Stringer. The firm is receiving $600,000 for out-of-pocket costs and the rest in cash and deferred payments, said Jim Cameron, Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority chairman.

Some deal. $7.3 million in attorney's fees but no reimbursement for the the cost of dealing with the damage the City of Tulsa suffered. The spinners argue that we got the poultry integrators to agree to clean up the watershed -- or rather, not to make it worse -- but it remains to be seen whether that will come to pass. The money Tulsa spent to make its once-pristine water palatable again is a tangible loss that was not addressed by the settlement. As long as the lawyers are happy, right?

400,000 people live in Tulsa, and there is no compelling reason why these two gentlemen should be selected over the remaining 399,998 to serve on this board.

Will he or won't he? Will City Councilor Sam Roop continue to stand firm with the bipartisan majority alliance which is working to open and clean up Tulsa city government? Or will his knees buckle under the pressure of a coordinated PR effort to get him to abandon the reform process which has been his goal throughout his long tenure on the Council?

The Whirled has run an article or an editorial nearly every day over the last two weeks trashing the City Council's majority, principally over their refusal to approve Mayor LaFortune's reappointment of Lou Reynolds and Jim Cameron to the Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority (TMUA) board. Sam Roop figures prominently in every article, including being the one councilor whose name appears in a David Simpson cartoon portraying the Council majority as running a torture chamber. Early this last week, KRMG talk show host John E. L. Frette (who uses the stage name "John Erling") phoned staffers at the City Council office to inquire about the process for recalling a councilor, and then launched an on-air campaign focusing on turning Councilor Sam Roop out of office.

Last Sunday Tulsa Whirled editorialist Ken Neal called the Council majority a "wrecking crew" and urged Mayor Bill LaFortune to use his "bully pulpit" to pressure the Council into approving the reappointment of Reynolds and Cameron. Lo and behold, Mayor LaFortune spoke to the Tulsa Rotary Club this week and made a special point to praise Reynolds and Cameron and urge their reappointment. Either the Mayor is doing Ken Neal's bidding, or they are both part of a coordinated offensive to break the Council majority and get Cameron and Reynolds reappointed.

(Anyone else find it ironic that the Whirled would call anyone else a wrecking crew when the Whirled is in the process of wrecking two more downtown buildings?)

And now today, Janet Pearson of the Whirled's editorial board, in a display of Olympic-class synchronized smearing with Mr. Frette, threatens that there is a groundswell of support to remove the majority councilors by recall, in an opinion piece with the subhead, "Is there a people's revolt in the making?" She repeats in a single paragraph the same old slams. Once again, at the end of the piece, the focus is on Sam Roop:

There's some reason for hope in the short term. Some observers think Roop, who showed he has genuine leadership and statesmanlike abilities in previous years, might come to his senses and distance himself from the fractious faction. There have been recent signs he is willing to rejoin the progressive and rational side.

Janet's playing "good cop" to Ken Neal's "bad cop", evidently.

What you are seeing is a full-out PR offensive to trash the Council, to cast doubt on their investigation of the Tulsa Airport Authority, and to pressure Sam Roop into joining the Cockroach Caucus. The offensive appears to be coordinated by Schnake Turnbo Frank, the politically-connected PR firm that ran the Vision 2025 campaign. Earlier this week, a businessman told me that his firm pays what he described as exorbitant monthly consulting fees to Schnake Turnbo, because of the firm's connections with the Tulsa Whirled -- it's a way to ensure that favorable stories are published about the company and that unfavorable stories would be suppressed. We can certainly understand why you'd want to have a firm like that beating the drum for you.

Steve Turnbo, the firm's CEO, headed up the PR effort to get public funds for for Great Plains Airlines, also serving as the airline's spokesman. He was seen recently at the City Council offices with Great Plains CEO David Johnson, looking to speak with any City Councilors they could find.

Margaret Frette (alias "Margaret Erling") is the wife of the radio talk show host mentioned above, who uses his stage name in her career as a lobbyist, is a lobbyist for Great Plains Airlines at the State Capitol. She had a key role in persuading legislators to subsidize the startup airline. The investment made by Great Plains in hiring her appears to continue to pay dividends, as her husband is using his microphone to put the pressure on Councilor Sam Roop, who happens to be heading the Council investigation into the Tulsa Airport Authority and their dealings with Great Plains Airlines.

(Another interesting connection: She was with Schnake Turnbo before going out on her own. And here is her most recent lobbyist registration form, filed on June 24, 2004, and links to all the forms she has filed since the beginning of 2003.)

So why the focus on Sam Roop? Not only is Roop the key councilor on the airport investigation, but he is seen as the likeliest to break with the rest of the bipartisan Council majority. Roop is by temperament conciliatory. He does not like what he calls power politics. Just before this spring's city elections, he refused to press the issue of the zoning protest petition process because the timing would make some of his colleagues, who opposed this basic protection for property owners, vulnerable to defeat in the elections.

Following the Council's July 29 vote to deny reappointment to Cameron and Reynolds, Roop was approached by Council Chairman Randy Sullivan to persuade him to move to reconsider the reappointments at a special meeting on Thursday, August 5, at 4 p.m. Roop attempted to put the item on the agenda, but due to a posting error, the item could not be considered because there was not sufficient public notice. Roop actually made the motion to reconsider, which was seconded by Sullivan, who was chairing the meeting -- an unusual departure from tradition. Councilor Roscoe Turner called attention to the posting error, and Council Attorney Drew Reis noted that this was the same situation as the motion to reconsider approval of the Owasso water line, when City Attorney Martha Rupp Carter ruled that acting without proper notice put the Council in danger of violating the open meeting act.

(Mayor LaFortune showed up at this same meeting to denounce the Council for their refusal to approve his reappointment of Cameron and Reynolds. Sadly, the performance was not captured by the TGOV camera -- it was already in the Council room for the 6 p.m. regular meeting.)

I've followed Sam Roop's career closely, and I've seen him withstand an amazing amount of pressure from the Whirled, from Mayor Savage, and the rest of the city establishment. He has suffered in years past from the lack of a majority of councilors to support his efforts to scrutinize and reform city government. Now that he has the support of four other reform-minded councilors, I am hopeful that he will remain a pillar of this bipartisan coalition, rather than seek refuge in the empty promises of the enemies of reform. Time will tell.

"Who would have thought that some little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?"

The Tulsa Whirled editorial board is madder than the Wicked Witch of the East when Dorothy doused her with water. Read over the witch's speech -- that's a pretty good fit with what the Whirledlings, the Chamber Pots, and the whole Cockroach Caucus must be thinking right now. They just don't have total control of City Hall any more, and does it ever frustrate them.

You need to keep in mind that in the months to come the Cockroach Caucus will do anything and say anything to restore things the way they were before the voters of Tulsa voted to take their city back and elect leaders who would look out for all Tulsans, not just the favored few. They may stop short of outright lies, but remember that media bias expresses itself most forcefully in the selection of what will be reported, and in the careful selection of descriptive words to insinuate meanings that can't be supported by the plain facts.

The Whirled whined today about the Council's allocation of this year's Community Development Block Grant funds. The Whirled's main problem seems to be the fact that there was a debate over how to allocate the funds and this debate was held in full view of the public.

It's funny that the Whirled takes the opportunity to condemn the Council's majority (they call them the "Gang of Five") when the final allocation passed by a 7-2 vote. The only two holdouts were the Whirled's most favorite Councilors. They passed up the opportunity to condemn Councliors Christiansen and Sullivan, who also participated in the reallocation of funds from the original recommendation.

CDBG is a chunk of money from the Federal Government to be used to help people who live in low-income areas of cities. As a "block grant", it's left up to the city government to decide, within Federal regulations, how the money is to be spent. Some of the money goes for projects which will be run by non-profits, other money is spent by the City itself, for example through the Tulsa Development Authority for "urban renewal" projects.

Under Mayor Susan Savage, the allocation process was simple: The Mayor decided how all the money would be split up and submitted her recommendation to the Council. For the Council to deviate from the Mayor's allocation, it would mean taking money from an organization already expecting to receive it, therefore making the Council the bad guys. To get CDBG money, it helped if your organization's director traveled in the Mayor's social circles. It helped even more if your organization was NOT faith-based in any way.

With the change in administrations in 2002, the Council adopted a new process that has worked to ensure that the same sorts of organizations continued to get the money. A committee run by the Whirled's favorite Councilors -- Susan Neal and Tom Baker -- and staffed by the aide they share, and including "subject matter experts" selected by Neal and Baker, made the initial recommendation for allocations. The Mayor's Office had a hand in this initial recommendation as well. The recommendation then went through the normal Council committee process, and like any other motion, was open for amendment when it came up for consideration by the full Council.

Councilor Medlock had this to say about the process on the TulsaNow forums:

The ultimate problem is, there are far too many worthy programs and projects chasing too few dollars. Many of our more successful social service programs have become reliant on CDBG for most, if not all, of their operating expenses.

As such, it becomes very difficult for new programs to get funding, as well as one time projects like what the Arts & Humanities Council and Neighbor for Neighbor are proposing.

The difficult choice we are left with is, defund ongoing programs to fully fund one time projects, or offer a small percentage of what is needed and hope that each group can leverage the public infusion of funds with enough private and foundation money to be successful.

Never a fun time of year.

One observer says that Baker and Neal, who represent affluent areas, approach the process as if the social service agencies are the target beneficiaries for these funds. In other words, they tend to see the agencies as ends in themselves, and in terms of the people who run them and work for them, rather than means to an end. Councilors like Henderson, Medlock, and Turner, who represent most of the poorer neighborhoods, regard the poor and needy as the people who should be served by this money, and aren't necessarily concerned about the impact on an agency, which is just a means to an end.

UPDATE 8/9/2004: After viewing the complete segment of the hearing on TGOV 24, I've added some detail and reorganized this entry somewhat. The conversation between the Council committee and Stephen Schuller was so bland, so calm, and so brief that it makes the Whirled's hysterical editorial look even more ridiculous. Just as C-SPAN began to destroy the mainstream media's monopoly on coverage of Congress, TGOV (channel 24 on Cox Cable) gives Tulsa citizens the chance to see for themselves how the Council is conducting itself and to compare reality to the Whirled's spin and bias.

UPDATE 8/16/2004: Received an e-mail from J. Scott Dickman, who is mentioned below, with a correction about his employment.

Your comments dated August 9, 2004 stated that I am the Chief Financial Officer of Avalon Oil plc ("Avalon Oil"). Please be advised that I resigned as an officer and member of the board of directors of Avalon Oil effective June 30, 2001. I remain Of Counsel with the firm of Titus, Hillis & Reynolds as well as Chairman and C.E.O. of Pinnacle Packaging Company, Inc. here in Oklahoma and Oracle Packaging Company in North Carolina, Georgia, Illinois & Ohio.

I have made appropriate changes below.

"Appointee grilled by city councilors" was the headline over the Whirled's Wednesday story about Tuesday's Council Committee meeting, in which attorney Stephen A. Schuller was presented to the Council for reappointment to the Tulsa Authority for the Recovery of Energy, which handles trash collection in the northwestern part of the City and oversees operation of the controversial trash-to-energy incinerator on West 21St Street. He was first appointed in November 2002 by Mayor LaFortune. Schuller is a zoning and real estate attorney who appears regularly before city boards representing clients seeking zoning relief or amendment.

From what I saw of the committee meeting, the Councilors asked a few questions about Schuller's background. Here's the way it was recorded in the meeting notes on the Council's website. (No way to link directly, but search agendas for "Schuller" and you'll find it.)

CM [Chris Medlock] asked about Schuller's specilization as an attorney. Real estate and international law was the answer. He was also asked about the scope of the TARE. Supervises in the trash collection of the NW quadrant of the City. Contract for renewal for energy expires soon. He gave a brief operational history. Positive comments were made as well as a remark on his attendance. Bankruptcy issue in the past has been resolved.

The positive comments came from Councilor Randy Sullivan, who spoke of his personal knowledge of Schuller. Christiansen made the comment about his attendance record, missing only one meeting since his appointment. "Bankruptcy issue" refers to the bankruptcy of the company operating the trash-to-energy plant.

The Whirled's story adds that Schuller was asked about "a specific client of the law firm for which he works." I'm not sure why the Whirled story omitted this detail, but the question was from Councilor Roscoe Turner, and it was whether Schuller's law firm still represented the Tulsa Whirled. (See below.) Schuller replied that the attorney who represented the Whirled left the firm about the time Schuller joined the firm in 1998.

The Council didn't reject Stephen Schuller's reappointment, the first presented to the Council under their new rule for appointments. They've just asked some questions. No one's voice was raised. No accusations were made. Medlock said that the Council may want to have Schuller reply to written questions, in accord with the Council's new approach to vetting appointments to and authorities. Schuller replied that that he'd be happy to answer further questions. The agenda item was complete in about 10 minutes. No one was upset or distressed.

The facts don't provide any justification for the use of the word "grilled" in the headline, nor does the text of the Whirled's own story, but that doesn't stop the editorial board from fulminating about a "witch hunt" in the following day's lead editorial:

The latest outrage was on Tuesday, when two members of the Gang of Five needlessly and shamelessly grilled an authority member about his work and background for no good reason. The latest witch hunt comes on the heels of the council�s 5-4 rejection of two long-time authority members who were treated in a similarly contemptible fashion....

If there were some reason to suspect Schuller is unfit to serve on the TARE board, that would be one thing. But there is not. In fact he, like the two others receiving shabby treatment in recent days, has served respectably and honorably.

So from the Whirled's perspective, asking polite questions about an appointee to a board -- an important city board which regulates trash rates and will soon be deciding whether to renew a contract with the operator of the trash-to-energy incinerator -- is needless, shameless, and contemptible. As we know, the Whirled's standard for the ideal city councilor is a lobotomized monkey, wired up to be controlled from the Whirled's offices.

The Whirled also treats an appointment to a board as a right -- from their perspective, the burden of proof should be on those who wish to take it away. Instead, the burden of proof ought to be on the Mayor to make the case for any appointment he presents to the Council. The Council should diligently inquire about a nominee's business interests and look for any potential conflict of interest regarding the nominee's interests or those of his partners and associates. In fact, the Council, on July 29th, amended their rules to lengthen the time between when the Mayor presents a nominee and when the nominee may be considered by the full Council, so that there is time to vet a nominee properly.

The Whirled maintains that Schuller, Reynolds, and Coleman have served respectably and honorably. Perhaps they have, but do they expect the City Council and the people of Tulsa whom they represent to accept that assertion as fact?

The Whirled's hissy fit about this is suspicious. At the very least, this is part of a campaign to discredit and defeat the members of the Council's working majority in 2006, and also to discredit any results from the Council's investigation of the Tulsa Airport Authority.

SO who is Stephen Schuller?

Mr. Schuller has some interesting connections: Mr. Schuller is with the law firm of Boone, Smith, Davis, Hurst & Dickman. The late Byron V. Boone, whose father founded the firm, was a partner in the firm and was also for 30 years the publisher of the Tulsa Whirled. The "Dickman" in the firm name is J. Jerry Dickman, who is the father of J. Scott Dickman, who is of counsel with Barkley Titus Hillis and Reynolds, the current law firm which represents the Tulsa Whirled. J. Scott Dickman was (prior to June 30, 2001) also Chief Financial Officer of Avalon Oil Plc, of which Council Chairman Randy Sullivan is CEO. It's a small world.

Schuller is a former law partner of Brent Mills and together they incorporated Spartan Aviation Industries, which now owns Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology (formerly Spartan School of Aeronautics). Mills is Spartan's chief operating officer, is registered agent for Spartan Housing Industries, LLC, and was a classmate of Councilor Susan Neal in Leadership Oklahoma Class XV.

Schuller represented the Guier Woods neighborhood in F&M's 2001 attempt to get zoning approval for a branch at 71st & Harvard. He was a planning district co-chairman back in the early '90s and represented some of his own neighbors to stop Southwestern Bell from installing a cell tower in the bell tower of Southside Christian Church.

The TARE board is very important. Decisions by previous boards have resulted in big trash rate increases in recent years, and the upcoming decisions on the trash-to-energy plant will have an impact on Tulsa's fiscal health and environmental quality for decades to come. The Council should continue to do what we elected them to do back in March -- ensure that the people running our city agencies are doing so with the best interests of the citizens at heart. There's no harm in asking and answering some polite questions.

Long before Fox News, before Rush Limbaugh did talk radio, before the emergence of the blogosphere, even before CNN, there was C-SPAN, which gave America the opportunity to see for themselves how Congress works, unmediated by newspapers and TV networks, and unmodified by unanimous consent requests to "revise and extend" remarks in the Congressional Record. C-SPAN marked its 25th anniversary this year. Without even trying, C-SPAN deserves a lot of credit for the end of Democrat rule in the House of Representatives in the 1994 election.

For many years, Tulsa's weekly City Council meetings were broadcast using C-SPAN's channel, preempting the network's programming for as long as the meeting lasts. Now the City has a dedicated channel on Cox Cable Tulsa, TGOV channel 24, which broadcasts the regular City Council meeting, City Council Tuesday committee meetings, and meetings of the City of Tulsa Board Of Adjustment and the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission. The channel also features some specially produced programs, like "This Week at City Hall" and "Talk of the Town". Last week's schedule is online here. I suspect they will follow this general pattern, although adjustments may occur as meetings in a given week are longer or shorter. Up-to-date listings should be on the TV Guide Channel (channel 2 on Cox Cable); TV Guide Channel's listings are also online -- free registration.

This is a wonderful development, as it gives us a chance to see for ourselves what goes on at these meetings and how our public officials are conducting themselves. Bright light tends to send the cockroaches scurrying away, and we've noticed that a camera in the room has an interesting effect. And I imagine this meeting might have been different had the cameras been running.

Speaking of bugs, there are still a few to be worked out. Remember the Saturday Night Live parody of C-SPAN's coverage of a 1992 Democratic Presidential debate? The intro included the line, "Our C-SPAN camera -- the only one we have -- is there." It seems that TGOV only has one camera at its disposal, which it must use at the Council Committee room for those meetings and over at the Francis Campbell Council chambers, where the regular meetings of the Council, BoA, and TMAPC are held. Remember this -- it will be important in a later item.

Between celebrating my son's birthday and playing hosts to some friends passing through town, I've gotten behind on filling you in on all that's been happening down at City Hall. It's been an eventful week or two, and if you only get your local news from the Tulsa Whirled, you don't know the entire story. (Why should that surprise anyone?)

In the next few entries, I'll cover the Council's "grilling" of Stephen Schuller, the awarding of Community Development Block Grants, the attempt to get the Council to reconsider their rejection of Lou Reynolds and Jim Cameron, and the issue of the arena location and eminent domain. If I have any energy left, I'll tackle Ken Neal's hysterical opinion piece in today's Whirled.

Tulsa is a city where the conventional wisdom says the only way to accomplish anything is to agree with everything. Many public figures who opposed the Vision 2025 tax increase kept their opposition to themselves for fear that their opposition would jeopardize the projects and causes they supported. I'm amazed at the number of times a public official has told me he felt unable to vote according to dictates of his conscience.

So it was heartening to see the City Council decline to reappoint two members of the Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority (TMUA). I have nothing against Jim Cameron and Lou Reynolds, but the recent discussions over annexation and extension of water lines to Tulsa's booming suburbs have revealed a difference of basic philosophy between the Council majority and the TMUA board members. The Council majority believes that the City of Tulsa's water authority ought to be first and foremost concerned with promoting the City of Tulsa's growth and prosperity. The TMUA seems bent on promoting growth outside Tulsa's city limits.

Article V of the City Charter describes a Tulsa Utility Board, a board of six members plus the mayor ex-officio. This board has a great deal of power -- if the board passes a rate increase, the Council is bound by charter to approve it.

The Tulsa Utility Board may exercise full, complete and exclusive rights, powers, and duties in performing each and all and every of the things to be done and performed in the construction, extension, improvement, operation, management, and maintenance of the waterworks system and system of sanitary sewers and sewage disposal plants of the city. It shall be the mandatory duty of the Tulsa Utility Board to fix and establish rates and prices for services rendered and commodities sold sufficient to meet the mandatory provisions elsewhere provided in this Article and it shall be the mandatory duty of the Council to approve all such rates and prices herein authorized to be fixed and established by the Tulsa Utility Board. The Tulsa Utility Board may enter into such contracts necessary for the performance of its duties and may appoint, employ, and contract for the services of superintendents, attorneys, managers, hydraulic, civil and management engineers, and such employees necessary for the performance of its duties, all subject to the approval of the Mayor.

In 1984, the City of Tulsa signed a 50-year-lease with the Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority to operate and maintain the city's water system. The TMUA was created as a public trust with the City of Tulsa as the beneficiary. You can read all the details, including the lease agreements and amendments, here, in Title 39, Chapter 3 of Tulsa Revised Ordinances. I haven't gotten all the way through it yet. I have the impression that the membership of the Tulsa Utility Board and the TMUA are identical, although I don't know that for sure. But it appears that they always meet together.

Given the power wielded by this board, when unelected board members are at odds with the City's elected representatives, it makes sense for the elected officials to use the power at their disposal to effect change, since the elected officials are directly accountable to the voters. In this case, the City Council used its power not to ratify the Mayor's reappointment.

The Cockroach Caucus was scandalized by this development, according to articles in Friday's (jump page here) and Saturday's (jump page here) Whirled. The common thread of their comments seemed to be that mayoral appointees deserve reappointment by default. There were complaints, too, that the rejection came without any indication that the reappointments might be in jeopardy, although as I watched a rerun of the committee meeting (on Tulsa Cable channel 24) earlier in the week, I noticed that councilors were asking some detailed and pointed questions about the operation of the TMUA. It was funny to read Tom Baker's complaint that the five voted "no" without hesitation or discussion, given that his vote and the votes of others in the 71st and Harvard case came without a coherent explanation of their decision.

By a 5-3 vote last Thursday night the Council established an investigation of airport operations. Henderson, Medlock, Turner, Roop, and Mautino voted in favor; the usual members of the Cockroach Caucus (Baker, Sullivan, Neal) voted against, seemingly on the grounds that it would be effective at uncovering wrongdoing. Bill Christiansen expressed his support of the investigation but abstained -- his business is an airport tenant. If you don't believe elections make a difference, look at that list and realize that the vote would have failed if David Patrick and Art Justis had been reelected instead of Roscoe Turner and Jim Mautino.

The Mayor's response has been interesting. Not long ago he had threatened to veto the investigation unless the Council passed his annexation plan. Now he says he's fully committed to the investigation and has his own fraud investigator looking into it, and he wants to see coordination and cooperation between the Council's investigation and his own. A cynic might wonder about the commitment of someone who was willing to treat an investigation into fraud, waste, and abuse as a bargaining chip. An even more cynical cynic might wonder if the purpose of hiring an investigator and asking for cooperation was to be able to learn where the investigation was headed and to tip someone off before the investigation gets too close.

In any case, the Council's investigation will move forward. The question now is who will make up the committee. I would hope for a lineup of Roop, Medlock, and Turner. Medlock in particular has the kind of analytical mind and an eye for spotting patterns and connections that the investigation will need. He will not shy away from asking tough questions and cross-examinination, as we saw in the F&M Bank hearing. I don't know how much confidence I'd have in an investigation that didn't include him.

There have been some calls to exclude Roop and Turner from the committee since they voted for the city's support of the Great Plains deal. I don't see that as a problem, and I'd be concerned that they would be replaced by other councilors who won't be as determined to get to the bottom of things. Roop and Turner believed at the time that Great Plains would be a good thing for Tulsa; they realize now something went terribly wrong and so they support the investigation, which will not, in any event, be limited to the Great Plains deal. In no event should a councilor who voted against the investigation be made a member of the panel -- I would be concerned that said councilor would obstruct rather than aid the investigation. And keep in mind that the Council will only be investigating -- any leads on criminal activity would be forwarded to the appropriate prosecutor.

Oddly pleasant, as I walked through the Tulsa International Airport late Friday night, to be able to put two quarters into a paper box and pull out a copy of the latest Tulsa Beacon, with the headline, "Feds will help with local airport probe." This story and the other above-the-fold story ("Councilor thwarts annexation") tell the tale of a City Council majority that is working to protect the city's investments, despite the sniping of the Whirled and other establishment voices.

The Council will likely move ahead with its own probe of the airport, with assurances from the U. S. Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General (OIG) that the Council's investigation will not be a hindrance, but will be welcome. The City has interests in the operation of Tulsa's airports that aren't matters of federal concern, and the OIG appears to be eager to pass along information about matters that fit this description. (Jim Myers of the Whirled's Washington bureau wrote about this last Wednesday -- jump page here.)

The Beacon's story has a very concise and comprehensible explanation of the land transaction that the OIG is interested in:

The City of Tulsa transferred 344 acres of land adjacent to the airport to the TIA so that TIA could use the land as collateral for the loan to Great Plains. On December 21, 2000, the Bank of Oklahoma and TIA entered into a loan agreement to issue two revenue notes of $15 million each. TIA then provided a loan totaling $30 million to Great Plains.

Also on December 21, 2000, the Bank, TIA, and Tulsa Airports Improvement Trust [TAIT] signed a separate �support agreement� in which the airport agreed that if Great Plains defaulted on its loan, the airport would purchase the property for an amount equal to the outstanding debt owed by Great Plains plus any other unpaid amounts due under the loan agreement (i.e., interest and collection costs, attorney fees).

In 2001, Great Plains paid back one of the $15 million revenue notes using state-issued tax credits. Since the agreements were signed, the bank has disbursed $8.25 million to Great Plains from the second $15 million note. The remaining $6.75 million was held in an escrow account to protect the Bank�s interest in the loan. Under the terms of the note, Great Plains was required to make monthly payments until December 21, 2003, at which time it was to have paid the outstanding loan amount in full.

On the annexation issue, there was and still is potential for a compromise that will protect the City's investments without trampling on the property owners who don't want to be annexed and without committing the city to expensive infrastructure improvements. Unfortunately, rather than working toward that compromise, Council Chairman Randy Sullivan went back on his word and put the item on the agenda when one of the councilors opposing annexation was scheduled to be out of town. Although Sullivan's proposal would not have annexed all of the north annexation area, it would have created a wide enough fenceline to allow forced annexation after November 1 (the deadline created by new state law), and it would have committed the City to building infrastructure in the area even before it is annexed. (For whatever reason, the proposed ordinance is not accessible online.)

There is an area we should consider annexing or leaving Tulsa the option of annexing forcibly at a later date, and that's the Cherokee Industrial Park, which represents a significant investment by the City in infrastructure. We also ought to consider annexing (with landowners' permission) a strip along US 75 where commercial development would be encouraged. That's the kind of development we need to boost city sales tax receipts. Housing and industrial development will only help the city to the extent that it indirectly encourages retail development. These facilities don't generate sales tax -- industrial facilities may generate some use tax receipts -- but they do generate property tax, which would mostly go to help the schools in Owasso and encourage more people to live and shop in Owasso.

We missed the chance to annex a commercial area at the principal highway entrance to Tulsa -- I-44 east of the Turner Turnpike gate. Owners would have preferred to be taken into Tulsa if they had to be annexed, but instead Sapulpa lassoed the area with its fenceline and recently annexed it, prompting a group of property owners to sue Sapulpa.

Berryhill residents reportedly would prefer to be in the City of Tulsa rather than in Sand Springs -- we should take advantage of that willingness while we can.

The Whirled's editorial board -- the propaganda arm of the Cockroach Caucus -- pooh-poohed the efforts of the City Council to formalize the powers granted to it by the City Charter to conduct investigations into the operations of city government. The investigatory power is one of the three critical roles the Council plays in our system of government -- representing the diversity of the city, making the laws of the city, and overseeing the execution of those laws. The Whirled labeled the members of the Cockroach Caucus "the grownups on the council" for resisting progress. The real grownups are the majority bipartisan coalition which continues to work toward the maturation of the City Council as an institution, the full realization of the City Council's role in the checks and balances of city government, something that was promised to the citizens of Tulsa when we approved the new Charter in 1989.

If the Council is going to exercise its responsibility to investigate, it must be able to enforce lawful orders, such as subpoenas. "Subpoena" comes from two Latin words which mean "under penalty." In the absence of a penalty for failure to comply, a subpoena is not a subpoena.

The Whirled incorrectly states that the Council would become judge and jury in cases of contempt or disruptive behavior. That indicates the Whirledlings haven't bothered to read the ordinances. (They actually get paid for their opinions. I don't get paid a penny for this, and I still take the time to read something before I comment on it. It's not that hard, but it does mean they'd have less time for sipping whiskey and swapping stories down at the Press Club.)

For you Whirledlings reading this, I will make it easy for you.

Here is a link to the text of the proposed ordinance to define contempt of Council and set penalties for said offense: CLICK HERE, KEN!

Here is a link to the text of the proposed ordinance to define disorderly behavior in Council meetings and set penalties for said offense: CLICK HERE, JULIE!

Notice that a charge of contempt of Council is simply referred to the City Attorney, who must decide whether to press charges. If filed, the charge would be heard in municipal court. The Council merely makes the charge, the roles of judge and jury are filled, appropriately, by a judge and a jury, not by the Council.

Article II, Section 4 of the City Charter empowers the Council to issue fines for disruptive behavior. (CLICK HERE, JANET!) The proposed ordinance defines the kind of behavior that qualifies as disruptive. The terms and conditions specified in the ordinance line up exactly with the terms of the Charter.

This is a typically lazy slap from the Whirled editorial board. They're uncomfortable with the idea of a Council committed to making government work for all the people, not just a favored few. We know what kind of councilors the Whirled likes, and we're glad their choices aren't in the majority any longer.

We are hopeful that the days of Tulsa as a banana republic -- a land of Marcos-style crony capitalism -- are numbered, thanks to diligent public servants like Councilors Henderson, Medlock, Turner, Roop, and Mautino.

The Tulsa Beacon has an extensive article detailing more problems with the management at Tulsa Airport, reported by the supervisor of landscape maintenance. There's a recurring theme: Governmental authority puts out a request for bids with estimated value so low and requirements so stringent that most potential bidders are deterred. One favored bidder applies -- perhaps the sole bidder, or else the other bids are disqualified on one technicality or another, or else the favored bidder bids less than he needs to do the job -- and is awarded the contract. Then the winning bidder isn't required to meet the terms of the contract, or is granted "change orders" to raise the ultimate value of the contract well above the original bid. That's the accusation anyway, and you hear stories like this about many public authorities in the area.

I love this quote from the whistleblower:

�The foxes are watching the hen house at the Tulsa International Airport,� Johnson said. �The Mayor believes if he supplies training that these foxes will become vegetarians and therefore they will stop eating the chickens. I do not care how well or how long you train a fox � he is always going to eat chickens. The foxes at the airport have believed for too long that they own the chickens and can do whatever they want with them.�

Mayor Bill LaFortune acted late Wednesday to place Tulsa Airport Authority director Brent Kitchen on administrative leave with pay, apparently with a view toward removing him entirely. A lot of people, particularly those who were part of the Mayor's performance review team, have been asking him to clean house at the airport for months.

Because the Tulsa Airport Authority is a public trust and not directly a part of city government, it was unclear to me whether Kitchen was an employee of TAA or the City. Since the Mayor acted to suspend Kitchen, it appears that he is a city employee and therefore under civil service protection.

Here's the Mayor on why he acted and why he waited so long (jump page here:

Speaking at press conferences before and after a two-hour executive session of the Tulsa Airport Authority, LaFortune said the federal investigation yielded troubling management issues at the airport.

LaFortune said civil service regulations prevent him from going into detail about what triggered his decision to remove Kitchen. Likewise, he said, he couldn't estimate the timing of a settlement or the process the city would use to name a new airports director.

The mayor, however, said the federal investigation was key in his decision to remove Kitchen, who has been airports director since February 1988 and an airport executive since 1986. ...

As a former prosecutor and judge, LaFortune said, "You have to have all the evidence in your file. There are people who have opinions and people who can act on opinions in a public forum. I have to act on facts.

"You don't just fire people. It can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in litigation costs if I don't act on facts."

Now, this gives us a useful insight into the Mayor's mindset. He seems to be applying a presumption that a city employee deserves to keep his job unless there is some iron-clad proof of malfeasance. That must be why nearly all of Susan Savage's department heads are still in place, more than two years after Susan Savage left office.

A lot of us who supported LaFortune expected him to start fresh with the best new ideas borrowed from successful mayors like Rudy Giuliani, Indianapolis' Steven Goldsmith and Jersey City's Bret Schundler. We also expected him to clean house and and replace the department heads with a team of people who believed in those ideas and would work wholeheartedly to carry them out.

The City Charter is an obstacle to cleaning house. Article X target="_blank">Article X includes a lot of detail about the civil service system that ought to be in an ordinance, where it would be easier to adjust. The charter enshrines the notion of seniority -- if jobs get cut in a department, first hired is first fired, even if the newest hire has needed skills.

Nevertheless, there is a system for dismissing or reassigning or demoting a civil servant, and hopefully the members of the civil service commission understand that the TAA administration is ultimately responsiblity for the mess there, and that failure of leadership is sufficient cause for removing those in charge.

But the Mayor must take the initiative to remove a department head. No one else can do it for him. Is his reluctance to act swiftly because he's a natural people pleaser, hesitant to make anyone mad at him? Or is he caught between a rock and a hard place, between the political imperative to respond vigorously to the mess that has been uncovered on the one hand and on the other hand, the desires of some of his political backers to maintain the status quo. Who was it who said, long ago: "So-and-so may be a crook, but he's our crook." There may be some powerful people who find it pleasant and profitable to deal with the current TAA administration and these folks would strenuously object to any changes. The Mayor may be looking for a way to say that his hand was forced -- he didn't pull the trigger, the FAA or the US DOT Inspector General or the Civil Service Commission did it.

No surprise that the Whirled would heap praise on departing City Attorney Martha Rupp Carter. It was under her leadership that the City Attorney's office intervened in the 71st & Harvard F&M Bank zoning case, putting forth a far-fetched opinion regarding the deadline for protest petitions that contradicted the plain language of the city ordinance. (The publisher of the Whirled is the chairman of F&M Bancorporation.)

I am informed by a reliable source that the following sentence from Saturday's paper is misleading:

In January, Tulsa County District Attorney Tim Harris ruled that a dispute over legal bills for work on the black officer's discrimination suit did not violate the state's budget laws.

Rereading the Whirled's story from January 10, it appears that Harris is saying only that the city only paid the Atlanta law firm what it had contracted with the firm to pay, and in that regard the law wasn't violated. The problem is that the law firm believed the city owed it for the additional work Rupp Carter had authorized beyond the contracted amount, and the firm sued the city to recover that additional amount. That was the issue raised by some city councilors in 2002 -- by obligating the city for money that had not been authorized, Rupp Carter had violated the Municipal Budget Act. In the end, the City had to pay $625,000 to settle the lawsuit. Perhaps because it is a legal settlement, it technically doesn't count as payment for unauthorized services, but that is effectively what that amount represents.

We understand that the OSBI report spells all this out and makes it clear that Rupp Carter is not blameless in her handling of the matter. We also understand that Rupp Carter's resignation comes within a day or two of renewed efforts to seek the release of that report.

It would be easy for public officials to let the matter go, as Rupp Carter is no longer going to be a city employee. That would be a mistake for a couple of reasons. Pursuing justice in the matter could deter future City Attorneys from treating the public and their elected officials with contempt. And not dealing with the outgoing City Attorney could come back to haunt us. So many Tulsans were relieved to see Susan Savage apparently leave public life, only to be appalled by her resurrection as Secretary of State. It would be a shame if, by failing to drive a stake through the career of Savage's jogging buddy, city officials allow her to "fail up" into a more prominent and influential position, after her legal advice cost the city and its taxpayers so much.

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.