Blast from the past: A truly rude TMAPC commissioner

In February 2004, leaders of neighborhood associations and homeowners' associations showed up by the dozens for a 1:30 p.m. hearing before the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission (TMAPC) on zoning protest petitions. Many of those present had to make special arrangements to be at a City Hall meeting in the middle of the work day. Without warning, TMAPC chairman Joe Westervelt struck the item from the agenda. The assembled activists walked across the plaza to City Hall and headed to the 11th Floor to register a protest with Mayor Bill LaFortune. Two years earlier, in June 2002, after reappointing Westervelt over the protests of neighborhood leaders because of Westervelt's contemptuous treatment of citizens appearing before the TMAPC, LaFortune promised that if Westervelt stepped out of line again, he would personally come to the TMAPC to register a protest. So our visit to the 11th Floor was to get LaFortune to live up to his promise and deal with this out of control TMAPC commissioner. The mayor didn't meet with us, but a couple of his staffers did, including Karen Keith, the woman who is now TMAPC Commissioner Elizabeth Wright's chief accuser. Click here to read my account of that day and of previous examples of Westervelt's rudeness. (I don't remember the exact contents of our meeting with Karen Keith that day, but I feel certain that she did not offer to have the mayor seek to remove Westervelt for cause.) And from January 2005, here's another example of Joe Westervelt's mistreatment of citizens speaking before the TMAPC.