Tulsa City Council funds teen sex survey with federal COVID cash

Four poster images from the Amplify Youth Health Collective were attached, one each in English and Spanish for the survey for 15-17 year olds and for the survey for adults. The English poster for minors reads:

Amplify Youth Health Collective is one of 70 nonprofits who received money from the City of Tulsa's $6.5 million pot. The city website states:

In 2021, the City of Tulsa launched a Request for Proposals (RFP) process to award $6.5 million in grants from COVID-19 relief funding to help local nonprofits address the effects of the pandemic. These ARPA grants focused on at least one of the following purposes:

• Support Tulsans' personal and financial health, development and resilience.
• Enable the secure resumption of economic or community activity.
• Seed the creation, stability and growth of emerging industries and occupations to build a stronger economic base.

Nearly 200 organizations applied for funding. After careful review by the City Council and the Mayor, 70 nonprofit organizations were selected for a reimbursable grant award. The period of service of these projects have generally been one year and have focused on building a more resilient Tulsa.

Three 2021 grant recipients are listed under "Reproductive Health":

• Amplify Youth Health Collective: $112,784
• Planned Parenthood Great Plains: $21,000
• Health Outreach Prevention Education, Inc.: $15,000

The description of the Amplify project in the city's briefing book of ARPA projects:

For many teens, losing access to in-person learning also included losing access to trusted adults and critical sexual health information and clinical resources. To address this need, the program includes funding for a community needs assessment, the creation of sexual health resources in English and Spanish, and technology and technical assistance to enhance and continue virtual sexual health education implementation and relevant training.

Amplify Tulsa is currently recruiting children as young as 14 who are "committed to advancing sexual health" for a "Youth Leadership Council": "Members will also receive leadership trainings, free dinner at meetings and a visa gift card for participating in YLC."

A committee of four councilors, the ARPA Working Group, has developed the allocation of these ARPA funds. From a November 3, 2021, KTUL story:

The ARPA Working Group, comprised of [Mayor GT] Bynum [IV], council chair [and District 1 councilor] Vanessa Hall-Harper, vice-chair [and District 7 councilor] Lori Decter Wright, [District 2] councilor Jeannie Cue, and [District 8] councilor Phil Lakin, Jr., has been meeting weekly for the past five months to review the city's ongoing needs to ensure the funds are being spent wisely.

Bynum IV posted a video on the city's Facebook page on January 22, 2021, soliciting applications for money from the $6.5 million CARES grant. A Request for Proposals (RFP) packet, with frequently asked questions, a January 28, 2021, webinar, and the webinar slidedeck, was posted to the city website. It's disturbing that the Mayor issued the RFP almost a month before the Council had voted to reallocate the money for this purpose, but I suppose you can get away with it if you know all the councilors will rubber-stamp whatever you want.

It was challenging to pin down the exact timeline of grant allocations. Many City Council agendas, backup material for each agenda item, and minutes are missing from the city council website. I was able to find video on the Tulsa City Council Facebook page and some agendas on the website, although you must know the exact date of a meeting to search for an agenda; you cannot call up all agendas within a certain time frame. The lack of OCR on most documents severely limits the usefulness of PDF search tools.

Council discussion in open meetings of the allocation of $6.5 million in federal COVID relief funds adds up to about 30 minutes, none of that time dealing with the pros and cons of specific grant requests. (Because of the search problems mentioned above, this may have been discussed in meetings that I was unable to locate.)

Allocation of the funding appears to have been first addressed in February 2021:

Ordinance amending the fiscal year 2020-2021 budget to make supplemental appropriations of six million, five hundred thousand dollars ($6,500,000.00) from Unassigned Fund Balance within the Pandemic Relief Recovery Fund. [UED 2/10/21; CC 2/10/21; CC 2/24/21] 21-121-1

The discussion of this supplemental appropriation took place at the following three meetings:

February 10, 2021, Urban & Economic Development Committee Meeting, item 24 (video, agenda): This item runs from 1:49:40 to 1:55:15 of the video. Clay Holk, the COVID Relief Fund program manager, stated that February 19, 2021, was the deadline for organizations to respond to the RFP, with the program to start in March. Councilor Lakin identified himself and Councilors Hall-Harper, Cue, and Decter-Wright as members of the working group that had been meeting with Holk for the previous two or three months. The immediate vote was to move the money to a different city budget fund; both Holk and Lakin assured the councilors that they and the mayor would have the final say on the list of recipients.

February 10, 2021, Regular Meeting, item 6.h. (video, agenda): This item took all of 13 seconds (46:50-47:03), one of several "first reading" items forwarded without reading or discussion to the next meeting by unanimous consent.

February 24, 2021, Regular Meeting, item 7.h. (video, agenda: This item took slightly more than two minutes (2:07:00-2:09:23). The time taken consisted of an automated voice reading the entire block of 13 "second reading" items. All items were approved unanimously without discussion.

In May and June, the list of grant recipients was finally available for discussion, and the source of money was once again moved between funds. These two items were combined during the May 19, 2021, Urban and Economic Development Committee meeting (video, agenda):

06. Ordinance amending the fiscal year 2020-2021 budget to make supplemental appropriations of six million, five hundred thousand dollars ($6,500,000.00) from Funds received from the United States Treasury American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), and to unappropriate six million, five hundred thousand dollars ($6,500,000.00) within the Pandemic Relief Recovery Fund. [UED 5/19/21; CC 5/19/21; CC 6/2/21]

15. Presentation by and discussion with the Council Small Budget Committee on the COVID-19 Request for Proposal program recommendations. Other than discussion, no action will be taken. (Hall-Harper, Cue, Decter Wright, Lakin) [UED 5/19/21]

During the discussion (starting at 13:30, ending at 34:50) , Clay Holk and another city staffer stated that it has been decided that the money from the American Rescue Plan Act was a better fit for the projects to be funded through this RFP than the Pandemic Recovery Relief Fund. At 17:20, Councilor Lakin took over, presenting a spreadsheet that the Working Group (Lakin, Cue, Decter Wright, Hall-Harper) put together as part of the selection process. Lakin made a vague reference to "impediments" that are "no longer there because of the source of the funds we're using." It appears that the change moved the source of funds from state to federal.

Lakin shared his screen, displaying a spreadsheet which cannot be read on the Zoom recording. This spreadsheet was not provided to the other councilors prior to the discussion; Lakin said it would be emailed to the councilors later in the day. Five reviewers (staffers, apparently) scored all 138 applications, and then the council working group reviewed each of the 138 applications, recommending approval of 74. Lakin stated that they went beyond the scores provided, reading the applications and backup material, sometimes contacting the applicant organization for further information. Lakin stated that the applications and backup material were available for the other councilors to review. The total of requested funding for the 74 projects selected was $7,281,000. In order to stay within the funds allocated, the working group reduced any grants over $50,000 by 9%, leaving smaller grants intact. He described the process as "significantly delayed."

During discussion, Councilor Arthrell-Knezek asked about the demographics of the groups served by these grants. Holk stated that the application process was made deliberately simple to avoid burdening smaller organizations. Councilor Lakin suggested that councilors would want to set aside "20, 30, 40 hours" to look through the applications.

The reallocation of funds was on the agenda for that night's regular council meeting (after extensive issues with internet connectivity in City Hall); all of those items were passed forward without discussion by unanimous consent (video starting at 40:20, following a lengthy discussion of internet bandwidth problems in City Hall -- One Technology Center -- affecting their Zoom meeting).

At the June 2, 2022, Regular Meeting (video, agenda), Chairman Vanessa Hall-Harper read the budget amendment (item 7.a. on this agenda; item 6 from the previous UED meeting above) along with six other "Second Reading" items, which were approved unanimously without discussion (52:45-55:59). The item approved only involved moving $6,500,000 from one fund to another and did not address approval of specific projects.

I have opened and scanned through PDF agendas for the weekly regular 5 pm council meetings and Urban & Economic Development Committee meetings from June 2021 through April 2022 and have not found any agenda item involving a resolution to approve the list of grants from this process. Because many of the agendas and backup documentation PDFs have not been run through optical character recognition (OCR) they are not searchable for references to ARPA or to specific non-profits. At the November 17, 2021, regular council meeting, the City Council approved a resolution (item 8.b.) allocating ARPA money for capital improvement projects totaling $50,684,250, including money for police and fire equipment, airport control tower, museums, and municipal court. None of the non-profit grants discussed above were included in this resolution. (See RELATED item below for more on this later and larger set of grants.)

Nevertheless, the presence of this project in a briefling book, dated May 20, 2021, and linked on the City's COVID-19 Relief Grant webpage, connected with the funding statement on Amplify Tulsa's Facebook posts about the survey, makes it clear that at some point that Councilors Lakin, Cue, Hall-Harper, and Decter Wright selected and Tulsa City Council and Mayor GT Bynum IV approved a list of non-profit grants that included $112,784 in COVID-19 relief funding for Amplify Youth Health Collective for a teen sexual health survey.

RELATED: An October 27, 2021, Public Works committee hearing discussed a later allocation of federal COVID relief money. The discussion began at 25 minutes. It was interesting to hear that our fire truck fleet and airport control tower are in dire condition, and yet the powers that be thought it was more important to put dams in the river and tear down a pedestrian bridge to build a new one. They could find money for frills like BMX, but not for public safety necessities, until a pandemic brought piles of extra federal money to the city. At 43 minutes, Bynum IV talks about $370,500 for a "Financial Empowerment Center," an amount that he said includes money for citizenship applications for 180 immigrants and credential translation for 500 immigrants. $7.65 million at 46 minutes for "Justice Reform" -- $2 million for helping people make payments, text reminder programs, admin support for public defenders, $2 million better physical environment, $1 million to pay property taxes for low income home owners, title clearing. Many of these items, particularly for public safety and transportation, seem like they ought to have taken precedence over corporate welfare and recreation.