2024 Tulsa City Council election
The only valuable member of the current Tulsa City Council, the only councilor who was more than a rubber stamp, decided at the last minute not to run for re-election. District 5's Grant Miller had planned to run for a second term, but Tulsa's establishment (what I've called the Cockroach Caucus) made it clear that they were determined to ruin his life unless he went away.
Miller had the temerity to think for himself. He wisely opposed the Improve Our Tulsa 3 package, which was rushed to the ballot two years early and included $75 million for some magical, undefined solution for homelessness.
When Miller caught the Mean Girls Clique -- Vanessa Hall Harper, Laura Bellis, Lori Decter Wright -- texting each other during a public meeting of the Council's Urban and Economic Development Committee, in violation of the Oklahoma Open Meetings Act, he exposed their catty messages through an Open Records request. They were privately discussing the agenda item and ridiculing Miller's ideas, rather than using facts and reason to debate Miller's ideas publicly.
The Mean Girls Clique got their revenge with the help of the Meanest Girl of All, Mayor G. T. Bynum IV. Councilor Miller had completed his law degree at the University of Tulsa, had passed his bar exam, and had applied for admission to the Oklahoma bar. Bynum, Hall Harper, Bellis, and Decter Wright communicated "concerns" about Miller to the Oklahoma Board of Bar Examiners, who denied him the right to practice law in Oklahoma. The Bynum Mean Girls Clique, with other accomplices, punished Miller for his politics by preventing him from earning a living in the profession for which he had been expensively educated.
(And that brings us back to this question: Why is conservative Oklahoma allowing a left-leaning, Commie-supporting private club to serve as gatekeeper to the legal profession and the judiciary in Oklahoma?)
On top of all that, just as Tulsans began to read about the clearly political reasons for Miller's exclusion from the bar, a bogus charge of domestic assault and battery, called in two days after the event from someone a thousand miles away from Tulsa, resulted in an arrest and headlines. Miller was quickly cleared, and he intended to continue his campaign for re-election, but his plans were changed by the realities of needing to care for two children, including a young son with autism, while, he told KRMG in May, his wife was hospitalized for alcohol-induced pancreatitis.
This is the System, the Cockroach Caucus, making an example of someone who dared to think critically and independently. No wonder it's hard to find good candidates to run for City Council.
A few months ago, I was at an event where several council candidates spoke. Julie Dunbar, running in District 9, spoke in a way that was touchingly naive about her hopes for serving on the council. This is paraphrasing from memory, but she was looking forward to exchanging and discussing different ideas for improving the city with her council colleagues. Ms. Dunbar is a social worker who specializes in "Relationship Issues, Trauma and PTSD, and Life Coaching," so you'd think she would be able to recognize organizations blighted by narcissism and toxicity. Her husband, Todd Huston, served a term as a city councilor, and the same forces that helped him win election in 2000 recruited an opponent to defeat him in 2002, because he didn't endorse the "It's Tulsa's Time" tax increase on the November 2000 ballot. You'd think Huston might have been able to communicate to his wife that the Tulsa establishment doesn't welcome a diversity of ideas.
A couple of years ago, Tina Nettles, a Tulsa friend who raises chickens in her backyard, discovered that the commission rewriting the animal welfare ordinance was completely uninterested in hearing from citizens who are knowledgeable on the subject.
If you're serving on the City Council or on a board or commission, you might think you're there to propose creative solutions to the problems on the agenda. In 1998, District 4 City Councilor Anna Falling believed she had found a less expensive way to meet the city's recycling goals. While her proposal may have met the requirements of the stated agenda of city leaders, it apparently didn't also meet the real, hidden agenda. And so the Mayor and a compliant news media set out to end her service on the City Council. We could go on to talk about what was done to Jim Mautino, Chris Medlock, and Roscoe Turner in the mid-2000s and the lawfare targeting councilors circa 2009.
What's the hidden agenda of the Powers That Be? It might include making sure that "our friends at this non-profit and our friends who own a heavy construction company and our friends the bond attorneys and bond bankers all get a piece of the pie while those guys over there who aren't beholden to us at all get nothing." A solution that doesn't involve massive spending is worse than no solution at all, from their perspective. An alternate, simpler, less expensive solution to the stated agenda might capture the imagination of the public and make the plan that satisfies the hidden agenda politically impossible.
In the immortal words of Sal Tessio:
Sally's stated agenda (protecting the boss in a meeting with his rival) didn't line up with his hidden agenda (setting up the boss to be assassinated). His angry reaction to the proposal of a different plan to meet the stated agenda exposed the treacherous hidden agenda. The future Fish was taken away to sleep with the fishes.
Which brings us to the August 27, 2024, City of Tulsa general election. For a start, we need to defeat these three harpies, the Mean Girls Clique, who carried out this attack on Miller on behalf of the Cockroach Caucus. We also recall Vanessa Hall Harper's racist verbal attack on Republican Sen. Tim Scott and Laura Bellis's obscenity-saturated speech at a fundraiser for Lori Decter Wright claiming Republican City Council candidates were "actual fascists," sentiments praised by Decter Wright.
Fortunately, each of those three districts has a better alternative on the ballot:
n District 1, Dr. Angela K. Chambers is a mom and grandmother, is originally from McAlester, but is a 33-year resident of Tulsa and a 30-year resident of District 1. Both she and incumbent Vanessa Hall Harper are registered to vote as Democrats. Chambers is a co-founder and board member of Black Women Business Owners of America, is co-founder of WFPG The Greenwood Beat, a digital radio service, and has an entrepreneurial outlook fueled by many years of small business experience. She has been endorsed by a number of community leaders, including former State Senator Judy Eason McIntire.
In District 4, Aaron Griffith, registered to vote as an independent, is someone I first met over 20 years ago through the Midtown Coalition of Neighborhood Associations. A sensationalistic right-wing endorsement sheet has labeled him "Leans Conservative," which is ignorant and hilarious. He is an old-fashioned, working-class liberal Democrat. Aaron and I disagree on a great deal, but the issues where he's wrong are issues where incumbent harridan Laura Bellis is also wrong: Abortion, $15 minimum wage, tribal sovereignty, to name a few.
There are some important differences between Bellis and Griffith, however. Griffith had the courage to join school board members E'Lena Ashley and Rev. Jennettie Marshall in a legal challenge against the Tulsa school board for violating their own policies requiring a search process and the Oklahoma Open Meetings Act in the appointment of Dr. Ebony Johnson as permanent superintendent. He also challenged the district's compliance with Indian Education requirements. Griffith opposes illegal immigration, supports protecting American jobs, supports law and order. He understands that homelessness is not a housing problem. Griffith works with his hands; he's not beholden to the philanthropocracy. Aaron Griffith is not going to wilt under special-interest pressure.
Here are Aaron Griffith's remarks at the Center for Public Secrets earlier this month.
I have received two emails expressing surprise that I would support Griffith. One email was from a newly minted gmail account and a fake name; the other was from someone I know. Both claimed that Griffith was a troll responsible for crude, insulting memes posted pseudonymously on Reddit and the TulsaNow Forum respectively. They expressed "concern" about me harming my name by endorsing Griffith.
I don't approve of or engage in crude memes and trolling; I've always said my say under my own name. I don't have any way to prove or disprove these claims about Griffith, but in my direct observations of him he's always behaved respectfully to me and others. The video I linked above is typical of my experiences with him. Even if the accusations were true, it's a strange sort of propriety that thinks a crude meme-maker is worse than a foul, vengeful tool of the philanthropocracy who set out to destroy the livelihood of a political opponent.
In District 7, radio host and insurance agent Eddie Huff is the Republican candidate. I was excited to learn that he had filed to run. Eddie was co-host of the KFAQ Morning Show with Pat Campbell for several years, and these days operates his own podcast, Fresh Black Coffee. He has been endorsed by Congressman Kevin Hern. (Although Margie Alfonso, an 89-year-old Republican and Eagle Forum stalwart, filed for the seat, she has suspended her campaign and endorsed Eddie Huff.) Huff's issues are public safety, streets, and cooperation with suburbs. (District 7 borders Broken Arrow and Bixby.) Eddie has been a thoughtful commentator on politics and policy for many years and will be unafraid to ask hard questions and propose better solutions.
Replacing Hall Harper, Bellis, and Decter Wright would have the salutary side-effect of reducing the City Council's entanglement with the local philanthropocracy. We have too many councilors from the non-profit sector, yacht guests dependent on the good will of the big foundations. We need more entrepreneurs and independent professionals, who understand what it is to create value, build things, and meet customer requirements, and who aren't financially and socially obliged to the city's puppet-masters.
That brings me to the District 2 race, in which four of the five candidates are in the non-profit world: Stephanie Reisdorph worked for almost 8 years for the Tulsa Housing Authority and now is a therapist for Family and Children's Services. For the last four years, Rhene Ritter has been Director of Grants Management for Housing Solutions Tulsa, and before that she worked for Community Service Council and the City of Tulsa.
Anthony Archie was a youth minister (Kirk of the Hills, Kirk Crossing), a public school teacher, and spent nearly two years as Outreach Manager for the One America Movement, which looks like one of those leftist-funded front groups aimed at convincing evangelical Christians that it's OK to vote for Moloch-worshippers. One America Movement significant donors include foundations like the Hewlett Foundation, the Packard Foundation, and Pierre Omidyar's Democracy Fund. This chilling sentence is on the funders page: "One America works with academics, neuroscientists, and experts in conflict prevention, identity formation, and psychology to design and evaluate our programs." Archie and his wife own the Oklahoma Toffee Company, but based on the full-time positions he lists in parallel and her commute-heavy job as assistant principal of Dewey High School north of Bartlesville, that appears to be a side gig.
W. R. Casey, Jr., is head of the Christian Ministers Alliance, Inc., and the lone Democrat running in District 2. A search of land records and news stories shows that Casey's organization purchased land in 2008 on the northeast corner of Apache and Lewis and tried over the years to raise money to build a youth center there. In June 2024, the land was sold in a sheriff's sale to various owners, apparently for unpaid property taxes.
That leaves Aaron Bisogno. He is assistant manager at a branch of Mariner Finance and has worked for personal loan companies for the last decade. He may be the only candidate in the race who can speak and vote according to his conscience without worrying about losing his job or his funding. The only negative I can find is a 2016 Sand Springs arrest on suspicion of driving under the influence of marijuana, back when possession of marijuana could get someone in trouble.
I've written about the District 3 race at length and recommend a vote for Susan Alexander, the Republican in the race.
District 8 voters have a great option in conservative Republican challenger Chris Cone. Originally from Skiatook, Cone has lived in District 8 for a decade. He is a Certified Financial Planner and the married father of three sons. On his website, Cone puts the spotlight on the poor planning and incompetent scheduling and execution of street improvements in far south Tulsa, where simultaneous projects on parallel arteries have snarled traffic and increased accidents.
Incumbent Phil Lakin is high-up in Tulsa's philanthropocracy as CEO of the Tulsa Community Foundation and chairman of the board of the George Kaiser Family Foundation. If District 8 voters want someone to represent their interests and values, rather than the interests of materialist billionaires, they need to put Lakin out to pasture and elect Chris Cone.
Lakin was a leader (he denies being formally in charge) of a Council working group which endorsed for $112,784 in Federal COVID-19 relief funds for a sex survey targeting children. Lakin adopts the pork barrel excuse: One should endorse a list including wasteful or even harmful items if there are other projects on the list that are benign or useful. That's like saying it's OK to buy cigarettes for your five-year-old as long as you pick up a carton of milk at the same time.
There are no good choices in Districts 5 and 6, just possibly less bad choices. In District 5, Karen Gilbert was a rubber stamp for the establishment during her previous service on the Council and now has the Crime Stoppers gig. Her District 5 opponent is Alicia Andrews, chairman of the Oklahoma Democrat Party. I endorsed Christian Bengel in 2022 and expected him to be an independent voice on the council, and it was disheartening to see him back the deeply flawed Improve Our Tulsa 3 package on the grounds that there were good things in the package, too. That's the pork barrel mindset: It's OK to waste money on useless or even damaging programs, as long as my constituents get their 30 pieces of silver. His opponent, Uriah Davis, has been endorsed by Run for Something, which aims to get young "diverse" progressives elected to down-ballot offices.
The best I can say about them is that I don't think Gilbert or Bengel will vote for measures that make it harder for our Tulsa Police to do their job than it already is; their opponents might, based on their ideological affiliations. So as much as I dislike both of them for their previous council records, Gilbert and Bengel seem to be better than the alternatives.
District 9 City Councilor Jayme Fowler dropped out of the mayor's race and filed for re-election. He is one of three registered Republicans running. RINO former State Representative Carol Bush is the Establishment's candidate. Julie Dunbar, mentioned above, seems too naive to survive: If elected, I would expect her either to be co-opted by the establishment or destroyed by it. Jayme Fowler has been too willing to go with the flow and too hesitant to make waves, even though (as he has often mentioned) he worked with contrarian economist Arthur Laffer.
My hope is that Fowler's abandonment by the Establishment will motivate him to be a contrarian on the City Council, to confront and expose the Leftists on the Council. A hopeful sign was his March proposal to ban the city from funding services for illegal immigrants. The Cockroach Caucus (including RINOs Lakin and Bengel) waived the City Charter to prevent a full hearing for the proposal. Fowler only had the support of Grant Miller. Next time he pushes something like that, Fowler needs to rally supporters of the proposal to pressure their councilors and to be present at the meeting.
The Democrat in the race is Lee Ann Crosby, who has held a variety of positions in the non-profit social work industry and is founder of the Just a Push Foundation which aims to help those released from prison to re-enter society. She ran for the office in 2020 and 2022. Independent Matthew Nelson runs a business that makes marble and granite countertops.
So to sum up:
- District 1: Angela Chambers
- District 2: Aaron Bisogno
- District 3: Susan Frederick
- District 4: Aaron Griffith
- District 5: Karen Gilbert
- District 6: Christian Bengel
- District 7: Eddie Huff
- District 8: Chris Cone
- District 9: Jayme Fowler
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