Tulsa City Hall: January 2019 Archives

Bookmarked for further reading: The City of Tulsa commissioned Place Dynamics of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to do a study of Tulsa's retail health and to identify strategies for improvement. The 245-page Tulsa Retail Market Study and Strategy report is now online.

From the city website:

The City of Tulsa relies on sales tax income within the city limits to fund operations, maintenance and capital improvements. It is the lifeblood of our revenue stream and is supported by economic development initiatives that create jobs. As part of the Vision Tulsa initiative, the City hired a consultant, Place Dynamics, LLC of Milwaukee, Wisconsin to prepare a comprehensive market analysis and strategy to:

• Provide a retail market study
• Assess specific retail districts (districts to be determined)
• Review the emergence of the small box retail stores
• Investigate the cash economy, where financial transactions are carried out in cash, rather than debit withdrawals or credit.
• Forecast for growth and demand
• Develop a market-based economic development strategy

Working with our retail stakeholders (representatives from banking, real estate management, local business, developer, chamber, economic development) we will examine the big picture of our retail environment, by identifying the trends that shape both retail and dining industries, and how they play out in Tulsa. Select districts will undergo a more in-depth analysis to assess their potential and the degree to which they meet the needs of the trade areas they serve. The end result will be a market-based economic development strategy with recommendations to help guide future business programming and incentives.

The report states: "A total of 13 study areas were selected for analysis, with the intent of examining a cross-section of commercial area types. In doing so, they [sic] areas that were studied will serve as case studies and models that may be applicable in other locations across the city." Here's the list, with my annotations in brackets.

• Pine and Peoria [including Pine west to the Midland Valley Trail]
• Pine and Sheridan [I-244 north to OK-11]
• 21st Street corridor [nodes from 15th to 23rd at Yale, Sheridan, and Memorial]
• Downtown
• Route 66 East [11th Street from Peoria to Columbia, plus 6th Street from Peoria to St. Louis]
• Tulsa Promenade [includes Southroads, OU-Tulsa campus, Highland Plaza]
• 51st and Union [51st from 33rd West Ave to US 75]
• 71st and Peoria [Peoria from 61st to 71st; 71st from Peoria to Joe Creek]
• 51st and Memorial [includes Fontana Center, Memorial from 46th to 51st]
• 71st Street Corridor [Memorial to Garnett]
• International District [21st Street from Garnett to 129th East Ave]
• River West/Eugene Field [West Tulsa townsite]
• 36th Street North [Cincinnati to Peoria]

This is not the first time that Tulsa has asked an outside consultant to help boost its retail profile. In 2004, the City of Tulsa commissioned the Buxton Group to identify sites for new retail development that would help the city capture a greater share of regional retail dollars. Buxton pinpointed two key locations -- 71st Street and U. S. 75 on the west side; I-44 at 129th East Ave on the east side -- that would capture customers inside and outside the city limits. The first site became the Tulsa Hills development, thanks to the tireless efforts of then-City Councilor Chris Medlock. National retailers that might have located in Jenks landed within Tulsa's city limits instead, allowing us to capture sales tax revenue for city operations. The east-side site was never developed beyond a McDonald's. National retailers that might have found a home there within Tulsa's city limits instead located near the Hard Rock Casino in Catoosa.

In writing the previous entry about the Covington Catholic High School students, I wrote about how local Tulsa media pushed a narrative that Tulsa City Councilors, particularly those elected with grassroots support over the objections of the chamber of commerce, developers, and other special interest groups, were bickering troublemakers. This narrative was used to trash the reputations of diligent, intelligent councilors who dug into issues, asked insightful (and uncomfortable) questions, and refused to be rubber stamps. Believe it or not, there was a time when we had councilors like that.

In researching the previous article, I came across some BatesLine articles that are worth re-reading as background to the current situation at City Hall. The excerpts below deal specifically with bickering, but click the links to delve deeper and get a primer in Tulsa's recent political history. Most of the articles were about specific City Council races, but I took the opportunity to address recurring themes.

September 7, 2009:

When I asked [Phil] Lakin about why he was running for City Council, he talked about infighting and bickering between council and mayor and between city and county. He seemed to blame the councilors for the mayor keeping them in the dark.

Lakin's critique of some current councilors reminds me of what I've heard from other councilors in the past about their predecessors. The gist of it: "If they'd just be nicer, people would pay more attention to the substance of what they're saying." Many of the councilors who have said that in the past have later learned the hard way that as soon as you challenge the power or the budget of some entrenched interest, everyone will think you aren't nice, no matter how nicely you make your case. The newspaper will run pictures that make you look angry. The mayor will accuse you of bickering. And then some council candidate will come along and tell you that if you'd just be nicer, people would pay more attention to the substance of what you're saying.

July 24, 2011:

What I saw in that Tuesday meeting fit a pattern that I've seen often during 20 years of involvement in local politics. A city bureaucrat looks at the certificates on the wall and his years of service and assumes he is the authority not merely about how things are done but the authority on what ought to be done.

So a new city councilor or a new member of an authority, board, or commission comes into office with a concern that isn't being effectively addressed by city government. The first answer from the bureaucracy is rarely, "Gee, why didn't we think of that?" It's almost always, "Nothing can be done," or, "We've never done it that way." And that answer is supposed to be the end of it.

If the councilor (or commissioner) persists, the bureaucracy attempts to re-educate the councilor, in the most condescending manner possible, to understand that his ideas are impossible to implement. Rather than saying, "Let's see how we can meet your concerns," the bureaucracy delivers the message, "Your concerns are ignorant and illegitimate."

What happens next depends on how the councilor deals with the initial rebuff. Some simply back off and tackle another issue. Some, like Tom Tuttle from Tacoma, become fully assimilated to the point where they'll defend the status quo and attack any other councilor who challenges it.

Then you have the councilors who do their own research, who dig into ordinances and budgets and case law and what other cities are doing, and they persist in asking "why not?" and presenting alternatives. From a bureaucrat's point of view, such a councilor is a pain in the posterior, a threat to their comfortable, stable existence, and must be taken down. If you can use your lack of cooperation to provoke the councilor, passive-aggressively, to the point of expressing his irritation, you win.

Since this sort of inquisitive, pro-active councilor also poses a threat to other entrenched interests, the aggrieved bureaucrat can usually find a helping hand from the various organs of the Cockroach Caucus, who miss the days when all one had to do was pull on their strings to get the councilors to do their bidding. The obligatory unflattering photo, misleading headline, twisted caricature, and tut-tutting editorial follow in due course.

It's a misunderstanding of the nature of bureaucracy to think that bureaucrats will be supportive and encouraging of a councilor's ideas for new ways to solve a problem, if only the councilor will be polite and patient. (People seeking public office really should read Jim Boren's books first.) It's not that bureaucrats are bad people, but it's a profession that tends to attract the risk-averse. You don't climb in a bureaucracy by taking risks. The exceptions to the rule are there, and they're real treasures because they're rare. Too often, bureaucrats will try to wait the councilor out -- keep holding meetings, keep delaying a final plan, until the councilor gets interested in another project or gets voted out of office.

It's a pretty good indication that a city councilor is doing what he ought to be doing if he's getting shot at by the bureaucracy and the daily paper. Jim Mautino is a good councilor, and if District 6 voters want an advocate for their interests who won't be deterred by bureaucratic foot-dragging, they'll return Jim Mautino to office this fall.

To which I would only add that people seeking public office should also watch Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister to learn the ways of bureaucrats.

September 3, 2011:

Too many city leaders, who only skirt the edge of the district on their way to Grand Lake, are content to make this part of town as a dumping ground for ugliness. Jim Mautino sees District 6's section of I-44 as the gateway to Tulsa from the east and northeast, an ideal spot to capture retail dollars from visitors to the city and thus sales tax revenues to fund the level of service Tulsans expect from their city government.

Jim's focus on developing within the city limits has made him a target for those with a vested interest in using city assets to fuel development in our suburbs. His opposition to disadvantageous long-term water deals between Tulsa and growing suburbs was a major factor in the unsuccessful 2005 effort to recall him from office.

I have a litmus test for people who comment on city politics. If all they can talk about is the "terrible bickering" on the City Council, I know that they've absorbed the latest meme -- a meme pushed by those special interests who want all power concentrated in a mayor they can control -- but they haven't really been paying attention. This council has worked well together, with a long list of significant accomplishments while fending off lawsuits and sniping from Bartlett Jr and his allies.

When Jim returned to City Hall in 2009, he set out to be newly elected Mayor Dewey Bartlett Jr's strongest advocate on the City Council. He urged his fellow councilors to give Bartlett Jr the benefit of the doubt for at least six months as he got his new administration going. Despite their good-faith effort to work with the new mayor, Bartlett Jr managed to alienate each councilor, one by one, with broken promises, misleading information, and contemptuous treatment.

Mautino may have been Bartlett Jr's last supporter on the Council. The final straw was Bartlett Jr's response to Mautino's recommendation for a vacancy on the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission. Mautino had suggested Al Nichols, a mild-mannered retired Air Force officer and long-time leader of the Mingo Valley Neighborhood Association, as someone who could bring some much-needed geographical and neighborhood balance to the TMAPC. Bartlett Jr seemed very receptive, but a short time later Bartlett Jr told Mautino that Nichols was "toxic," presumably because Nichols was knowledgeable enough about zoning and planning not to be a puppet for the developers' lobby. Instead, Bartlett continued to delay, ultimately nominating former Councilor Eric Gomez, who had very recently been rejected for re-election by his constituents.

September 10, 2011:

A small group of wealthy Tulsans want total control of city government. They don't want thoughtful citizens on the City Council who will ask direct questions or who will stand firm against special-interest manipulation. They want a City Council full of well-trained monkeys who will vote on command. They exist under various names -- TulsaBizPac, Coalition for Responsible Government, Tulsans for Better Government, Save Our Tulsa -- I call them the Cockroach Caucus. They've used unsubstantiated claims of "bickering" and "ward politics" to discredit the councilors we've elected to represent us.

These are the people, the Cockroach Caucus, who created a year of turmoil with their 2004-2005 attempt to recall two city councilors over policy differences. For all the whining and complaining they do about "Council bickering," they dragged the city through a divisive year of attacks and smears, all because they didn't like the results of an election, and they refused to work harmoniously with the councilors that the people of Tulsa had elected.

These are the people who led us into the Great Plains Airlines mess. They promised us openly that the taxpayers were at no financial risk, while they were secretly promising financiers that the taxpayers would pick up the tab if their wacky airline idea failed. It failed, state taxpayers coughed up $30 million in transferable tax credits with nothing to show for it, and Tulsa taxpayers got saddled with $7.1 million, which we're paying for with higher property taxes.

These are the Midtown Money Belt people who don't like the councilors that east and west and south and north Tulsa elect to represent our interests at City Hall. Middle-class and working-class Tulsans want more cops on the beat, city pools that open in the summer, streets that don't tear our cars to pieces, zoning that protects our neighborhoods against shoddy redevelopment, and economic policies that attract and keep growing businesses. The Midtown Money Belt types want taxpayers to subsidize their entertainment -- islands in the river, expensive concerts at the arena, WNBA. They want us to subsidize the success of their investments in suburban real estate, at the expense of growth within the city limits to help fund public safety and infrastructure.

So because they don't like the fact that the rest of us elect councilors focused on efficient basic city services, these people propose charter changes to dilute geographical representation on the City Council. They yearn for the days when you could drive a golf ball from the Mayor's midtown backyard into the yards of the other city commissioners. They want to pack the council with at-large councilors who have to be wealthy enough to afford a city-wide race or beholden to those who are.

These people have decided to back a group of candidates so they can take back control of the City Council. They don't care if their candidates are well-informed, and they don't want candidates with the backbone to oppose special interests who want to misuse city resources for their own benefit.

June 22, 2014:

Another thing you can do to make me regret my endorsement is to send a letter that refers to the "constant petty bickering" of the 2009-2011 City Council. The reality is that the nine councilors got along very well with one another and worked together across partisan lines. The problem, from Dewey Jr's point of view, is that they were united in their distress with Dewey Jr's actions and his refusal to build a cooperative working relationship. So Dewey Jr and his Chamber and developer buddies promoted the "petty bickering" meme and redrew the district lines to separate these councilors from the citizens who knew and appreciated them. The same people who wanted them gone want you gone, too, and for the same reasons.

There is a repeating pattern: A new reformer comes to the Council and arrogantly thinks, "The reason my bozo predecessors got tossed is they refused to be intelligent and polite in their approach. I'm going to be intelligent and polite and everyone will love me and accept my ideas." Guess what? Your "bozo" predecessors thought the same thing about their predecessors. No, the problem is that their ideas and your ideas are threatening to certain special interests, and they will paint you as a troublemaker and a petty bickerer so that low-information voters can't wait to toss you out of office....

Have some respect for the councilors who blazed this trail before you. Because of their willingness to take risks and endure ridicule and defamation, the Overton Window is open a little wider for you.

Mollie Z. Hemingway asks, regarding the unraveling of the mainstream media narrative about activist Nathan Phillips and his confrontation last weekend with the young men of Covington Catholic School:

The thing I keep thinking about: if many media types are dishonest about reporting contradicted and shown to be dangerously false by hours of extensive video evidence, how astronomically much are they misreporting their claims based on absolutely nothing but anonymous sources?

To which Just Tom replied:

Tom's Test: Pick a subject you absolutely are an expert in. Review the media coverage of that subject. Ask yourself, if the media has that record in something you know about, what is their probable record in subjects you aren't an expert in?

Which is another way of phrasing the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, as defined by bestselling author Michael Crichton:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray [Gell-Mann]'s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward--reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

You can extend the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect beyond one's area of expertise to events one has personally witnessed. Some of us who have attended a public hearing have read or watched news reports of the hearing and wondered whether the reporter was even present. Or perhaps the reporter was just so ignorant of the relevant laws and procedures that he didn't understand which parts of the hearing mattered and why.

But after you've encountered a number of these disconnects between what you know to be true and how it's being reported, you notice a pattern: The "mistakes" always seem to run in one direction. The reporters and editors choose to publish stories and to report only those elements of a story advance a particular narrative. Like any good fiction writer, they choose adjectives and adverbs that will induce a particular emotional reaction to the characters in the story and the issues at stake.

If subject-matter experts and engaged citizens are susceptible to Gell-Mann Amnesia as they read and watch the news, how much more are the bulk of voters who don't have an area of personal knowledge or expertise that might tip them off to the possible inaccuracy of what they see in the news?

The classic example here in Tulsa was the years-long effort to portray Tulsa City Councilors as useless, bickering wretches. Those of us who attended City Hall hearings and townhall meetings knew that in fact the councilors targeted by the Whirled and other outlets were heroically fighting for the interests of homeowners and taxpayers against entrenched special interests. But engaged citizens are always a minority in any election, and the proportion of voters with first-hand knowledge of City Hall and their city councilor was diluted by the 2011 gerrymander and further diluted by the move of city elections to the same date as state and federal elections. The voters without that first-hand knowledge of City Hall knew only the "bickering" narrative promoted by the local media and reinforced by campaign material funded by those same special interests.

When I was researching my article on the brief existence of Swanson County, I was struck by the open partisanship displayed by the newspapers of 1910. The Kiowa County Democrat in Snyder carried lengthy front page articles arguing for the creation of the new county and attacking the arguments of the naysayers. As the Swanson County Democrat, the paper was unabashed in taking Snyder's side in the dispute over the location of the county seat. If you wanted to read anything positive about Mountain Park or about the sheriff (the lone elected official who stayed put in Mountain Park), you weren't going to read it in the Democrat. The reader was better served by the blatant and unabashed bias on display than the veneer of neutrality adopted by modern media outlets to hide the narrative they seek to push; the reader of a century ago would have been under no illusion that the paper would give him both sides of the story and would have known to look to other sources to round out his view of an issue.

The Covington Catholic / Nathan Phillips story is helpful in reminding a broader swath of news consumers to be skeptical of what media outlets are trying to feed them. The existence of multiple video sources, longer than the original viral video, uncut, and from multiple vantage points, shifted the question from "Aren't these MAGA-hat kids horrible?" to "Who you gonna believe, me or your own lying eyes?" Let's hope that the experience overcomes the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect and inspires a skepticism that extends even to stories for which there is no video and to news outlets of every medium from the global to the local.

RELATED:

In 2017, a former Oklahoman researching a story for the Guardian contacted me, claiming to want an informed conservative perspective on Oklahoma's budget problems. My answers didn't fit his preferred narrative, so he reduced my hundreds of words of analysis, offered in good faith, to a dismissive phrase set in a misleading context. Lesson learned.

Dan Levin from the New York Times got severely "ratioed" when he posted the following Tweet:

I'm a New York Times reporter writing about #exposechristianschools. Are you in your 20s or younger who went to a Christian school? I'd like to hear about your experience and its impact on your life. Please DM me.

Alumni of evangelical and Catholic schools and from the Christian homeschooling movement quickly responded to say positive things about their educational experience and at the same time cast doubt on Levin's good faith, based on his Twitter timeline to that point. The assumption was that he would minimize or exclude positive testimonies in favor of those that could be used to paint Christian education in a negative light, in an attempt to build popular support for legal attacks on Christian education. I paged through Levin's previous retweets from the #exposechristianschools hashtag and all that I found were negative about Christian education. Since the above tweet appeared and received an overwhelmingly negative reaction, Levin has retweeted at least as many positive testimonies of Christian education as negative.

(In Twitter parlance, ratioed refers to the ratio of the number of replies to the number of likes and retweets, with the assumption that replies are generally negative reaction, while likes are positive, as, generally, are retweets, although Twitter users may retweet an item accompanied by a negative comment. In this case, as I write this, there were 9.2K replies to 2,002 likes, and 1,192 retweets, or roughly a 3:1 negative ratio.)

The #ExposeChristianSchools hashtag started to trend after news that Karen Pence, wife of the Vice President, was returning to teach at a Christian school which upholds Biblical views on marriage and sex, something regarded as a scandal by the Left. At 12:39 a.m. on January 20, I noticed that the "Top" 20 tweets for that hashtag had likes and retweets in the single and low-double digits, while responses favorable to Christian schools had been pushed down. The maximum number likes of any tweet in the "Top" 20 was 57, while the tweet ranked 21st had over 17000 likes, followed by more favorable tweets with thousands of likes. It appeared that someone at Twitter was manually tweaking the algorithm to favor opinions condemning Christian schools.

Rod Dreher points out that Levin had been tweeting such articles as an attack on the Home School Legal Defense Alliance. Dreher writes, "The New York Times is trying to gin up anti-Christian hatred," and notes that this sort of thing may push more Trump-hostile or -ambivalent Christians into supporting his re-election in 2020:

A Christian friend who has been a very strong opponent of Trump, but publicly and privately, these past few years, texted to say that the Levin tweet, and what it represents, has forced him to think that he might have to vote for Trump in 2020 simply because the hatred of the Left is so frightening.

MORE:

This recent New Yorker story by Jill Lepore traces the evolution of American journalism from the strongly partisan press of the 19th century, the shift to just-the-facts reporting for a mass audience in the early 20th century, the move to a more adversarial and interpretive role beginning in the 1960s, the failures of newspapers to recognize the business opportunities and dangers of the Internet, and the influence of Facebook, Google, and click-tracking on editorial judgment. She bookends the historical sketch with homey reminiscences of helping with her family's paper route delivering the Worcester Telegraph and Gazette in the 1970s. About the current state of play, Lepore writes:

All kinds of editorial decisions are now outsourced to Facebook's News Feed, Chartbeat, or other forms of editorial automation, while the hands of many flesh-and-blood editors are tied to so many algorithms. For one reason and another, including twenty-first-century journalism's breakneck pace, stories now routinely appear that might not have been published a generation ago, prompting contention within the reportorial ranks....

There's plenty of room to argue over these matters of editorial judgment. Reasonable people disagree. Occasionally, those disagreements fall along a generational divide. Younger journalists often chafe against editorial restraint.... Sometimes younger people are courageous and sometimes they are heedless and sometimes those two things are the same....

In the age of Facebook, Chartbeat, and Trump, legacy news organizations, hardly less than startups, have violated or changed their editorial standards in ways that have contributed to political chaos and epistemological mayhem.

At NiemanLab, Brian Moritz warns that the "subscriptionpocalypse" is about to hit, and that's bad news for local newspapers.

Eventually, consumers' subscription budgets hit a wall. We can't assume people are going to subscribe to everything. You can't expect people to subscribe to their local paper (which is vital to democracy, we tell them) AND The New York Times and the Washington Post (because Democracy Dies in the Dark) AND Netflix AND Hulu AND HBO Go AND The Athletic AND ESPN Plus AND their favorite podcast on Patreon AND ...

I found that item from this thread by journalism professor Jeremy Littau, tracing the financial decline of newspapers to the 1970s, as subscription rates year over year began to drop, and as chains began to gobble up local newspapers and take on massive debt in the process. Also discussed: The insane profit margins once enjoyed by local papers, the advent of free online classifieds, hedge funds buying and stripping papers for assets, the demographic time bomb -- newspaper readers are dying off and not being replaced, non-profit journalism as a possible way to sustain local accountability. Littau's conclusion: "The seeds were planted long ago by greedy, short-sighted owners."

Littau linked to the Trusting News project, which is researching why readers don't trust journalists and working with newspapers to develop and test strategies for rebuilding trust.

In his thread, Littau also wrote:

What I'd implore you to do, though, is look for ways to invest in local news because that is where it matters most. Good god, you think Washington is corrupt? Try City Hall. Some of the worst stuff I saw as a reporter happened there.

But if local paper ownership is involved with local corruption, what then? A bit later, KTUL tweeted the stub of an AP piece on a new documentary lionizing New York City columnists Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill:

The two men embodied a time when New York was a rollicking and complicated place, and each lived for the streets and stories of the little guys who made the city run. Every city had their own Breslins or Hamills, who made the powerful tremble and shake their fists. Their newspapers were required reading.

Yet a string of layoffs at media companies this week illustrates the peril faced by local journalism today that has made "truth to power" newspaper columnists an endangered species.

This may not have been the case in New York with Breslin and Hamill, but how often, in smaller cities, were "truth to power" columnists in the local paper really attack dogs used to tear down activists, reformer elected officials, and whistleblowers who threatened taxpayer-funded gravy trains for the publisher and his cronies?

In the summer of 1983, I was in Manila,and the English language newspapers were filled with op-eds and news analysis pieces about this corrupt murderer named Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino, who was threatening to return to the Philippines. Some columnists treated him as a danger to the republic, some treated him as a laughing stock, but if you had taken them at face value, you wouldn't have known that Ninoy's real problem was that his popularity posed a threat to Ferdinand Marcos's hold on power.

UPDATE:

One of Nick Sandmann's lawyers has assembled a 15 minute video montage showing what happened at the Lincoln Memorial: