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Karl Ahlgren, "Working Tulsans" back Brune over Ewing

Smear merchant Karl Ahlgren, the campaign consultant behind the current Money Belt effort to seize total control of Tulsa city government, is advocating for the defeat of Blake Ewing, the Republican nominee for Tulsa City Council District 4. Ahlgren is nominally a Republican, but he seems to support any cause...

Posted by Michael Bates on November 6, 2011 10:27 PM

Tulsa Election 2011: "Working Tulsans" facts and statistics

CORRECTED to include all Working Tulsans contributions. In my haste to post the list of contributors, I only included those on the printed attachment and missed those on the handwritten portion of the form. Adding in Paul Lackey and Jay Helm didn't change the median home value, but it did...

Posted by Michael Bates on November 2, 2011 8:48 AM

Tulsa Election 2011: Pre-general ethics filings; Kaiser, Schusterman lead funders of "Working Tulsans"

CORRECTED to include all Working Tulsans contributions. In my haste to post the list of contributors, I only included those on the printed attachment and missed those on the handwritten portion of the form. Analysis to come (after trick-or-treat), but for now, here are the ethics reports filed by PACs,...

Posted by Michael Bates on October 31, 2011 5:21 PM

Tulsa Election 2011: Pre-primary campaign contribution reports

Analysis will have to wait, but for now, here is the full collection of C-1s, required to be filed by 5 p.m. yesterday, as provided to me by the Tulsa City Clerk's office. The only processing I've done is to merge two separate files into one and to run OCR...

Posted by Michael Bates on September 7, 2011 5:05 AM

Council-suer, SOT member announce picks for City Council (UPDATED)

We're beginning to see components of Tulsa's establishment coalesce around certain candidates for City Council, the candidates they believe will best represent the establishment's interests at City Hall. Burt Holmes and Ben Latham have selected a partial slate of candidates, according to an email from Latham soliciting contributions for their...

Posted by Michael Bates on August 3, 2011 7:52 PM

SOTs use non-Tulsan petition circulators, notaries

The Save Our Tulsa charter amendment petitions -- pushing to add four at-large members to the City Council (including the Mayor), to eliminate partisan labels from city election ballots, and to hold city elections on the same ballot as national and statewide elections -- were certified by City Clerk Mike...

Posted by Michael Bates on April 7, 2011 8:37 PM

Bartlett Jr's first year in office

This week's Urban Tulsa Weekly cover story, by reporter Mike Easterling, is a look back at Dewey Bartlett Jr's first year as mayor of Tulsa. Easterling spoke to the Mayor himself, to chief of staff Terry Simonson, to several city councilors, to urbanist and developer Jamie Jamieson, and to me....

Posted by Michael Bates on November 29, 2010 1:48 AM

Clueless SOTs and their enablers

It appears that the rich old SOTs, who seek to take Tulsa back from, well, Tulsans, are attempting to marshal the resources for gathering the necessary signatures to put their aristocratic propositions on the ballot. Word is that they aren't getting the kind of support and traction they may have...

Posted by Michael Bates on October 22, 2010 9:48 PM

Rich old SOTs: Who is "Save Our Tulsa"?

Who is backing the latest effort to dilute grassroots influence over City Hall? I took the list of 23 names in the list of Save Our Tulsa steering committee members in John Brock's email and did some research. According to recent voter registration records, the median age is of Save...

Posted by Michael Bates on October 12, 2010 11:42 PM