February 2024 Archives

In addition to Oklahoma's presidential preference primary on March 5, 2024, a small number of local jurisdictions will have propositions: Haskell, Norman, Oilton (2), Dewey County, Logan County (3), McIntosh County, Major County, and Sharon-Mutual Public Schools (Dewey & Woodward Counties). One school district, Mannsville in Carter & Johnston Counties, has a special election for an unexpired board seat.

The longest ballot will be in Wagoner County, which has eight propositions relating to county sales taxes:

• Proposition No. 1: Make permanent the temporary 0.80% for operations and road and bridge improvements, originally approved in 2017
• Proposition No. 2: Make permanent the temporary 0.10% for Sheriff Office capital outlay and operations, originally approved in 2017
• Proposition No. 3: Make permanent the temporary 0.10% for General Fund purposes, originally approved in 2017
• Proposition No. 4: Repurpose half of the permanent 0.30% fire tax approved in 2004 to establish and provide ambulance service.
• Proposition No. 5: 0.125% for 30 years for courthouse facilities
• Proposition No. 6: 0.25% permanent for jail facilities and operations
• Proposition No. 7: 0.125% for 30 years for fairgrounds facilities
• Proposition No. 8: 5% lodging tax in unincorporated areas for parks and recreational facilities

Proponents call the package "Half a Penny for Wagoner County," referring to the new taxes in propositions 5, 6, and 7, but not considering the increase in taxes resulting from making a penny in temporary taxes permanent. The Wagoner County website has a PowerPoint with details on each proposition "for educational purposes only... does not imply an endorsement."

Some opposition has arisen, pointing out that this amounts to a 38% increase in the county's sales tax rate, from 1.3 cents to 1.8 cents on the dollar. That's on top of the state 4.5% sales tax and any city sales taxes. A group called Taxed Enough Already (TEA) points out that this will push total sales tax rates in the cities of Coweta and Wagoner up to 10.3%. Compare that to the combined 8.417% we pay in the City of Tulsa. While Gov. Stitt just signed a bill eliminating the state sales taxes on groceries, to go into effect in August, city and county sales taxes will continue to be imposed on necessities.

John Dobberstein of the Broken Arrow Sentinel has a detailed report on the Wagoner County propositions, specifically on a presentation made by Wagoner County Engineer Rachael Cooper to the Broken Arrow City Council. "Cooper admitted no public hearings had been scheduled about the tax proposals but they would be forthcoming in the next 60 days." The same article has links to the ballot resolutions approved by the Wagoner County Commission and notes the haste with which the propositions were moved forward.

District 1 Wagoner County Commissioner James Hanning said information was given to him about the propositions the morning of a recent County Commission meeting and he was asked to vote to whether approve the language with no prior knowledge.

Hanning said he didn't know how the numbers were created but he was unsure 0.8% would be satisfactory or even enough to maintain roads in the county.

"We all, as well as Broken Arrow see the destruction of our roads and how much more it's costing us to fix them. So I don't know where the numbers came from. I'm simply telling you they were never presented to me," he told the Broken Arrow City Council after Cooper's presentation to them.

Firefighters in rural fire districts are unhappy that their permanent earmarked revenue stream is going to be cut in half (emphasis added).

Everyone agrees Wagoner County needs an ambulance service, and service should be improved across the county, but firefighters say taking away funds their departments rely on would hurt their ability to maintain equipment, attend training, or recruit and retain firefighters.

On Monday night, firefighters asked County Commissioner Christina Edwards about what data supports the cut.

Edwards, who supports the ballot measure, was unable to answer the question.

The community also asked County Commissioner Tim Kelly, who also supports the proposal, the same question in a separate meeting.

His response was, "I get it. That's all you need to know."

Kelly was asked if he could provide the statistics and he said he could if he wanted to....

Another concern firefighters have is the county acknowledges never consulting any of the fire departments before proposing the idea.

I don't live in Wagoner County, but I would be reluctant to approve a permanent earmarked tax or any temporary tax longer than 5 years duration, as it eliminates opportunities for rebalancing revenues and priorities as costs and needs change. The need for Proposition No. 4 illustrates the hazard: Those who believe that the 0.30% fire district sales tax is generating more revenue than needed for that purpose now have to fight the holders of the concentrated benefit to repurpose the tax.

It's sketchy, to put it mildly, to schedule a sales tax election on a low-turnout date, with no hearings prior to the vote to put the propositions on the ballot and even one of the County Commissioners apparently kept in the dark. That kind of behavior by elected officials shouldn't be rewarded by the voters.

MORE:

KTUL: Wagoner County's 'half a penny campaign' draws debate over real cost of tax propositions
KOTV: Special Election In Wagoner County Could Impact Sales Tax
Group of Wagoner County residents holds rally against proposed sales tax increase

ELECTION RESULTS: Tulsa County school district bond issues all passed by a wide margin, each proposition exceeding 80% in favor. School bond issues fell short of the 60% threshold in Canute, Krebs, Silo, and Tupelo. In Boswell, Tuttle, and Weleetka school districts, a majority of voters voted against the bond propositions.

Worst turnout: Nobody -- zero of 21 registered voters -- in the Billings Public Schools district in Garfield County showed up to vote on adding themselves to the Garfield County 522 Ambulance Service District in the Billings Public Schools district. According to the Enid News, there were four propositions across the county relating to the ambulance service: Voters in the existing ambulance district cast two separate votes to annex into the district the parts of the Billings and Pond Creek-Hunter school districts in Garfield County, approving by 132-6 and 128-7, respectively. Voters in the affected part of Pond Creek-Hunter voted 11-5 in favor. Presumably annexation needed approval from both the existing district and the area to be annexed; with a tie 0-0 vote, it appears that the Billings annexation (about 32.25 sq. mi. in the northeast corner of the county) will not go forward.

In the entire state of Oklahoma, with over 400 school districts, each with at least one seat up for election this year, there were only 22 seats that required a primary because more than two candidates ran. In 13 of those 22 seats, a candidate received more than 50% of the vote and was elected; a runoff between the top two candidates will held for only 9 seats.

This coming Tuesday, February 13, 2024, is Oklahoma's annual school board primary election. Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. A list of all of Tuesday's elections across Oklahoma can be found on the Oklahoma State Election Board website. You can access your sample ballot on the election board's Oklahoma voter portal.

As one of 10 election days authorized by law this year, Tuesday is also host to some municipal elections and special elections, including several school district general-obligation bond issues. As in all non-Federal Oklahoma elections, early voting is available the Thursday and Friday before election day from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. at designated locations; in Tulsa County and most counties, that's at the county election board headquarters.

Only a small percentage of Tulsa County voters will have a reason to go to the polls. The only school board races on the ballot this Tuesday are those that drew three or more candidates. If a candidate receives more than 50% of the vote this Tuesday, he or she will be elected; if not, the top two candidates will advance to the school board general election on April 2, 2024, which is where you will find school board elections that have only two candidates.

There are several contested school board seats in Tulsa County, including three in the Tulsa Public Schools district, but all of them drew only two candidates, so you will see them on the ballot in April.

In Tulsa County, there are general obligation bond issues in Bixby, Sand Springs, and Jenks school districts, and a single city council seat each in Collinsville and Sand Springs.

Bixby school bond issues:

• School district web page on the bond issue
• Bixby bond issue Bond Transparency Act disclosure: The district has $192,440,000 left to be paid off from the 2022 and 2016 bond issues.
• Proposition No. 1: $11,500,000 "for the purpose of constructing, equipping, repairing and remodeling school buildings, acquiring school furniture, fixtures and equipment and acquiring and improving school sites"
• Proposition No. 2: $500,000 "for the purpose of purchasing transportation equipment"

Jenks school bond issues:

• School district web page on the bond issue
• Jenks bond issue Bond Transparency Act disclosure: "The School District has 49,945,000 in unissued building bonds authorized at an election held on the 10th day of February 2015." The disclosure lists specific bond expenditures from each election going back to 2019.
• Proposition No. 1: $18,180,000 "for the purpose of constructing, equipping, repairing and remodeling school buildings, acquiring school furniture, fixtures and equipment and acquiring and improving school sites"
• Proposition No. 2: $820,000 "for the purpose of purchasing transportation equipment"

Sand Springs school bond issues:

• School district web page on the bond issue
• Sand Springs bond issue Bond Transparency Act disclosure: The disclosure lists specific bond expenditures from each election going back to 2009. Sand Springs district has $23,308,959 in outstanding bond debt, including principal and interest.
• Proposition No. 1: $111,875,000 "for the purpose of improving or acquiring school sites, constructing, repairing, remodeling and equipping school buildings, and acquiring school furniture, fixtures and equipment; or in the alternative to acquire all or a distinct portion of such property pursuant to a lease purchase arrangement"
• Proposition No. 2: $2,625,000 "for the purpose of acquiring transportation equipment and auxiliary transportation equipment; or in the alternative to acquire all or a distinct portion of such property pursuant to a lease purchase arrangement"

For each candidate, ballot name is followed by full voter registration name in parentheses, if different, then age, party of voter registration, social media profiles and websites.

Collinsville city council, Ward 1:

• Brad Francis (Orville Brad Francis), incumbent, 76, R. LinkedIn profile, Facebook profile.
• Gary Cole (Gary D Cole Sr), 68, R. Facebook profile.

(Larry Shafer was the only candidate for mayor and has been re-elected.)

Sand Springs city council, Ward 4:

• Brian Jackson (Brian Michael Jackson), incumbent, 41, I. LinkedIn, Facebook profile. Jackson ran in the Republican primary for State House District 66 in 2018. He finished 2nd in the primary then lost to Jadine Nollan in the runoff. He changed registration from Republican to Independent sometime between the primary and November 2.
• David B. Parker, 61, R. LinkedIn profile, real estate Facebook page, personal Facebook profile.

(Beau Wilson, Ward 5, and Jim Spoon, at-large, were the only candidates in their respective races and have been re-elected.)

From the BatesLine Bookshelf, a very occasional feature on authors and books that have influenced me:

Christopher Alexander was an architect, but he might more appropriately have been called a philosopher of the built environment. He spent his career trying to describe and name the qualities that make a place -- a city, a neighborhood, a public square, a home, a room -- feel alive or dead.

Alexander influenced urban planning, but he thought central planning was useless, counterproductive. He believed in generative patterns that, if followed by individuals at a small scale, will produce living places at a large scale. He believed that these patterns flow out of the nature of order. Ultimately, that nature of order flows from God.

Beginning in the 1970s, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues the Center for Environmental Structure at the University of California at Berkeley identified patterns of design at every scale from regions to cities to neighborhoods to homes that they believed to be universal in generating lively places.

Eight books were published by the Center for Environmental Structure over a 20 year period from 1975 to 1995. Book 1, The Timeless Way of Building, explains the theory and application of patterns and how it relates to human nature. Book 2, A Pattern Language, identifies 253 specific patterns -- e.g., Promenade, Arcade, Small Public Square, Four-Story Limit, City-Country Fingers, 9% Parking -- shows examples, and discusses their interrelationships. The book was converted to hypertext, allowing easy navigation from one pattern to related patterns, and is available in that form to members of the PatternLanguage.com website. The website has a great deal of free content discussing Christopher Alexander's work, including a list and summary of the 253 patterns.

I wrote about Alexander's pattern language and the timeless way of design in a 2008 Urban Tulsa Weekly column:

Every building, neighborhood, town, and city is constructed from a collection of patterns. Alexander observed that some patterns are living and some are dead. The ones that are living are those that connect in some way with human nature--they attract people, making them feel at home and alive.

Dead patterns repel people, making them feel ill at ease and restless. A place shaped by dead patterns becomes neglected and uncared for and attracts trash, decay, and crime.

Most of the remaining books in that CES series get into specific examples of the application of this approach. I have not yet read A New Theory of Urban Design, but it looks interesting. All of these volumes are available for free hourly checkout on the Internet Archive, by following the link on each title.

1. The Timeless Way of Building
2. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction
3. The Oregon Experiment: Applying a new planning paradigm for the University of Oregon campus.
4. The Linz Cafe: The design of a single building in Linz, Austria.
5. The Production of Houses: Building of a group of houses built in northern Mexico, seven principles which apply to any system of production.
6. A New Theory of Urban Design
7. A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Colour and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets
8. The Mary Rose Museum: A museum in Portsmouth, England, devoted to Henry VIII's ship

From the publisher's blurb for A Pattern Language:

At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people.

At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a formal system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment.

"Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.

In The Timeless Way of Building, in chapter 2, "The Quality without a Name", Alexander describes the challenges of making a place come alive. It applies to people as well as blackbirds. It makes me think of the plazas that urban planners designed in the 1960s and 1970s, with artist's renderings that showed the plazas thronged with people; the reality is that the plazas were unpleasant and uncomfortable and became hangouts only for those who had nowhere else to be.

Suppose that I am trying to make a table for the blackbirds in my garden. In winter, when the snow is on the ground, and the blackbirds are short of food, I will put food out for them on the table. So I build the table; and dream about the clusters of blackbirds which will come flocking to the table in the snow.

But it is not so easy to build a table that will really work. The birds follow their own laws; and if I don't understand them, they just won't come. If I put the table too low, the birds won't fly down to it, because they don't like to swoop too close to the ground. If it is too high in the air, or too exposed, the wind won't let them settle on it. If it is near a laundry line, blowing in the wind, they will be frightened by the moving line. Most of the places where I put the table actually don't work.

I slowly learn that blackbirds have a million subtle forces guiding them in their behavior. If I don't understand these forces, there is simply nothing I can do to make the table come to life. So long as the placing of the table is inexact, my image of the blackbirds flocked around the table eating, is just wishful thinking. To make the table live, I must take these forces seriously, and place the table in a position which is perfectly exact.

In the 1990s, his ideas about patterns captured the imagination of computer scientists. I first saw his books for sale (to my surprise) at the 1996 OOPSLA (Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications) conference in San Jose, where he was the keynote speaker. You can watch his talk here and read it here. His work inspired popular software engineering textbooks like Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software and AntiPatterns: Refactoring Software, Architectures, and Projects in Crisis.

I recently responded to an appeal from the Internet Archive, seeking testimonials about the value of their Wayback Machine, the tool that allows researchers to go back to earlier snapshots of webpages, including many from long-gone websites. Here's what I wrote:

Tell us about the first time you used the Wayback Machine, or when you first realized the power of web archives. What were you looking for, and why was it important to you?

I can't recall the very first time. My blog contains hundreds of links to the Wayback Machine. An early example is captured in a blog entry giving my readers access to Oklahoma election records that had been lost in the State Election Board's redesign of their website.

Please share a specific example or story where the Wayback Machine played a crucial role in preserving a valuable piece of internet history for you or others.

In 2003, I started a blog, BatesLine.com, focused on local issues in Tulsa and Oklahoma, and it's still going over 20 years later. Many of my entries involved links to local news outlets and other local bloggers. As I revisit some stories from previous years, I update dead links where possible with Wayback Machine links, so that the context for what I wrote is preserved. Local TV stations are particularly bad about redesigning websites and ditching old news stories in the process. Many bloggers gave up after a few years and let their sites and domains lapse. So much has disappeared from the live web in just a short period of time, so I'm very thankful for the Wayback Machine.

Any additional comments or thoughts you'd like to share about your experience with the Wayback Machine?

The biggest disappointment is that the Wayback Machine's crawlers often seems to have struggled with dynamic URLs (the sort with ? in the URL), so that many articles are missing from vanished websites. For example, Urban Tulsa Weekly (urbantulsa.com) was one of many alt-weekly newspapers that used Gyrobase CMS, and many of its articles, even those that I linked from my well-indexed site, are not available in the Wayback Machine. Even a popular and well-organized site like Charles G. Hill's dustbury.com, the longest continuously running Oklahoma blog, which used WordPress and static-looking URLs for a PHP backend, is missing many pages, including the final essay Charles wrote just before his untimely death in 2019. The index page including a link to the essay was captured, but not the essay itself. This is heartbreaking and hard to comprehend.

If you, too, are thankful for the Wayback Machine, you can show your appreciation with a tax-deductible contribution to the Internet Archive. They currently store over 99 petabytes of data, including 625 billion webpages going back to the earliest days of the World-Wide Web, and they make it all available for free.

MORE: The Internet Archive's Community Webs initiative has helped 175 libraries and archives to establish their own digital archives, including two in Oklahoma -- OKC's Metropolitan Library System and the Choctaw Cultural Center. They just received a $750,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to expand that program.

The late, great Pat Campbell, morning host on 1170 KFAQ in Tulsa for over a decade, had a number of regular, weekly guests. Friday was always an interesting contrast: Dr. Everett Piper, author and nationally-syndicated columnist, then-president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, now Osage County Commissioner, would be on Fridays during the 7 o'clock hour, speaking about cultural issues from a conservative Christian perspective. That would be followed by a weekly conversation with Rollo Tomassi, "The Rational Male," who presented a "red-pilled," somewhat cynical perspective on marriage and male-female relationships.

On April 12, 2019, Campbell had both Piper and Tomassi on at the same time for a discussion about whether men today ought to get married. On the KFAQ podcast page, the hour was labeled, "Pat Campbell hosts a debate, or a sharing of ideas, between Rollo Tomassi, The Rational Male, and Dr. Everett Piper, Oklahoma Wesleyan University, about marriage."

Here's the audio from that discussion, now uploaded to the Internet Archive.

This entry was prompted by a tweet thread from rapper and podcaster Zuby:

I would love to see a proper, long form discussion between traditional religious conservatives and secular red pill men.

They always talk at each other, but rarely with each other.

Both have good points but both ignore large swathes of reality that could upset their 'tribe'.

Red pillers are aware of modern problems, but often promote ideas and actions that directly conflict with religious moral guidance.

Tradcons often ignore the reality of Western dating/marriage in 2023 and rarely address the valid concerns of millions of young men.

BTW I mean a discussion around modern men and women, gender dynamics, dating, marriage, family, etc.

Not a debate on whether God exists or religion itself.