Many thanks to the Tulsa County Election Board for providing scans of the campaign contribution filings for the candidates in the special election for Tulsa County Sheriff. (For a brief shining moment, campaign reports for candidates and committees in the state's largest counties were filed electronically with the Oklahoma Ethics...
Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission (TMAPC) chairman Bill Leighty came across a wonderful documentary short subject about Tulsa. The 15 minute film was part of the Cities in America series, produced by the United States Information Service, the Cold War-era organization that used a variety of media to promote a...
A weird election season has come to an end. Tulsa voters have emptied out the City Council and turned down two radical plans to remake city government (while embracing two ill-considered modifications with bigger impact than voters appreciate). After the polls closed, I collected results from precincts along the southern...
This entry post-dated to remain at top until polls close. Welcome to those visiting BatesLine especially for today's election. BatesLine has been around since 2003, and you'll find a lot of information and history here about the players and forces at work in Tulsa politics. BatesLine also features stories on...
Blake Ewing, Joe Bates, and Rocky Frisco, September 9, 2011. Photo by Trish Molina. Copyright 2011 Aithne Studios. Used by permission. Of the seven City Council races on today's ballot, the District 4 race, the only one in which I'm allowed to vote, is the only one in which...
A number of guides, interviews, and videos have been posted to introduce voters to the candidates on the Tulsa City Council ballot tomorrow. In most cases, the winner of a hotly contested primary for the district's dominant party faces the nominee of the minority party, who either got a bye...
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...
Democrat Ken Brune sent out a mailer to Republican voters in Tulsa District 4 with a list of 74 "Republicans for Ken Brune (1 MB PDF)." Ken Brune seems to be liked only by an elite and elderly class of Republicans. A BatesLine analysis of the 74 names, using voter...
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...
Tonight, November 1, 2011, at 5:30 p.m., All Souls Unitarian Church will host a candidate forum for Tulsa City Council districts 4 (Blake Ewing and Ken Brune) and 9 (G. T. Bynum and Mike Batman). According to the announcement, candidates will speak on the proposed charter changes and the future...
The American Planning Association has named Tulsa's historic Swan Lake neighborhood one of ten Great Neighborhoods for 2011, part of the APA's annual recognition of "Great Places In America." (Hat tip to KRMG News for the story.) From the APA's citation: What dominates this attractive and popular neighborhood are...
In my entry, "Tulsa District 4: Blake Ewing on historic preservation and infill," I wrote "Here's some infill development by one of Democrat nominee Ken Brune's political contributors." The sentence accompanied photographs of the development, or lack thereof, between Troost Ave. and Utica Ave. south of the Broken Arrow Expressway...
I'm sad to say that Democrat voters in Tulsa's District 4 made my choice in the general election an easy one. Friends and supporters of incumbent Councilor Maria Barnes appreciate her commitment to defending neighborhoods against inappropriate encroachment, a problem in District 4 where modern-day commercial development (and its accompanying...
Redistricting appears to played a key role in the Cockroach Caucus strategy to regain control of the City Council, according to a BatesLine analysis of Tuesday's primary results by precinct. The 2011 redistricting was the most radical since the City Council was established in 1989. Over 20% of the city's...
This entry post-dated to remain at top until polls close. Happy election day! Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. In two districts (1 and 5), the primary will determine a winner. In all districts, the primary will determine whether we'll have good representation or not-so-good representation at...
This is the only election I get to vote in tomorrow, and I'm voting for entrepreneur Blake Ewing for the Republican nomination for Tulsa City Council District 4. In the 2009 primary, I endorsed legendary Tulsa musician Rocky Frisco in his race to unseat incumbent Eric Gomez, who had beclowned...
Tulsa City Council District 4 is unique in having two seriously contested primaries. In the Democratic primary, I'm pleased to endorse my friend Maria Barnes. I've known Maria Barnes for over a decade, through her role as Kendall-Whittier Neighborhood Association president and fellow board member of the Midtown Coalition of...
Things are moving rapidly on this last day before the Tulsa City Council primary, and I'm doing my best to catch up. Several developing stories: Oklahoma City-based Majority Designs (the direct mail firm of Fount Holland and Karl Ahlgren) have put out mailers "not authorized by any campaign or candidate"...
I emailed FOP political consultant Victor Ajlouny and requested a copy of the FOP's press releases on their poll and their endorsements. The eight-page Tulsa FOP poll release featured a question about the impact that an endorsement from the Tulsa Metro Chamber's political action committee (TulsaBizPac) would have on a...
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...
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