Search this site
Matching entries from BatesLine
Eclipse 2024 notes
Composite image of August 21, 2017, total solar eclipse, Madras, Oregon. Photo Credit: (NASA/Aubrey Gemignani) Monday, April 8, 2024, will be the nearest a total solar eclipse has come to Tulsa in my lifetime. The path of totality stretches from south Texas to northern New England. Oklahoma southeast of...
Tulsa City Council preview, 2021/05/05: 36th & MLK TIF
AFTER-ACTION REVIEW: All items on the regular council meeting agenda were approved without dissent. There was only one controversy: Gary Brinkner, vice chairman of the Greenwood Chamber of Commerce, objected to special event application for the Black Wall Street Legacy Festival, which would block off Greenwood and Archer for three...
Tulsa Election 2020, District 4: Kathryn Lyons questionnaire
Back on August 12, I sent the three eligible candidates for City Council District 4 a questionnaire using the email addresses provided in their declarations of candidacy or on their websites. The questionnaire included the 18 questions I asked the mayoral candidates, plus a question about neighborhood conservation districts and...
Tulsa Election 2020: Mayoral candidate questionnaire
Last Wednesday, BatesLine sent a questionnaire to the six serious candidates for Mayor of Tulsa, using the email addresses provided in their declarations of candidacy or on their websites. We sent two reminders. We received replies from three candidates: Craig Immel, Ken Reddick, and Ty Walker. The survey consists of...
Tulsa School Board Office 5: Shane Saunders questionnaire response
Shane Saunders, candidate for Tulsa Public Schools Office 5, responds to the BatesLine questionnaire.
BatesLine retrospective: The "bickering Tulsa City Councilors" narrative
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...
2018 Oklahoma governor primary: Process of elimination
Can you tell I'm not excited about the race to succeed Mary Fallin? It's taken a long time to make up my mind, and it's still not as firm a decision as I'd like. As with many of the judical races, my current inclination to vote for Dan Fisher in...
Rodger Randle: Walt Helmerich rebuffed developer for park site
Walt Helmerich III, whose foundation donated $1 million toward the 1991 purchase of the riverfront property now known as Helmerich Park, and who served on the board of the bank that owned the land, rebuffed an overture from a private developer who wanted to create a "major mixed-use entertainment, recreational,...
Donald Trump in Tusla
On Wednesday, I attended the Tulsa rally for presidential candidate Donald Trump with former Alaska Gov. and vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, held at ORU's Mabee Center. I was there as a member of the news media; I received an email at 7 pm the night before the event saying that...
Dan Keating: Time for Dewey Bartlett Jr to go
Dan Keating, a conservative Republican, recently appointed by Gov. Mary Fallin to the State Board of Education, has written a scathing column in the Tulsa Beacon denouncing Tulsa Mayor Dewey Bartlett Jr's campaign for pushing party affiliation over his performance as mayor and saying that it's time for Tulsa Mayor...
Vision2: Blake Ewing explains his opposition to Prop 1
Tulsa City Councilor Blake Ewing has a blog post out today explaining his opposition to Vision2 Tulsa County Proposition 1 in great detail, addressing the "deal closing fund" and the "airport part" in separate sections, and it's worth reading in full, but here are a few highlights (emphasis added): As...
Chloramine contract on Tulsa water board agenda today
The Tulsa Metropolitan Utility Authority (TMUA), which operates the City of Tulsa's water system, will vote today whether to approve a contract for $925,600 with Crossland Heavy Contractors for "Chloramines Modifications" at Tulsa's two water treatment plants, A. B. Jewell and Mohawk. (See the TMUA agenda here.) The meeting will...
Francis McGrath, the definition of a city manager
If you look in the AP Stylebook to find out whether to capitalize city manager*, you find his name as the example, the paradigm: "City Manager Francis McGrath." When people ask me what I think about Tulsa changing to a council-manager form of government, I think of Francis McGrath. For...
Urban design experts looking at Evans-Fintube site
A group of urban planners from the Mayors' Institute on City Design (MICD) is in Tulsa today looking at the city's most significant brownfield: The Evans Electric and Fintube plants, which are located east of OSU-Tulsa, north of Archer St., between the BNSF (formerly AT&SF) tracks and US 75. The...
Who are the real NIMBYs?
An edited version of this column was published in the August 14-20, 2008, issue of Urban Tulsa Weekly. It was a more polished version of a blog entry from the previous week (minus hyperlinks and blockquotes, which don't translate well to print). The published version is no longer available on...
Shahadi must go
When a mayoral appointee to a city authority, board, or commission behaves badly, it's rare that our elected officials have an immediate opportunity for corrective action. Tulsa Development Authority (TDA) board member George Shahadi has been nominated by Mayor Kathy Taylor for another term. His renomination comes before the City...
The real NIMBYs
Ruth Kaiser Nelson was, for all practical purposes, my first Latin teacher. When I was an eighth-grader, our scheduled teacher, Bill Bippus, took a semester's leave of absence, and Mrs. Nelson taught us instead. Because the class occurred during the girls' PE period, it was an all-boy class, and Mrs....
I-244 & Yale vagrant facility on Council agenda
Tonight (Thursday, August 7) the Tulsa City Council will reconsider a resolution it passed last week. The resolution, jointly issued with the Tulsa Housing Authority dealt with four lots on the west side of Yale between Admiral Place and I-244, declaring it to be "in the public interest" for TDA...
Tax Increment Financing (TIF) 201: Advanced concepts and case studies
An edited version of this column appeared in the November 7, 2007, issue of Urban Tulsa Weekly. The published version is available online courtesy of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Here is my blog entry linking to the original column. Posted online September 9, 2017. TIF 201: Advanced concepts and...
A curious change in terminology
This struck me as strange. Maybe this was unintentional, maybe not. You be the judge. There's a shift in the way the Tulsa World refers to the potential commercial development on the west bank of the Arkansas River at 21st Street. Prior to the October 9 Tulsa County sales tax...
Feed Subscription
If you use an RSS reader, you can subscribe to a feed of all future entries matching 'Tulsa Authority for Economic Opportunity'. [What is this?]
