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Oklahoma Primary 2020: BatesLine ballot card
Here are the candidates I'm recommending in the Oklahoma primary elections on June 30, 2020, plus links to detailed analysis and recommendations from other trusted voices.
Tulsa Retail Market Study and Strategy
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...
SQ 640 and raising taxes in Oklahoma
Last week the Oklahoma House approved HJR 1050 by a bare majority of 51 votes, pushed by the Chambercrat House Leadership, voting to erode the constitutional protection against tax increases without approval of the voting public. These 51 representatives, including two, Leslie Osborn and Glen Mulready, who are seeking higher...
Tulsa zoning code draft: My comments
Just under the wire, I submitted my comments a week ago Saturday on the draft for public comment of the proposed zoning code for the City of Tulsa. This is a critical document for Tulsa's future, far more important than the debate over water-in-the-river. The current zoning code is nearly...
Writing curriculum publisher explains problems with Common Core
Common Core is looking more and more like the incandescent light bulb ban, Obamacare, and scores of other experiments in government regulation that drive up costs, drive out small business, and dry up innovation. Andrew Pudewa's life work is to enable students to learn to write clearly and persuasively. His...
Oklahoma runoff election 2012
Happy Election Day! Polls open in much of Oklahoma at 7 a.m. and close at 7 p.m. There are no statewide runoffs, but both major parties have a runoff in the 2nd Congressional District. Republicans have runoffs in four State Senate districts (15, 17, 33, 43), and two State House...
Phil Lakin and G. T. Bynum: The (as yet) unchallenged
At the end of day one of filing for the 2011 Tulsa city elections, two districts had a single candidate with no announced opponent preparing to enter the race. Phil Lakin is the sole candidate so far in far south Tulsa's District 8. Lakin, CEO of Tulsa Community Foundation and...
Greenwood since the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre
The story of Tulsa's Greenwood District did not end in 1921.
2011 Oklahoma Republican Convention tweets and retweets
Technical note: Copying and pasting tweets into this post was a very frustrating and time-consuming process. In the end, I had to paste the HTML into an Emacs buffer, use a series of regex replacements to clean the text up enough so everything would post without messing up everything else...
G. T. Bynum on the cover of <em>UTW</em>
The cover story in this week's Urban Tulsa Weekly is a profile of Tulsa District 9 City Councilor G. T. Bynum. Reporter Mike Easterling has written an interesting story about a significant figure in Tulsa politics, and he includes extensive quotes from Jack Henderson and Rick Westcott, Bynum's colleagues from...
PLANiTULSA final draft, my comments
Today at 4 at Tulsa City Hall is what may be the final session of the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission's public hearing on the PLANiTULSA comprehensive plan. (You can download the June 2010 Final Draft of the PLANiTULSA policy documents here.) Work obligations preclude me from attending today, but...
Last (?) TMAPC hearing on PLANiTULSA tonight; small area plans
Tonight, March 23, 2010, starting at 6 pm, is what may be the final session of the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission's public hearing on PLANiTULSA, Tulsa's first comprehensive plan in a generation. If not everyone can be heard who wishes to speak, the TMAPC has the option to continue...
City design: How, by whom, and to what end?
Blair Humphreys posts an excellent comment on an excellent discussion at Steve Lackmeyer's OKC Central blog: I agree with the thesis that cities NEED to be designed. Of course, the rub comes when you decide things like: designed how, by whom, and to what end. In Oklahoma City we have...
IDA looks at downtown Tulsa; City seeks bids for downtown services
Last fall, Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor asked the International Downtown Association to send a team to study our downtown, and in particular to look at the city's arrangement with Tul-Center, Inc., the arm of Downtown Tulsa Unlimited (DTU) that has handled downtown services since the current business improvement district was...
PLANiTULSA scenario launch
An edited version of this column was published in the May 7 - 13, 2009, issue of Urban Tulsa Weekly. Here is the blog entry I wrote at the time, linking to the column, and a blog entry reporting on the rollout. The published version is not available online. Posted...
End the parking wars: Share parking on Cherry Street
An edited version of this column was published in the April 29, 2009, edition of Urban Tulsa Weekly. The published version is no longer available online. Posted July 15, 2021. See the end of this entry for a postscript. Cityscope By Michael D. Bates Parking wars Will success spoil Tulsa's...
Can we trust the Tulsa Stadium Trust?
Some wise words in a letter from retired architect Bob Sober to the members of the Tulsa City Council, regarding the proposed Tulsa Stadium Improvement Trust indenture, on the Council's agenda for Thursday night: Councilors, The Mayor has asked you to approve the Trust Indenture in this Thursday's Council meeting...
Dorwart defends Drillers downtown assessment deal
Attorney Frederic Dorwart sent an e-mail today to fellow downtown property owners defending the use of a downtown assessment district to fund a new downtown Driller stadium. (You may recognize Dorwart's name as he represented Tulsa Industrial Authority in its Great Plains Airlines-related lawsuit against the Tulsa Airport Improvements Trust....
Beside the Alamo, enchantment
My most recent Urban Tulsa Weekly column is about the correlation between urban vitality and the combination of good urban form and older buildings, factors that are actively protected in cities like Austin and San Antonio, cities that Tulsans frequently say they wish to emulate. Those factors seem to make...
Maria Barnes vs. Eric Gomez
An edited version of this column appeared in the March 19, 2008, issue of Urban Tulsa Weekly. The published version is no longer available online. Posted on August 4, 2018. Barnes vs. Gomez By Michael D. Bates I've attended, watched, listened to, and participated in many debates and candidate forums...
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