aRdent Voice » Local issues

A dedicated utility fee for Tulsa Police and Fire? Fine, as long as everyone pays it.

Ron — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:47:26 +0000

Normally I’m not a big fan of earmarking little slices of the government revenue stream to only a single purpose or agency. Times change and priorities can change as well. However, I’m beginning to think that it would be a good idea for Police and Fire funding – but only if EVERYONE has to pay for it. That means every entity that resides or operates in Tulsa and receives a utility bill for water, sewer, etc., regardless of their tax status. Whether or not an organization or individual is a church, private educational institution, ministry or other non-profit, has no bearing on their benefit from Police and Fire service.

With a dedicated source of revenue that is not nearly as unstable as sales tax, the budgets for Police and Fire could be set and held for longer terms. This would also put limits on contracts with unions. When it is clear that there is only a certain amount of money on the table, then the parties involved will have to figure out a way to live with it, like the rest of us. This would prevent future mayors from agreeing to contract terms that cannot be fulfilled and also reign in union demands when there is only a fixed pot of money to work with.

This is not the first time I have sorely missed the commission form of government in Tulsa. At least then there was accountability to the voters for action and inaction of the major city services of Police/Fire, Streets and Water/Sewer. Now it seems that no one at city hall can be held responsible for anything, but they can sure study it and add more staff and look into ways to blame it on a councilor or the mayor or the union.

Adelson and Bartlett compete to show worst judgment, least scruples! Perkins looking better every day.

Ron — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:53:35 +0000

Tulsa’s party-hack mayoral candidates Tom Adelson (D) and Dewey Bartlett (R) continue to set the bar lower and lower in their battle to show which one can demonstrate the least amount of leadership and poorest judgment. I’ve been watching and sometimes participating in campaigns for a number of years now, but cannot remember seeing one that has had so little substance, yet been so full of mud-slinging. Neither candidate really has much political history or background despite holding minor offices, so the campaigns are harvesting every word ever spoken and driving every past vote or stance to some sort of bizarre extreme.

The latest one has Adelson’s ad showing an apparent child molester on a playground and proclaiming that Bartlett would leave your children to fall victim to these criminals. What’s next? Will Bartlett’s campaign create an ad or yet another mailer showing Adelson crushing kitten heads or feasting on dead bodies of puppies?

The one thing that is abundantly clear to me is that both of these morons (and their campaign managers) should be tarred and feathered, then run out of town on a rail. How a candidate campaigns shows their judgment and their ethics (if any) and these two idiots have shown themselves totally unqualified to run a snow-cone stand. Plus, the incredible amounts of money that the Bozo boys are spending means that if either of these slanderers gets elected, there will be a lot of favors to return.

I didn’t find Bartlett or Adelson particularly appealing at the start of this contest – but thanks to their combined efforts I genuinely loathe them both now. You may say that this is just campaigning or that I should focus my anger and disgust on the campaign managers—but the candidates approve this crap or it would not be going out. People show you their true face when they are striving for something they desperately want.

If ever there was a time to ignore political parties and just examine the candidates, this is it. I’m trying my best to found out all I can about the independent candidate Mark Perkins. So far I like what I see and unless he decides to get in the sewer with the other two, he will have my support and vote.

Can the Police ride along with home plate next time?

Ron — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 03:12:12 +0000

Just cannot resist the opportunity to wonder aloud who paid for the helicopter to move the Drillers home plate a handful of miles, while we are grounding the Police helicopters for lack of funds. Once again we see incredible insensitivity on the part of some. I doubt that any govt. funds paid for the silly chopper flight, at least I certainly hope not. However, you can bet that some business will charge this off as business travel or something. Once again, sports trumps everything around these parts, even good taste.

Goodbye Tulsa World

Ron — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:22:05 +0000

We finally decided that the time has come to stop paying $17 a month to have the dead-tree version of the local rag deposited on the driveway. The World has long ago ceased being a newspaper. I will not miss the front page evergreen stories, the full-page snake oil ads, the bizarre editorial positions or the constant drum-beating to spend any amount of tax money to construct some sort of downtown that only exists in the editorial board and publisher’s fantasies.

What really pushed us over the edge was noticing how many times they kept jumping stories to the website. There is plenty of room in the paper for a page dedicated to a brand of Bourbon from years past, and clearly no shortage of space to plug the current touring musicals, but they cannot seem to make space for actual news any more. Today’s top local story is that people apparently get hot and drink lots of water when it is 100 degrees outside. Wow, shouldn’t that be tagged “Breaking News?”

One would hope that the local paper would be the place to find out about local events. Apparently only those events sponsored by the World or favored by Wayne Greene merit a mention. Don’t even get me started on Mike Jones’ constant stream of liberal hate-speech for any knuckle-dragger that does not share his clearly superior positions. The World’s editorials frequently remind me that no group has a monopoly on intolerance and that nothing is apparently as vitally important as puppies.

Newspapers across the country are fighting a losing battle to stay relevant and stay in business. The problem is that for too many of them the business plan seems to be to do less and charge more, then wail about the Internet while giving away the precious little original content they still generate on the Internet. Thankfully there are still a few newspapers that understand that their strength lies in digging out and presenting stories, both news and investigative, not just adding their “coverage” to a story we have already heard.

I never really liked the Tulsa World, but as a former print photojournalist I still wanted my daily “fix.” The Tribune always had much better layout, better use of visuals and frankly better writers and editors, but afternoon papers were the first to go in this Darwinian process. I can read many of the best papers online; some for free and some for a very reasonable access fee.

I’m more than willing to pay for quality content. I do not give my work away for free and do not expect anyone else to. However, I ‘m no longer going to pay $17 a month for shipping and handling of a daily shopper. The paper kept telling us to go to their website—so we will.

Fixing health care for small business, self-employed and individuals — without tax money!

Ron — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 20:30:34 +0000

First of all, my solution for “reform” or actually trust-busting of healthcare for small businesses, self-employed and individuals does not involve tax money, subsidies, or much of anything else from government except mandating some rule changes. Most of these will be at the state level, though it would be necessary to make a small change in HIPAA at the Fed level.

The biggest single problem for all of us “little guys” (small businesses, self-employed and individuals) is the high cost to get into or maintain health insurance coverage, if we can get it at all. This is primarily because the insurance companies and groups, whether private for-profit or run by local or regional non-profit hospital groups, insist on dealing with small entities on a group-by-group basis. This means that a business with 10 employees that includes two or three with chronic conditions or a complicated pregnancy is going to pay a fortune in premiums.

In many cases, the employer simply cannot afford to include enough of the premium in their benefits to have anything left over to actually pay the employees. Since some employees may be able to get coverage through their spouse, the employer may be able to simply not offer healthcare and still attract enough workers. Nonetheless, many small businesses would like to be able to offer coverage to attract a larger pool of workers and perhaps to have group coverage for themselves as well.

This gets really tough if you are self-employed. Unless you are married with a spouse that has good coverage at their job, about the only option is an individual policy. Individual policies are not only very expensive, they also do not have to accept your pre-existing condition the way a group does under HIPAA.

It would seem that the obvious thing to do would be to organize some sort of group that various small businesses and self-employed people could join or affiliate with so that the insurance companies had to deal with them as a group of say 500 people, rather than many small groups and individuals. There would be one administrator for the insurance company to deal with and the risk would be spread out over a larger group, so that 2 or 3 people with chronic conditions no longer represented 25% of the group. This affiliation would also be a group under HIPAA, so those in it would have complete portability of their coverage from employer to employer, or from employer to consultant/contractor.

Anyway, this grouping of lots of small businesses, self-employeds and free-lancers to get affordable health coverage sounds like a great idea, right? Not if you are an insurance company. This sounds like something that has to be prevented, and that is exactly what has happened. Although it is possible to put together a group and negotiate with perhaps one carrier to give your group coverage based on some sort of membership or professional commonality, it is next to impossible to just get together a mixed bag of several dozen small businesses and free-lancers and define it as a group, then get coverage quotes and let your members make an annual choice on which of several competing levels of coverage they want. Why? Because it is highly profitable for insurers to demand that each employer be defined as a group and make the free-lancer/self-employed apply as individuals. This is especially profitable for them when dealing with self-employed people who usually have to buy individual policies because the insurer can exclude pre-existing conditions. If this were a group plan, the HIPAA rules would not allow them to exclude pre-existing conditions.

As more and more of us become free-lancers, consultants, self-employed, this is becoming a bigger and bigger issue and becoming more and more profitable for the insurers.

What needs to happen here is legislation to force the insurers to deal with independent groups on the same basis as large employers including full portability of coverage. If you have a group of 500 people, it really doesn’t matter whether you all work for the same firm or not as far as your likelihood of illness/disease is concerned, so why are the insurers able to insist that it does?

This is NOT a case of government meddling in private business. Ask anyone that knows me, I’m a raving Libertarian. What this is is getting both state and federal governments to STOP allowing the insurers to cherry-pick the group size and composition they choose to deal with and actually restore free enterprise.

Free enterprise is a wonderful thing when it actually is free. When it uses government to grant monopolies or let it play by “special rules” that no other business gets to play by, it is no longer free enterprise. This is the root problem of our health no-care system now. The insurers, drug-peddlers and various other health-industry lobbyists have so gummed up the works with “special rules” that is has no resemblance whatsoever to free enterprise.

The Democrat solution is take money from some to pay for the rest and the Republican solution is to keep telling us that the Democrats are trying to socialize healthcare, and preaching status quo ante. Meanwhile both sides continue to rake in campaign cash from the healthcare industry and enjoy a gold-plated benefit plan that we are all paying for.

If small entities and the self-employed could get affordable coverage through groups or co-ops, the numbers of uninsured and underinsured would drop appreciably, without any tax money! Let’s try this before we throw out more $Billions.

Tulsa Whorled lashes out on the way down

Ron — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 18:02:46 +0000

The local daily fish wrapper continues to show its true nature while its spirals constrict itself into oblivion. Granted, the story by Michael Bates in this week’s Urban Tulsa Weekly is embarrassing – or at least should be. However, according to the story about the libel suit in the daily, it is the issue of circulation numbers that prompted the suit. Never mind that a local-family-owned paper is behaving far worse than any corporate behemoth in luring people away from other jobs, just so they can be laid off in less than a year. And this has apparently happened twice in the last twelve months. Never mind that their editorial policy seems to drift back and forth from whatever BOK wants to “build anything anywhere and let the taxpayers pay for it” to “never seen a tax we didn’t like” (except a tax on advertising).

Tactically, I suppose they had to file the suit, otherwise it implies that the story is exactly correct. Whether or not it is, we may never know as these things have a way of being settled to prevent the expenses from going through the roof. In many libel actions, it’s not whether you can prove the truth of your story, it is whether you can afford to go to court in the first place to be able to prove your story. Fear of the legal expenses in a libel action effectively squelches many stories in small town publications. I certainly applaud Bates and UTW publisher Keith Skrzypcak for going out on the limb for this.

In the Tulsa World story about the suit, World Publisher Robert E. Lorton III is quoted as saying he “does not object to criticism of himself or the World but will not stand for impugning the organization’s honesty.”

So, getting folks to quit a job and come work for you, just to be laid off a few months later is just “business” and does not reflect on the paper’s integrity. This is indicative of the real problem.

What was once a newspaper has become simply a company that prints ads and game scores seven days a week. The odd space that doesn’t carry a hearing aid ad or an Amish miracle heater ad is filled with wire copy, barely rewritten press releases, investigations of puppy mills, or Wayne Greene’s pathetic attempts to find something even lamer and more self-indulgent than Springer Spaniels to write about.

It is especially sad because I know there are still good, capable journalists there. I went to J-school with some of them and have seen the quality of their work, then and now. Sure do miss the Tribune. I didn’t always agree with their positions on things, but at least it actually was a newspaper that was not totally controlled by the local oligarchy.

Who knows, in another year we may be reading Urban Tulsa Daily. Let’s hope so.

-30-

Memorials are in parks, graves are in cemeteries.

Ron — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:48:25 +0000

Finally had to throw in a comment on the silliness of the “consultant from out-of-town” observing that our parks look like cemeteries because of all the memorials. News Flash – memorials are NOT in cemeteries, graves are. Memorials are typically spread around a city or town, or located on or near a spot being memorialized. The great memorials in D.C., Lincoln, Washington, Vietnam Veterans, etc. are not in Arlington Cemetery, but rather in the city itself. Likewise, in our fair city we have memorials to a variety of war veterans, as well as individual people and events located throughout the city – not in cemeteries.

Tulsa has been blessed with an abundance of people that we wish to remember. I am also proud that we have a strong spirit of remembering people and events as it encourages us to draw strength from those that have given of themselves in so many ways.

The “Up With Trees” program is a great way to maintain and expand Tulsa’s urban forest. It is not surprising that people would choose to honor friends or family members by donating to this effort and having a small, simple wooden sign added. If you will actually read many of the signs, you will see that many of them honor living people and their efforts to make life in Tulsa better for us all. Tulsa’s people are remarkably generous with their time and their money and a living group of trees is a great way to acknowledge those special people who go the extra mile.

As far as the River Parks in particular, I feel that some of the NatureWorks pieces could be better integrated into the park with landscaping and such, but they are wonderful pieces and I enjoy them whether cycling or driving in the area. There are other pieces of art in River Parks that I do not understand or relate to, but this is a park for all of Tulsa and I would not want to see it dumbed down to the Thomas Kinkade or Terry Redlin level of greeting card works.

In short, Tulsans from all walks of life have given of themselves and I think it is great that we choose to honor them all over town, not just on the courthouse lawn. I also think it is great that we have a variety of art pieces in our public spaces for all to enjoy. Just because you do not love a particular piece on first viewing doesn’t mean you can’t get something from it if you will open up and give it a try.

Grocio.com wins Tulsa Mayor’s Entrepreneurial Spirit Award

Ron — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:43:53 +0000

Hearty congratulations to Gerald Buckley, creator of Grocio.com and winner of the 2008 Tulsa Mayor’s Entrepreneurial Spirit Award. The award is sponsored by SpiritBank, The Kauffman Foundation, the Tulsa Metro Chamber and the Tulsa Economic Development Commission, among others.

Gerald’s innovative online service provides comparison shopping for groceries. With your zip code and grocery list, Grocio.com will tell you which grocer has the least expensive total checkout for that list, while also providing valuable coupons matching the purchases. Gerald wins a $30,000 check from SpiritBank and an additional $30,000 match from i2e.

Mayor Kathy Taylor presents 2008 Entrpreneurial Spirit Award to Gerald Buckley, creator of Grocio.com

The Spirit Award competition started with over 100 entries this year. Competitors had to provide a complete business plan and give presentations on their business idea. As the competition went along, the competitors received coaching, sharpened their business plans and gave additional presentations to a panel of judges from industry, academia, finance as well as other successful entrepreneurs.

I have had the pleasure of knowing and working with Gerald for several years now and cannot imagine anyone who more embodies both the spirit and action of innovation, excellence, integrity and entrepreneurship. I look forward to seeing Grocio.com and whatever additional efforts he starts being very successful.

Can we please put a sign on our building?

Ron — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 18:53:06 +0000

It’s too bad that there are not any attorneys on the City Council or in the Mayor’s office. Otherwise someone might have gone through the master lease agreement for the new City Hall and noticed the small item about signage needing to be approved by BOK, even if it is signage by the property owner. I don’t really blame BOK for inserting that into the agreement as standard boilerplate, but someone on the City side should have caught it and added exceptions for the property owner, at least within some predefined parameters that could have been reasonably expected since we are going to use this for City Hall and the public and visitors might need something to clarify the location of the primary public entrance.

This is the kind of stuff that happens when everything is rushed through at the last minute. This is also the type of thing that causes many of us a lot of worry about other big agreements like the downtown ballpark trust.

Now, how long is it going to take to get the appropriate people at BOK and the City to show their PUD for the sign, negotiate the details and finally hammer out an agreement.

Kathy – get someone senior in your office to call someone equally senior in Stan’s or George’s office and get this thing done now.

If the property managers at BOK can’t trust the City to put up a reasonable and professional sign that will not degrade the leasing opportunites for the rest of the space, then we want our $7 million back. Once again, it sure looks like “Tulsa – a wholly owned subsidiary of the Bank of Oklahoma.”

Tulsa vs. Tulsa

Ron — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 19:27:10 +0000

The current row about the Tulsa county jail and what it will cost the City of Tulsa for inmates housed therein is ridiculous in the extreme. Clearly adult supervision is needed on both sides. Without being on the inside, or having a good news source that is capable of reporting rather than reprinting press releases, we can’t really know how what should be a routine matter has become a public pissing match.

Both City and County officials, whether elected or staff have a fiduciary duty to the people they supposedly serve, rather than their respective entities. They may well argue that they best serve that duty by standing up for their entity, but most taxpayers would disagree. Although I feel sure there is plenty of blame to go around, other recent events seem to make it clear that a fresh start is needed at the helm of Tulsa County. We have got to get these so-called leaders to stop playing “how can I increase my budget” without regard for where the monies come from.

This is yet another example of why Tulsa needs a different form of county government.