Good morning, good morning, good morning, and welcome, welcome, welcome. It's time now for one of our two community connections here this morning. We're going a little bit early today. We have Aaron Kirkpatrick in and he is running for the office of Ward for city counselor here in Bartlesville. And welcome back. You've been here many times.
Yeah, good morning time.
I'm excited to be here, excited to get talk to you and everybody else about I guess local politics for the first time.
What made you want to jump into the waters.
Man, I've been thinking about it for years, but I was in Mayor Copeland's district when we first moved here, and of course.
I thought he's done a great job. Didn't want to run against him.
Moved downtown several years ago, and Billy Roan was our representative and I admired her.
I thought that she was phenomenal.
Unfortunately, she passed away suddenly earlier this year, and so when that happened, I thought, Okay, I love what she did, and there's an opportunity now to not run against her, but instead just step in and run for the things that I'm excited about that I believe in, and for hopefully the future of Bartlesville.
That's a very positive outlook. Running for you're not although there are others running for the same office. You're all competing, but you're not running against each other. You're all running for the goal.
Right And it's really common to hear people talk about, oh, you're running into you're getting into politics, like you must be angry.
What are you mad about? Who you know who ticked you off? Are what are they doing that's wrong?
And I mean there's room for improvement and all those kind of things, But for me, at least, the idea that I'm going to get in because I'm mad about something. So I've been leading organizations churches for almost twenty years now, and what I can tell you is when you are led by people who lead out of fear or anger or frustration, that flows out to everybody else.
And the last thing that you want to be.
Is in a community that is run by anger and fear and frustration.
It just becomes a very toxic place.
And what we want And one of the things I think is great about Bartlesville is that it feels like a community even though it's really large. You see the same people at Walmart at the baseball field, downtown, eating out on a Saturday night, whatever, And that sense of community needs to be a positive, healthy place for people.
Oh indeed it does. So you've got your campaign started. You're going to be in the big November election because city council will be all in that as well. And we've got, like you said, a beautiful community and you mentioned improvements. What improvements would you like to see?
Well, one that's I've got one big one that I'll tell you about it in a second.
Let's we'll build it. Yeah.
Yeah, let's let's talk about some that everybody is really concerned about. Right.
One that is on top of everybody's mind after the last two years is water infrastructure. And everybody's seen their water bill go up and that stresses people out. At the same time, we all saw pictures of how low our lakes got, our reservoirs got over the last couple of years. So both like sustainable water infrastrutructure, but also safe water at the same time, you want to make sure the water you're drinking is water you want to
put in your body. And we got great people who work on both ends of our water infrastructure, both treating and getting it to us and also treating it on the way out, but making sure that we have not just a vision for the future, because we've had ideas, but to continue.
Most of everybody needs to understand this is I understand it.
Most of our struggle long term comes from actually dealing with the Army, Corps of engineers and things at the federal level.
So it's actually not stuff that we control a lot of.
And there's this what I think is a really backwards approach, which is it's eventually it is cheaper to build the new lake than to fix the ones we've got, and that that is a logic that could only be thought up at the federal level, right, I mean, at some point it is better to be a good steward of what you have and help it lasts as long as possible than it is to go, well, I'll just use it till it breaks and then buy something new. That's
a really poor way to govern anything. But that requires ongoing conversations and just an unwillingness to quit when dealing with.
The federal government.
We ought to be every time it gets a Drought've been saying this for ten years. Every time we hit a drought, year. Why don't we put people out there with backos and tractors getting the silt out of the lakes, you know, and then taking them somewhere, putting a cover crop and getting the heavy metals out of them. These things seem like common sense solutions in the meantime, since since the federal government and the Army Corps of Engineers
says not let us do those things. Now we're talking about what building a pipeline to call lake drawing out of it with you know, three or four other cities, and also everybody's bill is going to go up dramatically
from something like that. On the back end, I want to see make sure that as we do these these big infrastructure improvements on our water treatment facilities, that we're doing it in a way that is good for the whole community and addressing one of the big problems that we now know we have that prior to this we hadn't focused much on, which is p fast.
These forever chemicals.
These forever chemicals are in all of our water supplies at this point, and they're all linked to to a host of issues, including like intocrend disruptors, meaning your hormone levels get all jacked up and long term cancer.
So there are ways to remove that from the water supply.
The city council just approved an eighty million dollar overhaul to our water our waste water treatment, which is a necessary infrastructure investment, but it does not have that component built into it that I'm aware of. So one of the first things I did once I announced that I was running was I met with Mike Bailey, or our city manager, and said, hey, are you aware of this technology? And I shared it with some videos and information with him and said, this technology, as I understand it is
cheaper than what we're about to put in. It is energy positive, not energy negative, which is energy is like it usually accounts for something like forty percent of the cost of water treatment, and then on the downstream of that it removes pfasts, which I mean, that's just a win win win as far as I can tell. So it's this is a big one, like a big improvement we like to see. Obviously we have, you know, ongoing
retail development downtown. I think that's awesome and want to just do whatever I can do to help supercharge it.
The west side of town where my ward is. My ward's actually it's huge.
It actually goes the west side of Highway seventy five north of Adams, all the way through Oak Park and then down to thirteenth Street. It's massive. But one of the things that we are all feeling to pinch on and especially in ward for, is the need for more healthcare and quality healthcare and affordable healthcare. So this is not something the city council does on their own, but I'm friends with a group of people who have been working behind the scenes to bring more healthcare options to
Bartlesville for several years. They made a ton of progress, but eventually it gets to the point where you have to decide, are there obstacles in the way for them moving here?
Right?
Is there are you know, are there zoning restrictions that need to be changed? Is there infrastructure that needs to be negotiated or tax breaks?
Things like this.
We need these resources here yesterday, and I have been working behind the scenes with these people to kind of find out where they are and say, if I can get elected, whatever I can do to help, I will help do because we need those resources. And then lastly, I would say one that lots of us are feeling the pinch on is affordable housing and this is a nationwide problem, but local is where we have the chance to help, and.
We're part of the nation. Yes, so.
I have done some real estate development myself, some real estate investment myself, and the downtown area is ripe for fixing up old dilapidated structures, taking them down to the ground and building new stuff.
We're seeing some of that investment go on.
But there was a plan that was actually recommended to the city council I think over a decade ago that suggested ways to improve or to increase the amount of small housing that we had, basically making it easier for people who own a house or own a piece of property to build a free, outstanding building at a above
garage apartment or a tiny home something like that. We have a lot of single people and like single moms with kids, who if you get on some of the Facebook groups here locally, are always asking I'm looking for a one to two bedroom place for one thousand dollars a month or less. It's really hard to find that right now because we just don't have the inventory. Part of the reason we don't have the inventory is zoning regulations. That is something that city council can have a hand
in so directing the city planners and the city managers. Hey, we want to see we want to make it easier for people to develop the land they already own, to increase the supply of affordable housing that we have, which will which will then lower rent costs and ultimately it may even lower mortgage costs.
You got a big video on your website, don't you.
Yes, So I just it's it's on my Facebook page aerin forward for Then I have a website which is aerinforward for dot com, which.
Lays out what I'm about to tell you.
So it goes along with the affordable housing idea, and I would encourage anybody to go check this out. I'll tell you the details, but watch the video because it lays it out really well. And then the website has like detailed you know, deeper than I'm sure we'll get here.
So so here's.
A little background you need to know that will help you get to as excited as I am by the time we're done. So, when a piece of property gets abandoned or gets dilapidated, people stop paying property taxes on it. When that happens, the county puts a lean on that property. Right, it's just a tax lien, and you have the opportunity to come back and pay it, pay your back taxes. But if you don't, after enough time, the county takes possession of that land.
So what used to happen.
Is the county takes possession of you know, some house that hadn't had its taxes paid, it's been abandoned, it's you know, falling apart, the grass is grown tall, if it's in city limits. The City of Bartlesville has been on the hook for maintaining that land until it got something got done with it. Okay, So we were out money, out tax money to pay people to take care of the property, and then the city or the county would auction them off and the county would make the revenue.
Off of it.
So this year the state passed a law that allowed the cities to take possession of these properties from the county, and back in August.
The city council voted to do that.
But at that meeting, if you go back and watch the discussion, they said, Okay, we're not really sure what to do with these properties, but let's go ahead and take them so maybe we can figure out something to do with them in the future.
Okay.
I met with this city planner with the city manager and kind of said, what's the plan here.
They said, we're not sure yet, but some idea.
Along the lines of will either auction them off or will bundle them and sell them to developers. Okay, it's not a bad idea, but it's not a great idea.
You don't know what you're get.
So I woke up at five thirty in the morning a couple of weeks ago from a dead sleep. I sat up in bed and went, oh, my goodness, I know what to do. Like this is this idea is awesome. So I called this idea the hometown hero Land Run. Okay, right now, the city owns about a dozen of these lots.
They're just most of them are just vacant lots. My suggestion is instead of auctioning them off, which in the past has meant that maybe the neighbor buy it for fifty to five hundred dollars and then just have a double lot and you don't get it developed. Instead of doing that, my suggestion is that we create a raffle system for our teachers, police officers, and firefighters.
So the city owns these properties forget about selling them.
Instead, if you serve the city in one of these roles, however many years you've served, you get an entry to whatever drawings we do, to the raffles that we do to potentially win one of these properties. So we all wish we could pay these people more, and frankly, they get sucked away from Bartlesville by cities or states that will pay more than we can afford to. And it's not that they're all just chasing money, so they're trying to figure out how to make wise choices for themselves
and their families. So one thing that we can do now we've got these lots, and so my idea is ninety days out, we publish on our website. Hey, here's the properties we have. Teachers, police officers, firefighters. You have time to go look at these properties, meet with a local lender to see if you can see or funding.
Meet with a local builder or developer to kind of drop some plans how you will develop this property, so that before the drawing happens, you can come to the city planner's office and say, I want this piece of property, Here's what I'm going to do with it, and then you can enter into the raffle. You don't divide up your entries or whatever it says, all in on one property that you want to develop, because what we want is for those cities to or those properties to move
off the city ledger back into private hands. Okay, this is good for all of us, even if like myself, I don't benefit from this, but my tax money is no longer going to.
Keep up a piece of property.
In fact, it will then be developed, which will help the city because it'll start getting property taxes back off of that and these people can build a house that they can afford.
Now this is important.
As part of this part of the hometown hero land run, I would add a stipulation that whatever building you built the primary residence there.
Must be owner occupied for ten years.
One of the challenges we have in a lot of our neighborhoods is that they are especially in the downtown area, it's actually more it's owned by people who rent them out, so they're occupied by renters. And what that does when you own a bunch of these things, you tend to kind of check out. You just collect the rent checks and you let the property so slowly fall apart. That
hurts everybody's property value. It hurts everybody's standard of living, It increases crime and blight in the host of other things. So when you build this property, for the first ten years, it has to be owner occupied. So you can build it and live in it, or you can build it and sell it. Right, so you can develop the property, make a nice profit off of it, sell to somebody who's going to live there, and that's good for the neighborhood.
Right. So if you build and live in it.
When a police officer, firefighter move into a neighborhood, the whole neighborhood becomes safer, So that benefits everybody. When you have owner occupied properties, that benefits the whole neighborhood because you begin to invest in that community, You keep up the property, you take.
Care of it, so even if they sell it, it's still going to be good.
If a teacher moves in on the neighborhood, she begins to get to know or he begins to get to know the families the children that are involved in the school district, which can make it and invest in those communities too. We want our people to put down deep roots in these neighborhoods. At the same time, it increases property value. So literally everybody in those neighborhoods benefits from
this program along the way. The way I look at it, it benefits the individuals who win the raffle, It benefits the neighborhoods where these people move in, It benefits the local economy, and it benefits the city government, and it decreases the tax burden for the rest of us taking care of these properties.
It is a win win. One more idea, just to put a cherry on top, I think that we do this.
The Bartlesville Redevelopment Trust Authority already has a policy like this in place where if you use city funds to upgrade your property to build those kind of things, it must be done with local labor.
I think the same thing would apply here. At least I would like to see the same thing apply, or at least.
Some percentage of the contractors that you use to build a property must be local labor, which then goes to stimulate the local economy, but stimulates the local economy.
Without any of us paying more taxes.
Wow, okay, where can we find this on your website and on your Facebook page? Tell us where your website is?
So Aaron four fr Aaron for Ward four the number four, okay Aerinforward four dot com, there's a tab up there that says hometown Heroes Land Run. And then if you just search on Facebook for Aaron for Ward four, you'll find my Facebook. It's that video went live at eight point thirty yep. Share it with all your teacher friends, all your police officer friends, all your firefighter friends, and if you know people in Ward four, I'd love it if you'd encourage them to check it out.
All right, Aaron Kirkpatrick, thank you for being with us.
Thank you,