And welcome, Welcome, Welcome. It is time now for our community connection right here on K one. The one you trust and with me here is Aaron kirk Patrick and you are running forward four And we just saw each other just what a few minutes ago?
Yeah, just a couple of hours we sat together at the forum over at our vest.
Yeah, it was. It was an interesting UH event last night. A lot of people got to hear a little bit from each Canada. But we're gonna hear a lot more from you today. One of the big issues in Bartlesville, and especially in your ward is UH is the homelessness issue. And you a few ideas that you've been working on for quite a while. I mean, I remember when you first said you were running you had ideas. Can we hear a little bit about those?
Yeah, And you know, I was really moved by the listener's question that we got to talk about last night, which was essentially, and I won't remember a word for word, but the question was basically, my daughter got chased at knife point on the pathfinder. What can we do to address the homelessness issue? And that's not the only time that I've heard that story. Actually, it's the homelessess situation has really gotten out of control, and we've got people
suffering on both ends of this. We have homeless neighbors who are suffering and we have the rest of the community that's suffering as well.
So I have a plan that I can't take.
Credit for all of it, because in fact, the plan that I put together came from lots of discussions with our nonprofit and helping organizations. On the one hand, it also and I've served in the and volunteered in the homelessness space for twenty years at this point, talking to our police officers and hearing their feedback, talking to homeless individuals and formerly homeless individuals who gave.
Their feedback on this plan.
And I have a plan that at this point I can confidently say, with the endorsement and support of helping agencies all over town, this is the plan that we need to be pursuing. And I call it the high Way out of homelessness or the highway out of here, And essentially the highway out of homelessness is what we
will call it. When we take our helping organizations, we unsilo them and we streamline them so that you know the way that a highway works where there's lots of on ramps, but it all heads in the same direction. We want to we want to be able to intersect with our homeless neighbors and say, no matter what their needs are, we have helping organizations that are already set up to help you, but they struggle to interface well together.
So creating that layer in coordination between those groups will allow us to say, if it's a church that meets a homeless gentleman, or the police owner sect with a homeless lady, or they show up at a gape for help, or one of our homeless shelters, we say, hey, what is your complex web of needs? But wherever we intersect you, we're going to put you on the highway out of homelessness so we can get you into stable housing as
quickly as possible. And by coordinating with these groups, and these groups have all talked about with me how they can coordinate, then we can help people move into stable housing. That is great for people who are experiencing situational homelessness. These are people who if they can get the help that they need, they can move out of homelessness and
into a more stable living situation. What our police officers are dealing with are people who are homeless by choice, meaning and this is a fairly small number of people, but there are people who are just hey, I'm happy living outside of the tent. I'm happy using the services that Bartlesville has to offer. And these people, they don't start in Bartlesville. Let's see, I met aman yesterday who
moved here from Wichita. Last week, there were four or five guys who all came together from Durant now are homeless in Bartlesville. The police were telling me last month about a guy who had trained, hopped from la and ended up staying in Bartlesville because he discovered all of the services that our town has to offer. So when you talk to homeless individuals, and I've talked to a bunch of them about this plan, almost none of them
started in Bartlesville. So for those folks, if you want to get out of homelessness, we want to help you do that. If your desire is to be homeless and just to use the services we have, we're not interested in helping with that because there is a cost to the rest of the community. I talk a lot about the externalization of consequences.
So if I make a choice and it.
Impacts and then there's a negative consequence that comes from it, and I put that negative consequence onto you. I've externalized the consequence of my action onto you, right. That have the community level too. It's why I'm not allowed to take my dumpster and empty it into my neighbor's yard.
No, we have that.
Yeah, if my dumpster's overflowing, I can't toss it into somebody else's yard because I've externalized the consequence of my choices. So that's happening at the community level right now. So the Highway out of here would essentially make make lowest level misdemeanors of a few behaviors that are negatively impacting the community. Camping in certain public spaces, specifically like around Pathfinder for instance, where there's lots of homeless encampments out
there right now, yep, aggressive panhandling outside of businesses. And then for our business owners, dumpster diving, especially downtown. Our business owners have really had an issue with dumpster diving and them having to clean up the litter that other people have created. If we make these low level misdemeanors, then it gives the police officers probable cause to interact with folks, and the goal of that is education. Here are the resources we have for you. What help do
you need? How do we get you on the highway out of homelessness. But if people are not interested in changing their behavior, well, I want to keep living out here, I want to keep going through the dumpsters, I want to keep panhandling.
That's where the misdemeanors come into play.
And the goal of misdemeanors is not to put a homeless people in jail or to find homeless people.
That's absolutely not the goal.
The goal is community service, so the individuals become contributing members of our community. If they don't do that, then those misdemeanors are publicly available to our helping organizations so that they can say when you show up to a gape, for instance, they run your ID before they serve you and say, I'm sorry, you've got these misdemeanors because you've not been complying with our homelessness laws. We're just going to turn off the tap. We can't serve you. At
that point. We don't have to force people out. An individual has a choice to make either join the highway out of homelessness, right start taking these services and getting the help you need to get out of homelessness, or figure out a way to provide for yourself, or move to a community that will. So it's all I think a lot about individual agency and agent see is simply the dignity to make choices and understand the consequences of
those choices. It's freedom and responsibility. So my goal is to treat our homeless neighbors with the same dignity that I treat the rest of our community with and to say, let us help you make choices that will lead you out of homelessness, or we will give you the freedom not to make those choices, and we have the choice not to help, not to enable, And in doing so, our helping organizations have said overwhelmingly, and this is a Skelton like it will continue to be fleshed out and improved,
but they've said overwhelmingly, this is the plan that we need. At the same time that I proposed this plan publicly as part of my campaign into the City Council, the City Council voted on a homeless on a homeless plan
as well. Their plan was to spend a month putting together a plan for a committee and then to vote on that committee, and then to have that committee study the homeless this issue for six months, then come back to the back to the city council with hopefully a recommendation for what to do.
That's a year.
So it's meetings about meetings about meetings for six months before we do anything, like it's a bureaucrats, bureaucratic solution, and it's not a solution at all because for those six months, my wife and daughters still can't walk on pathfinders safely by themselves.
Neither can yours. So we've got a crisis.
We're going to six month spend six months studying the crisis when we have professionals in the community with decades of experience who are endorsing this plan saying the highway out of homelessness is what we need, and they go, well, we should probably study it.
For six more months. To me, that's a pretty inefficient way to deal with a crisis. Very good.
You have another one called like a land rush.
Yeah yeah, people are almost said, going what.
And folks, you need to hear.
Yeah.
So the hometown Heroes land Run is on the west side of town. Especially, we have an affordable housing crisis.
Yes.
In fact, I spoke to a few women at the Westside Community Center this last Saturday who said they're knocking down the homes in our in our neighborhoods, but not building anything else instead of a lot. Yes, and in fact, the city owns some of these properties. So my idea the way that real estate development works is once investment money comes into a community, other investment money will follow it.
Because once once you start to have economic signals that this neighborhood is being is being upgraded or built or improved, Yes, exactly, other people see it and go, well, if I invest here now, then I've got a larger profit margin down the road. So what we want to do is begin that investment process so that we will see this cascade
of positive effects. So the Hometown Heroes Land Run is to is to take these lots that the city owns because of tax delinquency, and rather than selling them, I want to give the away through a raffle or a lottery system to our teachers, our firefighters, and our police officers.
And on the back end, I've been working with lending organizations to streamline the financing process and with some of our local developers to streamline the building process and asking both of these into these both these groups of people, Hey, take a little less money on the front end of this thing because of the people you're helping. These are folks that we want to stay in Bartlesville. And at
the backside, yes that. So then we take these properties ninety days out, we'd put them on the city's website to these organizations and say, hey, these are the properties we're given away. Would you like to enter the raffle for them, and our teachers, police officers, firefighters can go and look at them and say yes, I'd like to
build here. They give them three months to get to get funding secured, to get a house plan secured, so by the time that they win that property, they're ready to break ground, just boom immediately.
And then as those houses go up. One of the one.
Key pieces we have a really high, i think an unhealthy high density of rentals in the west side of town. So these properties will have to be owner occupied for the first ten years, which means that whoever is living there will be a part of that community. We're not building the house just to have more rentals. We're building the house to have more community members.
I have a question, Yes, sir, what if someone has to make a life change or a move and what happens to that home?
Yeah, so they're still they're allowed to sell a home. In fact, you could develop it and sell it immediately, but whoever buys it will.
Still have to be owner occupied for the first decade. Understood.
Yes, And then part of what I'm trying to do, part of what this will also allow us to do is because we have an affordable rental problem too. A lot of the lots downtown are already zoned multi family residential. So my idea with these lots is to let people build the home that they want to live in. But at the same time, you can build a detached rental unit as well. And a lot of these properties can be in above garage apartment that can be a free
standing apartment. But basically you have the owner occupants living on the property and then they can have renters living on the property with them. By doing that, it allows the builders to be able to afford their mortgage a
little more easily. But also what we'll be building then is typically rentals that are going to be sub one thousand dollars a month, which is really what we need right now in bartles BA badly got lots of single moms going, Hey, me and my two kids are looking for a two bedroom apartment for less than thousand bucks a month. They are extremely hard to find, especially in a unit that you'd feel safe with your kids.
But because it's.
Owner occupied, you have people who are going to be taking really good care of this brand new property. So it's going to be a lot safer because the people who own the property are living right there as your next door neighbor.
They do the renter.
So we're dealing with two different issues, or actually it's more like five. We get this, we get this property off the city you know tax doll We start making property taxes off the property, so it benefits the entire community. We benefit our hometown heroes by helping them build affordable house for themselves. We benefit the community around them, and we start building affordable rentals, which also.
Helps our community. It's just a cat. I love.
I love ideas that have positive cascading effects, and I think we need those kind of ideas at the government level.
Where can we find out more about you and these ideas. I understand you've got a couple of videos that explain these in greater detail than what we have time for here.
Yeah, so if you're streaming this on Facebook right now, you can go to you can just search Aaron for Ward four on Facebook. My Facebook page has tons of videos explaining policy ideas. You can also go to my website erinforward four dot com, or you can just probably google Aaron for Ward four and it'll come up. Facebook is the best way to connect with my ideas because I'm because of these videos happen, you know, every other.
Day, I'm putting out lots of content, lots of content.
That's right, my goodness sakes. And once again early voarding starts today and election Day is coming up on Tuesday. And Aaron Kirkak, thank you very much for.
Being here with now. Thank you, Tom, appreciate it already.
Folks, you have been watching and listening to our commuter