CITY MATTERS w TIM SHERRICK

Good morning, good morning, good morning, welcome, welcome, welcome time now for city matters on our community connection. And with this here a city Councilman Tim Sharey.

Hey, dude, sir, doing great, Tom, Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

Always great to have the folks in from the city. You'll give us kind of a recap of what happened with the City Hall last night. The big news, I guess was the Task Force on the Homeless. And I understand that we got an ordinance taken care of and a few things that we're kind of brought to light to concerning some language and what have you.

Yes, that's true, So I have a copy of the ordinance here with us.

Sure, And I thought that the committee did a very fine job kind of keeping government and it's lane, you know, it's it's not our job to try to legislate an individual's pathway to recovery.

We can't do that. We don't know what they need.

We can't come to them with a holistic approach and support that they're going to need to perhaps recover from some of the life controlling behaveaviors that have been pointed out by the committee. But what they did was create an infrastructure here that regulates certain kinds of behaviors in public spaces as it relates to matters of public health and safety, and that is a legitimate government concern, and I think they did a very good job keeping that

Oh, very good. So you got to keep up with the times, as they say, yes, sir, So there we go. Other things that we're I guess talked about were trying to make sure that these folks get their ideas because some of them run around with no identification.

Right, it is important to get them an ID to make sure that we can recognize who we're dealing with. That allows repeat encounters with individuals to be guided, if you will, so that they can be directed to the appropriate resource to best suit whatever they may need. Particularly when we're talking about acute care, where you're talking about you, do you have water, do you have food? Do you have adequate survival skills?

Here? Are you going to be? Okay?

That's kind of the first humanitarian effort, and so that's I think very important. Another piece of that, though, is that if you get them to the nonprofit, they don't have to pay for the ID. If they just go to the tag office like you and I, you're gonna have to pay for a photo ID. It doesn't matter if it's a drivers. So I think that's that's a nice feature that the nonprofits can help them to get a photo ID that will help them to do a lot of other things like.

Help them help themselves.

Absolutely, you know you'll need it for a job interview.

You will as you as they begin to come out of perhaps the homeless situation that they're in.

They'll need those kinds of things. You know, if you want to go apply for a job at Walmart, they're gonna want to picture.

Id you bet you any any place? Really. Also, I understand that we cleaned up some of the language. I remember several weeks ago, actually a couple of months ago, there was an email that went out saying that the city is going to find anybody and everybody found homeless why one hundred dollars?

Right, There was some information out there that we were attempting to criminalize homelessness.

No, we're not. So what that does is it allows a protection.

To exist for anyone who might have to encounter the courts. By stamping it with a maximum of five hundred dollars, it keeps it firmly within the realm of a misdemeanor offense, rather than being perhaps misconstrued as a felony offense.

That that's good for everybody. It is.

Not something that's going to be handed out as a matter of first choice.

As these people are encountered. The language of the ordinance.

Now says that the officers have the option of helping to refer them. I think as we go through this next six months, you can see some QR code that pop up. It's amazing that people are homeless but still have cell phones and access to a lot of that Internet access. But it's good for us because we can make it available in a very portable fashion all of the resources that they could access if they choose to do so.

So it's going to be based on.

Repeat offenders, of course, will be adjudicated, perhaps a bit more stringently than others. I think that's appropriate. I think you see that in the entirety of our law. But it's not going to be where they're just passing out five hundred dollars fines because you happen to be homeless and sitting on a sidewalk someplace.

Okay, very good. Other things coming up, I guess there was some land things that are coming up in the future that you deal with our city owned lands that I guess it's coming up. As far as the Endeavor twenty, what's going on.

There, Well, we had a couple of things that dealt with property.

We accepted some.

Bids for development in a couple of areas. Some of that will create new housing in Bartlesville.

There were some other things that we had to deal with that.

For one individual, they thought perhaps it would be better if they just knocked property down. And I was really impressed with Larry Curtis as he volunteered to give some more time to work with that individual and make sure that his property rights were preserved. That he was going to make sure that it could be the property itself could be secured and then that would keep that where he could use it.

For his business as a shed and so forth.

So I thought that was a highlight there that you know, Larry really approached this with some compassion. Now, as far as as the other things for the zoning, we did create an ad hot committee that consists of three community members. They were based on the recommendation and that packet, of course is available for everyone out on the city website if you want to go see all the detail of that.

And we.

Also placed Councilman Kirkpatrick on as the City Planning Commission representative and Vice Mayor Dorsey as the council representative.

And what they're going to do is.

Review and select a contractor basically to come in and evaluate our code and see what might need to be remediated as it relates to the endevor twenty forty five plan.

So how often is this group going to meet as needed or.

It's going to be on an as needed basis.

They'll have to identify first of all, how much needs to be adjusted so that it's brought into alignment, and I think that will set their schedule.

Okay, good. Our reporter who was there last night, they told me this in an email. I got it just a guess. Before we came on about information sharing or a documentation, A discussion took place there. I really couldn't make anything out of the audio I heard, But what was that all about? It? It seemed like that you guys were kind of talking past each other a little bit.

It is.

About document retention and the authority to destroy. So anytime that you have public records, you have to have a document that controls how long they're retained. Like if you were going to talk about a financial it might be five or ten years, or maybe even fifteen years, depending on exactly right.

So this was.

Hey, guys, we haven't addressed new forms of media in many years, so there are certain forms of media that are out there that we need to create a policy around.

What has been omitted what has not been brought up to speed.

So I think the last time that they touched on this was around twenty ten or twenty twelve. They didn't have the proliferation of email, text and other like WhatsApp, signal and other messaging applications. They didn't have body worn cameras back then.

No, I mean they were around, but they weren't used wide use.

Yeah, right, there was an explosion of social media over the last ten to fifteen years. Voicemails were not included in the previous policy, So there were certain things that we needed to go back and say, Okay, this is going to be our policy. This is how long we're going to set as a city that these things need to be retained. And then certain other things we set as a city policy to know required retention, and what that means basically is that it defaults back to the

The life of the case. Sure, basically that seems pretty simple, cut and dry.

Absolutely, So there was some concern that we wanted to provide for transparency so people would be able to come down and ask for records and be able to see certain kinds of communications that may have contributed to some decision making.

So we moved the email, text.

And other electronic messaging from a no retention required policy at the city level to a two year retention policy. Oh okay, And what that will do basically is preserve all of those types of messages over the life of a single elected term and bleed over slightly into the

So basically, getting some clarification. That's what the discussion was. Like you said, the new media. That's and you know, could have gone back to nineteen forty three when it was just telephoned. Yeah, got to keep an eye on dates and what's happening with the times.

Right, And some of us communicate in different manners, so some of us primarily communicate face to face in by phone. I think that's great because anytime you try to send a message, you lose the nuance. How much of our communication is nonverbal a lot.

And you know what a text or a message on WhatsApp or a signal has no tone, and with that, you're the recipient and you can see that as somebody just getting up in your face, or is somebody just kind of just saying nothing and it doesn't have that human component. I understand that.

Totally right, And that's something that I decided early on that I would try to do, is make myself available to have those conversations. I've said several times, I've got fifteen minutes for anybody, you know, And it also makes sense from a certain perspective for me because I'm a senior analytics consultant.

That's what I do every day.

That's your world, that's my world, and my time is at a premium depending on what project is going on at the time. So it makes more sense for me to take five minutes with you by phone or ten or fifteen minutes and work through an issue and give you what information or direct you to what resources you may need and be done, whereas if I have to go back and forth on email because it's misconstrued, it's

Or a simple TYPEO can really throw a.

Message off the error and punctuation can really.

Punctuation is sexy.

So that's that's something that I do. I may I've posted my phone number out there. I talk to more people by phone than anything else, and that's that's one way that I try to make sure that people have a better understanding of what we're doing and why okay, okay, good.

Anything else you'd like to bring up that maybe do we have any openings on boards, commissions, stuff like that we do. You guys are always looking for somebody.

We do, so they put these out there and of course We're really trying to stimulate more community involvement.

You bet.

We want everybody to at least throw your resume online and let's see what we can do. It may not always be a good fit, but we'll see where it could fit. One area that I'd like to promote because I happen to serve on that board is the Bartlesville Area History Museum Trust Authority. We also need someone on the Bartlesville Library Trust Authority. There's an opening on the Street and Traffic Committee, and two openings on the White Rose Cemetery Board.

Just go to the website the City of Bartlesville dot org.

Correct.

You can go out there and fill out the application online and then you can be considered for those things.

Sure, anything else you'd like to pass along.

There was one consideration or concern that was brought up in our meeting about the flock cameras. You know, we passed a new ordinance related to flock, and as part of that ordinance, we said we did not want.

Who share the data outside of Bartlesville.

And so there was a story online back on May thirtieth from four h four Media that talked about lookups that were conducted by agencies across dozens of states, including police departments in Texas, Florida, Missouri, and Arizona. And in many of those cases, local officers were acting on informal requests from federal agents to try to discover information about immigrants, undocumented people, and so forth.

So we had a moment to.

Talk to Chief Ickleberry about that, and he assured us that it would have to be part of a criminal investigation that is documented, or they would not fulfill the requests. So I think that put to rest some of the concerns immediately in the community. But there's always that sharing agreement, and that's troublesome. The data is accessible, the data is hackable. I don't think that flock was ever a great idea because.

Of some of those things.

It is still twenty four by seven surveillance, and even though we're modifying it somewhat for our community, it's not one of those things that's ever going to be completely secure unless or until they institute a universal standard, and those just don't exist, so those mutual sharing.

Agreements are still out there.

I did see that Guthrie actually is getting rid of flock after having experimented with it, and that may be something that Bartlesfield wants to do at some point, I know that we are still considering the possibilities of doing that. So this is a concern. These kinds of things are continuing concern. There's also a concern where Flock in Georgia is now using drones. So they have a nine to one one drone. When a nine to one one call

So the drone pulls you over.

The drone sends the video to the police unit.

I got you, okay.

So there's a guy standing on the side of the road flying the drone and there's three cars the video that I saw, there's like three cars sitting there, and as it gets a hit for someone not wearing a seat belt, someone who's texting on their phone while they're driving. The drone identifies, it sends the video to the police unit, and the police unit pulls them over and writes some

Texting and driving is kind of stupid.

It is very stupid.

You look down, you've gone one hundred yards. I don't think people realize that, right you look down at your phone, You've gone hundred yards. Lot could happen in one hundred yards.

It's very dangerous.

I think our concern is, you know, with using these things to help to perhaps remediate some things that we feel like are inherently dangerous. It's that's a precedent that it could potentially be used to regulate things that aren't.

So it's all about trying to find where the line is.

It really is, and that finding the line for some is blurry.

In Oklahoma, you know, I had a conversation with John Eccles, who's running for our next Attorney general's position, and I talked with him through some concerns around FLOCK. And he also believes that FLOCK is perhaps in violation of Oklahoma's Title forty seven. He also believes that it could present a Fourth Amendment encroachment. He was in Barblesville speaking to the Oklahoma Second Amendment Association when he made those comments.

So it was back in February.

It was just our very last meeting.

Oh meeking, gotcha?

No, I'm sorry. It was not our last meeting. Charity Lynch was here at our last meeting. It was the meeting before that.

All right, good, Well, I want to thank you for coming in, yes, sir, after a busy night last night. Yeah, got some beauty rest. But Tim Shark, thank you very much for being a part of our program here on City Matters.

Thanks for having me Tom, always a pleasure.