And good morning, good morning, good morning, and welcome, welcome, welcome. It is time now for our community connection, a little thing we call city matters. If it matters, you have matters to the city, and we welcome in the brand new mayor of Barnellsville, Mayor James Kurt.
How are you doing there, sir, Great, glad to be here this morning.
A little bit of a lengthy process last night, from what I understand, well it was.
It was a great meeting last night.
Understand, everybody got heard.
Everybody got heard. We had a lot of citizens speak last night. We had some good conversation on the council. We had support for several members of the council last night to be the mayor. And I came through at the end and as I said the last night, I'm humbled and honored and thankful to be elected the mayor of Barnesol, Oklahoma.
Well, you've got a whole new set of players except you and mister Dorsey. We do, and it's going to be interesting to see how everybody comes together and how we we call.
Us as a council.
Yeah, I think last night was a good indication of that. We just you know, you get you get used to doing things the way you do them. And now we've got new people and new ideas, and I'm looking forward to working with mister Shrick, mister East and h mister Kirkpatrick.
It's going to be a good counsel.
I think they're all interested in proving in improving Bartlesville and making us helping us move forward.
Well, very good, like you say, you know, with some fresh blood, some fresh ideas.
Who knows, change is good change. It's not always easy, but it's good.
So you've been a vice mayor for what two terms?
Right, that'll be my three terms. I've been for six years and then this will be my first term is married? Ye?
Okay, Well, so how do you how do you see that role?
Well, it's a I've got to sit to one of the next to one of the best mayors. I think bartles has had many years of Dell Copeland and uh uh we said some nice things about him last night. He's been a selfless mayor of service community well for thirteen years and uh I've learned a lot from him. And I think just being the mayor is just I'm
just one vote. I've just got to figure ahead of the meeting basically to make sure that the meeting proceeds smoothly, we worked through the agenda and continue the city's business every day.
So it's an honorable role and you.
Could see last night that there was other people available for that role. But as I said, I came through at the end and I'm proud and looking forward to being that.
Mayor speaking and looking forward. You've got a brand new year coming up.
What do you see coming up here as things we need to address, like water and things like that.
I imagine we certainly do.
I think this was on the list of several of the new councilors. They want to know what the water situation is, how it's moving forward or not.
They're interested in homelessness. We certainly have.
Issues social issues that we're going to be facing here that we've talked about before. The drag shows and things will be things that I think will come before us again. So those are things that the council's faced before and looked at, and we've got new voices and fresh ideas, so we'll bring those forward and then see what we can do to improve our processes going forward.
Well, we have the place for having a few of the new council members in here already and talk with them a bit and a lot of reading goes into this before you really take the oath, and yes, go take the deep dive.
I understand.
Yeah, it's you know, the learning curve they do say, it's drinking from a fire hose and stepping into the arena of politics on a level of city politics like this, there's a lot to learn very early, and I'm eight years in and still learning every day. But thankful for our city administration, for our city directors that we have there. They make our job so much easier. They're all engaged,
they're interested in making our city go better. And I think new counselors will come to see how things operate and still have their own opinions of what we could do and do better and look forward to hearing from that.
Well.
Yeah, definitely, having a wide spectrum of opinions is good because people come from different you know, backgrounds and what have you, in different neighbor hoods and different experiences. It's going to be an interesting blend. Now, mister Mike Bailey, forst works with the city staff, but he also works with the the older people too.
The councilors.
Ye.
Well, yeah, so he's got his work.
That out for you. Does that he does? Yeah?
And then I think the thing that what I like to see is just the continuity and government so we can continue to do what we've done for the last eight or ten years while I've been on there, and I know we've we've gotten through a lot of tough issues before.
We've got through COVID.
We've got things that we've got and we've got more tough issues ahead. We've got homelessness, We've got some things going on. We've got people interested in our surveillance techniques of our city police department, the block cameras. So those are issues that we'll bring forward and discuss and come up with, hopefully a reasonable.
Solution for him.
Well you can't.
You said something here about the block cameras. That's something that's been kind of going around almost every community in the United States here late. Yes, what's the price of safety? What's the price? What do you forfeiting in order to get a.
Little something right? Where does the information go? Who holds the information? Is it just for license plates? I think those are learning curves. I have to come up with better on our police chief is going to have a kind of a citizen's forum, the better explain the police's position on it, and then it'll come before the council I think at some point as to how we use these in the future or not.
Okay, that'd be interesting. Be also interesting to hear the you know, the the public comment on that as well.
Well, we heard a lot last night, and it's informed. There are people that understand it better than I do at this point. They've done a lot of research on it, so it's an eye opening experience. We all appreciate security, We all appreciate making sure that people are safe, but there is a cost involved and sometimes it may be too high a cost, and that something we should do or shouldn't do, And I think that's something we'll look at in the future.
Getting back to the water, it seems like, you know, once we have a big rain, people breathe that little sigh of relief, but we know it's coming again.
Yes, because it drought is kind of cyclical.
Yes, And I think what.
We try to explain to the public and to citizens is that there is a tremendous amount of work going on behind the scenes to try to move.
Our water situation forward. We've got a water Resource Board, We've got.
Politicians, our national representatives are engaged with the corp of Engineers in Washington. Things move slowly in Washington, so ten years can go by just to get a study done or just to.
Ask to have more reserves in the lake.
I mean, it takes years and years and years to get the federal government to move forward on certain issues that we want them to. But our resource committees looking into pipelines, looking into dredging, looking into aquifers, We're looking into a lot of different ways we can supplement the water we have so that our water issues are not as critical when we're low on reign in the fields up near Copan and Dewey and up north to us in our rain fields.
Well, you've been a little bit closer to the situation than the average citizen. But the average citizen really just cannot wrap their head around around ten years for a yes or no.
It's very difficult.
It's got to be does.
Well, you know, And I've run businesses for forty years and I can affect change pretty quickly because I'm yes or no yes.
But when you get in the city government, much less the federal government.
You have to slow your speech down, slow your hopes and their aspirations down, because things move slowly. But we have a good representatives working for us to try to make things move as quickly as we can.
We find out another note.
As hard as we've been pushing to pave Adams Boulevard, we get a note from the O DOT that says we're now moved back another two years. And that road causes most counsel and more frustration than anything else, because we hear more and more again, why can't we pave Adams. And while it's easy to just say, well, it's not our responsibility, it's difficult to say that because it's a road that goes right through the middle of our town. Everybody travels on it every day. It's got ruts in it, potholes,
and it's in disrepair. And so it's frustrating when we run into situations like that where we we as an average cities council.
And can't do anything about that.
We can urge our city manager on and then we can talk to our state representatives and go from there. So that's happens every day behind the scenes with Julie Daniels and John B. Keane, those people are pitching for us every day to get those things done.
Yeah, and I see where the confusion comes in. Hey, this is how I go to work, you know, this is where I go to school, This is where I do my shopping.
You know what gets.
Why can't you fix that road? And I appreciate that?
And did you want you? You let them know. They understand. They don't like it any better, but they understand.
And some people don't understand because it does seem like something we could just go pave ourselves.
But it's a state highway.
Don't worry about that.
It's a state highway.
And you know, we're just our hands are tied to just trying to persuade them further and urge them to put us forward in their program and try to get the road done sooner. The repairs they've affected in the past have been virtually useless and have been virtually no good.
So those are the That's the way we be, honest, That's the way government is sometimes and we do a good job trying to explain it, but we can always try to do better of getting information to people and let them know what we're doing on water.
Why the roads is the way they are. Things like this or things.
We're always looking for better ways to communicate with the citizens.
We're talking with the Bartlesville Mayor, Jim Kurd. Anything else take place in the meeting last night besides the election of mayor andvicement.
Well, we go over our code of our ethics code we go through every year that we you know, pledged to conduct ourselves ethically. And we also have a kind of a way we conduct our meeting meeting pools, protocols that we have that's part of our charter and we approve those every time there's an election.
And the council was agreeable to do that.
We expend a We extended our area where citizens can come before the council.
We used to have a ten mile radius.
It was somewhat of an arbitrary figure that I was a part of the council when we picked out. We didn't have any specific thing in mind other than just trying to limit it to Bartlestiell citizens that came before the council. To speak, there's a will to try to expand that to other people that use our surfaces, that buy our water further down the road.
So to speak.
So we've expanded it for the all of Orshney County now, so that came before us last night. We had a good debate on that and we ended up including all of Orshney County in the respect where everybody could come and speak to the council if they had issues with water or any other issues business related issues, they.
Could come speak to us well. Very good.
So it was a very productive media It was a short agenda, but it had a lot of a very important decision to be made in terms of Mayor and Vice Mayor and then making sure that we all understand we've got we've got a very good council orientation coming up tomorrow or all day affair with all three new of the council and then then certainly Trevor and myself will be there to learn and learn more of how our city operates and how our directors operate, and what
our responsibilities are and things we can and cannot do as a city councilman. So those are all good to be pointed out to us. I'm not always satisfied with our levels of inputs sometimes and mister Bailey knows that. But I'm privileged to be on the council and certainly privileged to be working with the city administration we have today and our new Councilman, it's going to be a great, great honor and look forward to moving forward with them.
May hurting anything else you'd like to tell the people as well in all the listening.
Areas, just you know, I was unopposed this term, and I have a great ward. Ward three is a great world, and I hear daily from people that support our city council, support our businesses here in town. And we're not perfect. We work volunteer counselman. We work hard every day at it. I know Trevor does, and I know mister Sherick and mister East and mister k Patrick will work hard at it too.
We're going to continue to do that. So it's it's been a honor.
I'm privileged to be sitting here today as your mayor and looking forward to the opportunity for the next two years.
All right, thank you very much, Meyor Jim Kurd right here on K one