The normal, But yeah, it was.
We got a lot of good, good items on the agenda last night and a lot of good discussion towards those items.
First of all, let's get to the one that a lot of folks had an interest in, was the golf carts on city streets. Uh, And that was.
That was a tight vote, it was, And I think there's I think there's an ordinance there out there that we can eventually get passed. I think several of the councilors voice some concerns. I had some concerns, safety concerns, but I certainly agreed that it was a good ordinance to put out there, and we could modify it as we went down the road, as we found some areas
that we needed further restrict. So I'm hopeful that we can find some language in there that we can get some agreement on and pass it because I think golf courts are a good motive opera to transportation for people.
I see them throughout neighborhoods in.
Bartlesville, and I want to be able to work with the counselors on the committee and see what we need to do to see if we could get that pass someday. All right, very one worked very hard on it, and he's got a lot of I had several people in support, but I really had no calls of people that didn't support it. But I understand the safety concerns of unleashing them on the city streets, but I just don't see it that as being a problem. I mean, we have the scooters out here, we have a lot of different
modes of transportation that we've never had before. So I think it's just falls in line that we eventually get something on the books where we can allow those to be used throughout neighborhoods and in various parts of the city and kept off the major streets so that they're not a hazard to the people that are driving them.
All Right, that took a little bit imagine.
And yeah, golf courts are they're purchased all over the country nowadays. Secondhand cards have purchased and their repurpose with brake lights and headlights and turn signals and review mirrors and.
And things like that.
So I think there are safety aspects that we can add back to them, and then other restrictions as to where they would be able to be used throughout the city would be things that we could look into and see if we could bring it back and find an agreement on it.
Well, I lived Inmployer for about ten years, and many of what they call the planned communities now, they didn't have it in a you know, a municipality. Within the planned community, you can zing around there, and many of those places had your own post office, your own stores, you know, your grocery store. All within the community had that little area, namely the villages. I don't know, have you ever been down.
There, like, oh, I've heard yeah, I've seen it. And you know those are designed with four golf carts in mind. Yeah, roads they have different ways for those to get around. So that's different than it would be.
Here in our community.
But certainly I hope we can find a way to see if we can make those legal so to speak, in our neighborhoods and throughout the throughout the community.
That was a big one, but boy, we had a lot of ones that warranted a lot of discussion. Last night we did what else did we have?
Well, we had the properties. The city now has the ability to pick up properties that go through the sheriff sale or the county sale that don't meet a minimum bid and Larry Curtis Is found a way to secure those properties and then we've got kind of a pilot project to see what we could do with those down the road, make them available for future housing, or sell them at a better rate that we could get and
receive our money back. Most of them are that we've torn down dilapidated houses and we have that cost investing in the property and we'd try to get that back
in the sale of it. A lot of times the properties won't sell for what's owed on them, but this gives us a little more control over the properties and gives us some opportunity to use some There's opportunity zoned throughout the community that one of our counselors spoke about, and I think there might be an opportunity to find a way to build some additional housing throughout our community to meet the housing needs that we have.
Oh yeah, it's definitely needed. And we do have a lot of what you call bulldoze or ready projects.
We do, and we've had several on the agenda last night to be voluntarily torn down.
So there's going to be more properties available every year.
This will happen and the city can kind of take a year to see how this works and if we can find buyers for them or find developers that might be interested in them. They're spotty, they're throughout the community, but they're mostly smaller lots, and we need houses in those areas too, because we are tearing down a lot of dilapidated structures and not replacing adequate single family homes in those areas.
Well. Hopefully this works.
Yeah, yeah, we'll see how it goes. And Larry Curtis has brought our new community development directors. He brought a new look to things down there and appreciate him coming up with these ideas of ways to do things like this.
Great. What else was on the agenda last night?
That took a bit, Well, then we had we had a reaffirmation of our city Charter for our Code of Ethics, and that just bore some discrestion as to the allotment of time we give citizens to speak at the council meeting. We currently have a fifteen minute limit, but as we all discussed, we've never imposed that limit. Aggregate totals fifteen minutes for a total combined group of people speak get
the council. But throughout my seven and a half years, we've gone well over that into the hours, into tens and twenties of people allowed to speak for their three minute terms, and we've allowed them to go beyond the three minute terms in many cases too. So it was a good discussion and maybe not the time and place to have hammered out that last night. So I think that will hopefully come back for the council and there
might be a way to extend that. A councilman Roselle wanted to extend it to sixty minutes, and I don't think that's unreasonable, so I think that's something we could look into. But last night we were basically reaffirming what the governor approved after the election of our of those two items. So we got that through last night, got that done, and then I think we'll hopefully see something come back to the fact that we might be able.
To extend that period. Even though we've always extended it.
We've never limited public comment other than the three minute rule, trying to get as many number of people as we can, but we've never put a fifteen minute time limit on one number of people that could speak.
I can vouch for that. I've covered a couple of those marathons.
We've had a couple of marathons and they've been good.
It's been good to have public in there and have shown interest in a certain item. So I don't think any counselor that's on that committee wanted to in any way limit the time.
It was just maybe it came before.
Us, and I think we were just expecting to get this pass the way it was, And if we want to look at time limits, I think there's another time and a place to bring that before us, and that would be something we could consider.
Very good, very good. Now we've got a little switching seasons coming over. It's still plenty hot, yes, and it's still plenty summer, but we have fall coming up here too, so we've got the school starting and everything cool starting. I had no mayor deal. I'd always say, don't you.
Dare speed down? Slowed down.
So we'll have extra police officers out monitoring those skill zones. And made a very good comment last night that we certainly urged the public to be cautious when they see those yellow lights flashing from the bus on the school
zones or in front of schools. It's a time and a place to really slow ourselves down, ease ourselves to work or wherever we're going that day, and make sure we're taking the kids care of the kids that are out there crossing streets and getting the bus stops and getting ready to go back to school.
You know, the different groups that have different kinds of responsibilities, all living under the one city. We've got it pretty good with our schools here, and I think our city Hall works very well with our public schools. We do, and the fact that we have resource officers. We're able to do that thanks to the generosity of a lot of different things, people and things. This is another reason why I think some people decide, well, you know, Bartinsall
is not a bad place to raise a family. I think we're just going to move there.
No.
I mean, through the direction of our previous police chief and our city administration and the public and the support for our budgets, we've been able to put a resource officer in every school, and that's just a blessing throughout the community. To have these people that are protecting our children. It's a harsh reality sometimes that we have to do that, but once they're in place, it's good to have them there.
They're good to interact with students in the building and to expose them to the police force and the generosity of our city to be able to find a way to keep these schools safe and have these kids in there. So it's been it's a it's a real privilege that we've been able to do that very good.
You know, the community is one of these little oasises in the middle of you know, there's a whole lot of bad stuff going on in the world. Yeah, and and to find a little ottle Bartlesville, you know, in this tumultuous see we call the world, it's really something else. And we've taken this community has taken a lot of time and a lot of effort to examine things over the years to make sure that it's as good as
it can possibly be. And our city Council, you guys and gals, over the years have really kept a good watchful we have.
And we've got our strategic plan in place now and so we're looking at ways that we as a business at the city can function better and support our community better.
We're always searching for ways.
To communicate better and to provide better services to the community. So they've shown a great deal of trust in us over the past several years with our bond issues, by approving our bond issues of our roads, for streets, for bridges, and for all the things we've done for quality of
life issues for parks and recreation. I think it's indicative the fact that Council has worked very well with the administration and we've gotten a lot of great support from the public to keep this community safe and at the same time moving forward in a way where we can attract people to move and live here and stay here.
And I think that's one thing we've done, is to try to get people to stay here in town, move here, buy a home here, don't live in Tulsa, don't live in a what so and commute up here and go to work, but live here in this town, buy a house, pay our taxes here and support this community in that way. So I think effectively, between our county government, our city government, between the BDA economic development, we've done a lot of good things, and we've got a lot of good things.
More we need to keep doing it. It's kind of what have you done for me lately?
So we have to keep pushing that forward and making this community better so we can continue to grow and thrive the way we have been the last several years.
We're speaking with the City Counselor, Jim Kurk. Now, Jim, you brought up the BDA. This has been an interesting function of our government where we're able to assist businesses not only establish themselves here in town, but also bring their employees with them.
Yep, Yeah, we have.
We've got several good programs that we've done, and we're allowed to do that through our quarter set sales tax and that funds our BDA or funds the economic development and many communities don't have that at their availability. So we've got a great team down there that's found ways to buy buildings, to attract businesses to come to town, to incentivize people to build and buy homes here and
move into our school district and live here. So we continue to turn over every rock we can to look for businesses to come here, ten jobs at a time, thirty jobs at a time, whatever we can do to bring primary jobs here to town and at the same time attract retail and more choices for people to move here when they do here, so they've got more restaurant choices, more retail choices, and make it a better community like that, so they can live here and don't feel like they have to live in a community.
South of us here to find those choices.
So we've done a lot, but there's still a lot to do, and we've got more to do.
But we're not going to rest on our worlds.
But I can say we've had a lot of success in the past and we've got to continue to do that going forward.
One thing that's kint of cool is the investment we've got going on at our airport. Yeah, and that's really been working out well for us.
We've got a lot of good things coming up there. I've got some Oklahoma grant money to build a speck hanger there. We've got the shuttle is being guarded back up by Conico Phillips, so the activity out there is increasing every day. And we've got some more grant money to include improve our taxiway out there so we can expand into a different part of the airport. So a lot of funding beyond UH It is coming from beyond and from Oklahoma, so it's not costing the taxpayers a
great deal of money. But the airport has UH just turned into a great little gem for the city.
After we've gotten it back from.
Our local corporation here, it's turned in a great little venue and we've got a lot of great people working out it every day to keep it running up like that.
Like that you get some of the best around, that's for sure.
Yeah, we have.
We've had personal friends that have dropped in here and stopped over and come in and come into the local restaurants and bought food here and headed out of town.
So we, uh, we know that that's.
A great little airport, and uh, it always has been so, but it's it's been run really well right now by the city and.
I'm really proud of our efforts there.
We've got a lot of good things coming up out at Adams Golf Course too. We've got our new greens going to be put in there. We've got a management study to put it in place right now to kind of see it's come along good. We'll be getting our report here and I think in the next thirty days and it will kind of show where we've been and where we're at and how we can go forward.
And I think there's a real will on.
The council to make Adams the golf course that it can be that's been in the past. It's been run great by Jerry Benedict in the past several years. It's just kind of a new time in our life where we can step back to yours retiring and step back and look and see what we can do beyond what he did to make it even a better place for the community here and attract people to town to play golf here because it is it's a great golf course,
and in the past, it's just the cities. It's been one of the assets that we've had that I think we've not overlooked, but we've just we need to just look harder at it and continue to do the things we can to improve it.
Every day.
I can tell you at least once a year, it brings in a ton of dough well.
And I think that's one of our prime motivations.
It brings in a lot of money for our United Way, and we've got a lot of people that work for that comp for those companies to play there on a weekend basis, and we've got a lot of people to come into town play. But then we've got a lot of citizens in town that just just enjoy love that golf course. Every day, and they meet their friends out there and they play golf. And we've got an obligation to make it the best we can, and I think we're committed to do that.
Right, Jim, is there anything else we've left on?
Well, I think we've touched on quite a bit today, I think other than just the heat, like you mentioned, the we know we're maybe August now, but we're just a couple of weeks away from September, and hopefully the weather it be cool now a little bit and we'll get some rain in here and we'll just continue on into the fall.
Ladies and gentlemen, you have been watching and listening to our City Matters program on KWA