Oh boy, more city council-Mayor shenanigans...

[Gonesouth1234]

Agree.  At-large is the way to go, IMO.  I also think Dewey needs to be ousted, and should've never been elected in the first place.  Tom Adelson was clearly the best option and hopefully he runs again in 2013. 

Who would take Bartlett's place if he is ousted, Simonson?  Or would there be a special election? 

Has there been a formal recall petition circulated yet?

John Eagleton has started the petition, according to the news pundits.

What is the procedure once Dewey is gone?  Who runs the city, other than the "shadow government" and the Kaisers?

[patric]

John Eagleton has started the petition, according to the news pundits.

"Make me city attorney or else"?

[guido911]

What is the procedure once Dewey is gone?  Who runs the city, other than the "shadow government" and the Kaisers?

I get your sarc. But in case I'm wrong, or if others actually believe you, please visit this site.

http://zapatopi.net/afdb/

[Gaspar]

John Eagleton has started the petition, according to the news pundits.

What is the procedure once Dewey is gone?  Who runs the city, other than the "shadow government" and the Kaisers?

Once Eagleton gets the petition going to oust Dewey, we need to make sure we oust Eagleton and the rest of the fantastic quorum of media whores. We need to start over fresh and send a message that Junior-High politics will not be tolerated!

I think that elections have consequences, and we are learning a great deal from this last one.  I voted for Dewey, attended his watch party rejoiced in his victory.  I am now deeply sorry for that decision. 

Realistically, a petition will most likely be unsuccessful.  I think we need to make sure we continue to send the message to the counsel and the mayor that they will be ousted in the next election.  All of them, unless they learn to work together and stop wasting money comparing the size of each others Johnsons.

We used to just have an embarrisang city councel, now we have a mayor who is a floppy-dog and a counsel that wants to be the mayor. 

I miss the good old days when the counsel provided hours of endless entertainment releasing moronic statements, attacking each other, playing the race card, and trying to figure out how to funnel money into their districts.  The mayor used to represent sanity in Counsel meetings, like a kindergarten teacher in a room of unruly children.  Today, the teacher doesn't bother to show up, and the children spend the day drawing dirty pictures of him on the chalkboard.

[pmcalk]

Agree.  At-large is the way to go, IMO.  I also think Dewey needs to be ousted, and should've never been elected in the first place.  Tom Adelson was clearly the best option and hopefully he runs again in 2013. 

Who would take Bartlett's place if he is ousted, Simonson?  Or would there be a special election? 

Has there been a formal recall petition circulated yet?

Why would you think that an At-large councilor would actually do anything to improve the current situation? 

The spin you hear is that the current conflict is due to egos & battles for power--that some of the city councilors are behaving like "mini-mayors."  If anything, throwing in another councilor would just up the ante.  What happens if the at-large councilor (who very well may have received more votes than the actual mayor) wants to pull the city in a different direction than the mayor?  Suddenly you have two people, both elected by the entire city (and both presumably with HUGE egos), who have competing ideas.  I suspect that the fighting you see now would be minor in comparison.  Right now you have 9 city councilors, each from different parts of the city, all of whom have problems with this mayor.  Not all of the councilors have joined Eagleton, but not a single one of them have criticized what Eagleton is doing.  Not even Bynum--the closest Bartlett has to an ally.  If we had an at-large councilor, do you really think this wouldn't have happened?  Or do you think that the at-large councilor would be in the thick of it--looking for an opportunity to become mayor?

Any political system is only as good as the politicians we elect to run them.

I am leaning towards the city manager form of government, though.

FYI, Eagleton is starting an ouster petition, not a recall petition. 

[Gold]

I really like the idea of simply throwing everyone out through a recall.  It would send a message.  I will gladly volunteer for such an effort.

[Breadburner]

And go back to commisioners.....

[Gonesouth1234]

Why would you think that an At-large councilor would actually do anything to improve the current situation? 

The spin you hear is that the current conflict is due to egos & battles for power--that some of the city councilors are behaving like "mini-mayors."  If anything, throwing in another councilor would just up the ante.  What happens if the at-large councilor (who very well may have received more votes than the actual mayor) wants to pull the city in a different direction than the mayor?  Suddenly you have two people, both elected by the entire city (and both presumably with HUGE egos), who have competing ideas.  I suspect that the fighting you see now would be minor in comparison.  Right now you have 9 city councilors, each from different parts of the city, all of whom have problems with this mayor.  Not all of the councilors have joined Eagleton, but not a single one of them have criticized what Eagleton is doing.  Not even Bynum--the closest Bartlett has to an ally.  If we had an at-large councilor, do you really think this wouldn't have happened?  Or do you think that the at-large councilor would be in the thick of it--looking for an opportunity to become mayor?

Any political system is only as good as the politicians we elect to run them.

I am leaning towards the city manager form of government, though.

FYI, Eagleton is starting an ouster petition, not a recall petition. 

I vote for the city manager form of government.   

It works well in cities much smaller  and larger than our home town, as long as the manager is responsible to a council that is composed of members who are each accountable to a home district within the city, and with the mayor's position set up to allow one vote on the council, and a few ribbon cutting ceremonies on the side.

Isn't this the form in OKC now?

Running a city is something that requires a lot of governmental and management experience in today's climate, and we certainly don't have that in place now.

[Conan71]

I vote for the city manager form of government.  

It works well in cities much smaller  and larger than our home town, as long as the manager is responsible to a council that is composed of members who are each accountable to a home district within the city, and with the mayor's position set up to allow one vote on the council, and a few ribbon cutting ceremonies on the side.

Isn't this the form in OKC now?

Running a city is something that requires a lot of governmental and management experience in today's climate, and we certainly don't have that in place now.

No form is really better than the other so long as you have people with deep enough pockets to keep re-electing "their" people to office.  When the council form of government was first devised, I believe it really was a fair and representative form of government where each councilor was an average citizen elected by their peers in their geographical area.

Now councilors are recruited to run and receive campaign contributions from people who don't even live in their district.  What's happened is the council has morphed into sort of an "anti- or counter- mayor" instead of being a quasi-legislative branch of city government with average citizens.

Developers and the mega wealthy have figured out they can stack the council now and get their appointments to local boards and get favorable council votes on the items which matter to them most.

So long as the city manager is an appointed post, I don't think it will improve our form of governance.  They will still be beholden to the whims and desires of those who pushed to get them into the job in the first place.  The only way to get around that would be by doing a "blind hire" and that's got it's own pitfalls as well.

Granted, Mayor Simonson and his sock puppet Dewey Bartlet (sic) were a bad choice.  

However, it's simply time for the council to make an honest appraisal of itself and realize it's become nothing but an antagonistic chamber which is spending more and more of its time battling the mayor's office instead of working for the citizens in their districts who elected them.

[pmcalk]

And go back to commisioners.....

Why would you want to go back to that system?  While that form of government was popular a century ago, it has by and large been completely abandoned by the rest of the country.  Some cities changed under threat of a lawsuit (like Tulsa) by the NAACP, but many changed for the simple reason that it did not work well, especially as their cities grew in population.  They found that the various commissions often resulted in huge turf battles, particularly when it came to budgets.  Because there was no oversight of one commission over the other, it became fertile ground for corruption.  As far as I know, only one major city in the US retained the commission form of government:  Portland.  And their system really isn't a pure commissioner form--the commissioners don't actually run for specific offices; the mayor assigns them to those offices.  While I think Portland is a great city to emulate, Tulsa is too different from that city to truly duplicate its political system.

[Breadburner]

Why would you want to go back to that system?  While that form of government was popular a century ago, it has by and large been completely abandoned by the rest of the country.  Some cities changed under threat of a lawsuit (like Tulsa) by the NAACP, but many changed for the simple reason that it did not work well, especially as their cities grew in population.  They found that the various commissions often resulted in huge turf battles, particularly when it came to budgets.  Because there was no oversight of one commission over the other, it became fertile ground for corruption.  As far as I know, only one major city in the US retained the commission form of government:  Portland.  And their system really isn't a pure commissioner form--the commissioners don't actually run for specific offices; the mayor assigns them to those offices.  While I think Portland is a great city to emulate, Tulsa is too different from that city to truly duplicate its political system.

What we have now sure as hell ain't working......Just because "everyone changed" does not mean an old way of doing things can't be tweaked and work.....

[pmcalk]

What we have now sure as hell ain't working......Just because "everyone changed" does not mean an old way of doing things can't be tweaked and work.....

Again, everyone changed because it didn't work.  And nothing in Tulsa will incite racial division like suggesting we go back to the old form of government.  Change--just for the sake of change--is no guarantee of improvement.  So I'll ask again, why do you believe we should go back to that form of government?  If you are going to argue that we should return to a form of government that the rest of the country abandoned, while stirring up old racial wounds, I think you should at least be able to explain why that system is better.

[Hoss]

Again, everyone changed because it didn't work.  And nothing in Tulsa will incite racial division like suggesting we go back to the old form of government.  Change--just for the sake of change--is no guarantee of improvement.  So I'll ask again, why do you believe we should go back to that form of government?  If you are going to argue that we should return to a form of government that the rest of the country abandoned, while stirring up old racial wounds, I think you should at least be able to explain why that system is better.

I would actually like to see us go to a council-manager style of government.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council%E2%80%93manager_government

[Conan71]

Again, everyone changed because it didn't work.  And nothing in Tulsa will incite racial division like suggesting we go back to the old form of government.  Change--just for the sake of change--is no guarantee of improvement.  So I'll ask again, why do you believe we should go back to that form of government?  If you are going to argue that we should return to a form of government that the rest of the country abandoned, while stirring up old racial wounds, I think you should at least be able to explain why that system is better.

What has happened to Tulsa in that time?  The north side has supposedly gotten better representation, but as a whole, the city's infrastructure appears to have suffered.  Maybe it's entirely coincidental that our streets started to deteriorate a lot faster after we no longer had a street commissioner.  We didn't have a star chamber back then and the city seemed to operate a lot more efficiently.  Is north Tulsa getting better representation than it was pre 1990?  Sure, there's been improvements, but it's still the most blighted region of our city.

[Conan71]

And adding to shenanigans:

Some City Councilors on Tuesday questioned the timing of the Legal Department's analysis of the city's personnel policy that allowed for the hiring of Interim City Attorney David Pauling.
At issue is whether the Legal Department changed the policy definition that otherwise might have prohibited Pauling's hiring because his wife, Nancy McNair, is also an assistant city attorney.

The current personnel policy states that "immediate family members" cannot work in the same city unit with or under the direct supervision of each other.

Personnel Director Erica Felix-Warwick told councilors that prior to the legal analysis, any time a promotion or employment application would put a married couple in the same department, "we would have raised issue with that."

When the administration considered hiring Pauling, the issue arose again, but it was determined that the policy's definition of immediate family members being "by blood or marriage" no longer meant spouse.

The councilors are now being asked to add the term "spouse" to the policy's list of immediate family members and to agree to a grandfather clause that would be effective at the time of council approval of the change.

Read more from this Tulsa World article at http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=16&articleid=20110308_11_0_SomeCi679180

Excuse me, but wouldn't the most obvious example of a family member by blood or marriage be a spouse?  What the Hell are they smoking down at City Hall?