Tulsa Topics

I finally had a chance to look at all three petitions that I recently picked up at politicalactions.org's storefront. Both the TABOR and Eminent Domain petitions have the same proponent listed as Rick Carpenter. Mr. Carpenter is associated with a group called Oklahomans for Action. I ran across an article on The Oklahoma Constitution website titled - Taxpayer Bill of Rights and Eminent Domain Initiative Petitions Filed. The staff at the PA's storefront mentioned a couple of numbers they were shooting for on the petitions. 300,000 for the TABOR petition and 150,000 for the Eminent Domain petition. Here's an excerpt of the OK's Constitution article -

Originally, the group sought to amend Oklahoma's constitution for both initiatives. Later they revised their filing on the Eminent Domain issue to only change state law. A constitutional amendment requires 219,564 signatures of registered voters to get the issue on an election ballot. But to have an election to change state law, the signature requirement is only 117,101 signatures.

That's about a 26.8% safety margin on the TABOR petition and a 21.9% safety margin on the Eminent Domain petition. The numbers the staff at the PA's storefront seem to be in line with that because I'm sure they will have invalid and duplicate signatures. I assume when submitting an initiative petition it would be better to be safe than sorry. On the "City Council Reform" petition, the proponents listed are - A.H. "Chip" McElroy II, Thodore C. Sherwood, and Tulsans for Better Badder Government. Both McElroy & Sherwood are listed as Co-Chairmans of Tulsans for Better Badder Government on their website under the "Who We Are" page. The spokesman from today's KRMG news story was Hans Helmerich. Helmerich isn't listed in the "Who's who of GOB list." Although Helmerich proclaimed the "Reform the Council" petition was being shelved, there is no mention or news release posted over on the TFBG website. The home page does however have a complete copy of David Averill's Tulsa Whirled editorial dated 10/30/2005 displayed prominently. This leads me to believe that the Tulsa Whirled has thrown their support behind this group. It will be interesting to see how the Whirled spins the recent development to shelf the initiative petition and read how much they praise and cheerlead the formation of a "Special Citizens Committee" hand picked by Mayor LaFortune. In the word's of President G. W. Bush, I have this bit of advice to Tulsans Defending Democracy and other "grass-roots" citizen advocacy groups - "Stay the course" and don't drop your defenses. This fight is far from over and until the group formerly known as Coalition for Responsible Government - Part Deux, Tulsans for Better Badder Government, has a formal press release by one of the proponents listed on the petition this may just be another ploy. As the old saying goes, "All is fair in politics and war" and we know some of the trickery employed by the GOB's who are beginning to feel their power erode. I'm sure the GOB's have a playbook with a depth that runs the gambit of the alphabet, i.e. Recall - Plan A, Recall - Plan B, Recall - Plan C........ Recall - Plan Z. The CliffsNotes version of the "City Council Reform Petition" was/is Recall - Plan B; pure and simple.