The World According to "Aaarrgh!"

In Bartlesville, they have what is known as a Family Legacy Hall of Fame, and every year they have a big shindig to honor the new family inductees.  What I find interesting is that they are not necessarily honoring those families that had had the biggest positive impact in the community, but those that have been around the longest, and are still here.  In other words, we are honoring a bunch of ne’er-do-wells who are living off of pappy’s and grandpappy’s name and wealth and who have never left to strike their own place in the word.  You know, lazy little rich boys.

Some of the scions of these legacy families are scoundrels.  Some are shysters.  Yes, some are good, but some are bad.  Very, very bad.  And yet we are honoring them because they haven’t moved away?  Are you serious?

I guess it is just me, but I admire men and women who blaze their own trail in the world, who do not ride the family coattails to get ahead.  Even though my father and I are both engineers, I spent only a few months working in the same corporation as he, and even then it was so humongous that we only saw each other rarely.  After that, I blazed my own path, and while there have been some rough stretches, they were my rough stretches, and, looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing.

I feel blessed because all five of us siblings lived away from the ancestral home of Saint Louis during some period of our adult lives, and it made us all better people.  Of course, we come from a long line of adventureous people.  My maternal grandfather grew up in West Virginia, married a Missourian, and ended up building cars in Detroit.    My mother the Michigander also married a Missourian and that is where she stayed.  My sisters moved away from Saint Louis but eventually found their way back; my brother and I never did.

My fathers’ family also had their share of adventures.  My father and several of his siblings joined the armed forces and experienced life outside the confines of Saint Louis; my aunt while a military nurse met a military pilot and they settled in New Hampshire, a completely different world from Saint Louis.  It is interesting that several of my father’s siblings, life-long Missourians, are now Floridians; in fact, they all live on the same street!

Of the numerous cousins, many have moved away to live their own lives, not the family’s life.  I have cousins in Florida, Massachusetts, Utah (or is it California?  One of those places across the Great Divide), Colorado, Ohio, Texas, Illinois, and who knows where else, all finding their own paths in life, all admirable.  As parents, we should encourage our children to live their own lives, and we should not live vicariously through them.  If none of my children choose to be a civil engineer, I will not be disappointed, as that is my path, not theirs.  On the other hand, if one or more decides to be a civil engineer, I would be flattered and honored that they think enough of me to emulate me.  But, it is their choice to make!

It speaks volumes of our fair city of Bartlesville that we think it is necessary to honor those who are too cowardly or lazy to choose their own path, who ride the coattails of their parents and grandparents.  Of all of the sons who have taken over businesses, careers, political seats from their fathers, most cannot hold a candle to their parent.  Think of all the children of musicians who have fallen flat on their face.  Can you say, “Lisa Marie Presley”?  Think of all the children of athletes who can’t escape the shadow of their father.  Can you say, “Adam James”?  Think of all the children of politicians and leaders who just aren’t their father.  Can you say, “George W. Bush” and “Patrick Kennedy”?  Just because your parent is gifted doesn’t mean you are.  And the converse is true – just because your parent is a talentless hack doesn’t mean you are, and you shouldn’t be burdened by the lack of ability of your parent.

I find it interesting the list of families that have been “honored”.  The Gormans.  Yeah, those Gormans, and we all know that Mister Mayor Man wouldn’t be Mister Mayor Man if he had to be elected by the entire community instead of just five people.  Enough said.  One of the families honored this year is the Earl of Bartlesville.  Yes, we all know full well how well the family legacy thing works.  Can you say, “My kid got a high-paying state job because her old man is in the Ledge”?  I knew you could!  In the writeup about The Earl’s family, they mentioned that an ancestor proudly fought in the Confederate Army.  One of my ancestral families came from Kentucky right around the time of the Southern Rebellion, and did not fight for the right to hold people in servitude against their will.  I know that there is a lot of Confederate pride, but let’s face the facts- those who fought for the Confederacy were traitors who took up arms against their own government, and they were fighting to preserve the enslavement of a particular ethnic group.  Not exactly something that I want to be honoring, but then that is just me.

Back about a decade or so ago, the icon for Kroger was a scissors, which was the price chopping scissors.  The Oklahoma Ledge just passed the new budget, and I hereby award the Kroger Scissors to Bartlesville’s very own Earl Sears, Chairman of the House Appropriations and Budget Committee, for his wizardry in whacking every useful thing from the state budget.  Three cheers for The Earl!

In addition to not wanting to mandate health insurance coverage for autism, and providing a sweet assist to his daughter to get a high dollar state job lobbying his committee, he and his comrades have successfully completely decimated the state government of Oklahoma so some wealthy old people won’t have to pay a bit more in taxes.  Yeah for us!

Some “accomplishments” in the budget-

- Cuts in education funding so drastic that schools are closing;
- Reductions in the amount your property tax can go up annually to an amount so small that it can hardly keep up with inflation;
- Cuts in human services funding;
- Cuts in the transportation budget to the tune of $100 million.  Yeah, you read that right, $100 million.

Of course, we all know that Oklahoma has the best roads in the nation, right, so who needs to fund transportation?  When all of the freeway-type highways feeding your second largest city are all tollways, who needs road improvements, right?  When your bridges are so decrepit that the DOT has to install safety nets below them to keep chunks of concrete from crushing motorists, who needs transportation funding, right?

When interviewed by the Tulsa newspaper, The Earl’s comment was so sublime, it was a classic textbook understatement – the budget cut to transportation will significantly derail the 8-year road plan.  Gee, Earl, do you think?  Derail it my hind-side!  It’s not just derailed, it exploded into flames and charred into unrecognizable molten goo!

What I don’t get about The Earl and all of his Republican cohorts is that the claim to be the epitome of capitalists, but when you sacrifice everything of value, everything that the government does better than the private sector (such as roads), at the alter of tax cuts, there is no tools left for capitalism to exist and we all end up as wards of the state, which is the antithesis of capitalism.

What business in their right mind wants to move to a state that says no to good schools, good roads, good infrastructure?  None.  Then, these same people, like The Earl, advocate TIF and other government intervention in the economy.  Here’s a newsflash - you can’t have it both ways!  You can’t starve the government of everything because you don’t want to raise taxes and then complain when things falls apart and people flee and then want to create TIF districts to bribe people to stay.  You know why Rome was so fabulous successful?  Because it spent money on the public.  The aqueducts weren’t built by private entities, but by the Republic.  The Appian Way wasn’t a stinking toll road.  The Romans understood full well that lavish public facilities and great public infrastructure attracted people and businesses.

Look at our own history.  What were the major things that stimulated development?  Roads, canals, dams, infrastructure and great public buildings.  Andrew Carnegie gave away his fortune building fabulous public buildings across the country under the theory that if he raised the quality of life for the masses, they would spend more money on his products and improve his quality of life, too.  A key partner in the rise of American capitalism was the government, federal, state, and local.

If you look throughout history, those governments that hoarded wealth and did not spent it on the masses ultimately failed.  As Marx once said, “Religion is the opium of the people.”  So are nice roads, parks, and public facilities.  Keep the public happy with nice things and they won’t have time to complain and revolt.

Unlike most places, who utterly detest politicians, Bartlesville worships its civic leaders.  Frank Phillips, despite his reputation as, well, kind of an S-O-B, has the main street named after him.  Prominent families such as the Adamses, Kanes, and Prices have streets and buildings named after them.  Ted Lockin, former Mayor and now Vice-Mayor, has a water treatment plant named after him.  Earl Sears has a park.

I have an issue naming infrastructure after people, especially living people.  You see, people are flawed, and living people are still capable of making huge mistakes which can be very embarrassing.  Ask the folks in McAlester, Oklahoma, who named one of their main streets after State Senator Gene Stipe, who brought home the bacon in a big way.  Of course, the pride of McAlester quickly turned into the shame of McAlester when Stipe was sentenced to the pen on corruption charges.  The City Fathers couldn’t move fast enough to remove Stipe’s name from just about everything.

Public places should only be named after those who show great courage and who have been dead long enough to stand the test of time.  There is this asinine movement by Republicans to name everything after Ronald Reagan.  Reagan was okay, but he sure wasn’t my hero, unless you consider Iran-Contra, tax breaks for the wealthy at the expense of the poor, anti-unionism, and other such acts as heroic.  Oh, and here’s a newsflash – Reagan didn’t cause the collapse of the Soviet Union; the Soviet Union did.  Dumbo could have been President during the 1980s and the Soviet Union would still have collapsed.  Sure, Reagan gave some nice speeches, but his policies did more to set this country back economically than any president since Harding.  Our current malaise is a result of Reaganonics.  As one who proudly did not vote for Reagan, I refuse to call it Reagan airport; it’s still National airport to me. 

The more I read about what Bartlesville’s beloved Earl has been doing in the Ledge, the more I think we should remove his name from the park, a park that was created by bullying decent people out of their homes so that they could be demolished for a park.  I stumbled upon an article from the Enid paper from March of this year, and, well, I will let you read an excerpt for yourself-

March 3, 2011

House scraps bill to expand autism coverage

James Coburn The Edmond Sun The Edmond Sun Thu Mar 03, 2011, 10:11 PM CST

EDMOND — A House bill intended to include children with autism spectrum disorders in the state’s high risk insurance pool was killed this week in the Appropriations and Budget Committee.

The Earl, so revered as an educator and one who loves children, would not allow a discussion or vote on a bill to help children.  I guess if your children are autistic, well, then it’s a big screw you!  Why, we won’t do anything to annoy the insurance companies, who are, after all, big contributors to the Republican caucus.  Of course, The Earl is supposedly a good Catholic man, but being a Catholic who was educated in the Catholic schools, I was always taught that we are supposed to help the most helpless, not cast them aside.

Autism is near and dear to my family as I have a nephew who is borderline autistic.  Through lots of therapy and assistance over the years, he is a delightful and fun person to be around, very expressive and intelligent and not at all like one would think a borderline autistic person would be.  Heck, he even drives, and drives better than his mother, I might add!  I only shudder to think what he would be like if he hadn’t gotten the assistance he needed as a young child.

Whether or not The Earl agreed with the bill, he could have at least let it be discussed and voted on; but he did neither.  One man decided to play God with the well-being of the autistic children of Oklahoma; this one man decided that they should be cast aside and are not worthy of our help.  The Earl will tell you he is pro-life, but what the hell good is it to be pro-life if you callously disregard those who are living because they have a handicap?  God created them that way, and yet The Earl, by denying a hearing, told God that His Children are not worthy to be saved.

Some hero.

Our very own and beloved Oklahoma State Representative, Earl Sears, is at it again, challenging the meaning of “ethics”!  For locals who’d rather forget, a few months back, a fellow ethically-challenged Republican Representative, the Dishonorable Randy Terrill of Moore, he who bribed a Democrat not to run for reelection with a fat state job, threw The Earl under the bus by revealing that The Earl’s daughter, Hollye, received a sweet state job for $90K a year while he was self-serving in The Ledge lobbying her own father’s committee for money.  Oh, throw in the fact that when The Earl became committee chair around the same time she got a $30K raise and that he is paying her rent to live at her house in The City while The Ledge is in session, and there were those of us who concluded that The Earl is, well, a tad bit ethically challenged.  The Earl being The Earl, he was able to convince the uneducated masses of his district that there really wasn’t an ethics issue at all but was a personal vendetta from the ethically challenged Terrill to smear The Earl’s good name.  (Of course, it takes the ethically-challenged to know the ethically challenged, right?)  So, it all was swept under the rug, as is always done in Bartlesville, the idyllic, sweet community where everyone loves everyone and that is challenging Tulsa for economic dominance in Indian Territory (despite the numerous closed and boarded up businesses), and The Earl got away relatively untarnished.  (There are those of us, however, who didn’t succumb to the brainwashing.)

Unfortunately, when you are able to get by with something that you shouldn’t, then you just do it again.  This time, it was a flagrant violation of Open Meetings, with a last minute, unpublicized move of a meeting of The Earl’s committee meeting.  Here is the scoop from Oklahoma Watchdog-

House moves meeting time for budget hearing, chairman apologizes for lapse in notice

By Peter J. Rudy on May 12, 2011

The House Joint Committee on Appropriations and Budget today changed the time of its meeting from 8:30pm to 3:00pm with just an hour’s notice.  Committee chairman Earl Sears (R-Bartlesville) later told Oklahoma Watchdog that he will make sure that notice is given wider distribution in the future.  While Oklahoma Watchdog gets notices from the House Media division and the Speaker’s Office via e-mail, no e-mail was received indicating that the meeting time had changed and the meeting notice on the House website was not changed even as the meeting was going on.

Tom Gorman was elected Mayor at the last Bartlesville City Council meeting.  Big surprise….

When he was campaigning against me, he was adamant that the mayor should not be elected at-large by all the voters, but instead by the five members of the council.  I remarked to voters that this was because he knew that this was the only way that he could become Mayor, as he could never win an at-large election and that it is very easy to make deals with the other four members of the council.  I also predicted that if he won re-election, he’d be the next Mayor.  He did, and he is.  Like I said, big surprise there.

An interesting twist is that I suspect that the quid pro quo he made with Erin Tullos is that if she supported him for Mayor, he would support her for appointment to the Bartlesville Redevelopment Trust Authority, since most of the area that needs to be redeveloped is in her ward.  So, after he was chosen to be Mayor, she nominated herself to the BRTA, and he nominated himself.  Of course, he prevailed, on a 4-1 vote, leaving Erin as the odd person out.  What’s even worse is that the 4 are all men, and all self-employed or retired.  Hmm.  Something really smells rotten not only in Denmark, but in the rest of Scandinavia as well!

I have made it known that, God-willing, I will run against the “Honorable” Mayor Gorman in November 2012, unless he manages to gerrymander the district so I am no longer in his district, which, given the fact that he spent thousands of dollars to beat me, a virtual unknown, for a job that pays, well, nothing, is not outside of the realm of possibilities.  When you have seen as much corruption and back room deals that I have over my years of government service, not to sound full-of-myself here, but I pretty much know when something not-so-honorable is going down, and let me just say that something not-so-honorable is going down.  Given the Gorman is a party to a lawsuit against the BRTA, I’d say that he wanted to be appointed to keep whatever it is they are trying to hide by not releasing the transcript of the secret meeting from seeing the light of day.

I hope that all of those who publicly endorsed this clown will come to regret their decision because the corrupt are always ultimately brought down, usually by one of their own in a fit of jealousy, as corruption makes one arrogant and cocky and cockiness leads to mistakes.  Just ask Gene Stipe and Jeff McMahan about that.

Even if Gorman survives the BRTA scandal, he needs to heed this warning – any and all problems that beset a city are laid at the feet of the most prominent politician, the Mayor.  So, Mister Mayor, you better keep your enemies close and your friends even closer, as you will be held accountable for any misstep.  Just ask Ron Nikkel.   Oh, and make sure you wear a tie to every meeting.  That is, after all, how you threw Ron out of the Mayor’s chair and under the bus.  Remember – what you did to others will be done to you. 

You can’t hide as “just a councilperson” any more.  You are now “The Mayor”.  I hope you enjoy the glory!

The first question asked to the City Council candidates at the League of Women Voters Forum was, “What is the number one issue facing the City of Bartlesville?”  Five of the six of us mentioned financial stability.  I, as I tend to be, was the black sheep of the group.  My answer?  Stagnation.

Subsequently, I have been told that my answer was no well received, as honest as it was.  I was badmouthing Bartlesville.  I was being negative.  After all, Bartlesville is a great place to live; it is by no means stagnating.  Or is it?

A decade ago, Phillips Petroleum was the city’s largest employer, and employed in the neighborhood of 10,000 people.  The city was rightfully proud to have the world headquarters of a major petroleum company within its borders.  In the ensuing decade, Phillips merged with Conoco and moved its world headquarters to Houston, to be closer to the world headquarters of its competitors and to be able to have access to a major international airport and major transcontinental freeways.  Bartlesville is, unfortunately, an out-of-the-way backwater, and is not a suitable place for the world headquarters of a multinational corporation.  After Hurricane Rita put a scare into Houston, ConocoPhillips decided that it would be wise to move some of its operations back to Bartlesville, kind of like a shadow headquarters, like the West Virginia bunker for the federal government, and moved several thousand back.  All in all, the number of ConocoPhillips employees in Bartlesville now is a fraction of the number that there used to be.

Ponca City, seventy-five miles to the west, was once a vibrant and beautiful city and home to several thousand Phillips employees.  With the exception of the refinery, the Phillips employees are all gone, and Ponca is an aging, dying city, as the youth are leaving to find opportunities elsewhere and never returning.  In the six years I’ve lived in the Bartlesville area, I have noticed the same trend, except Bartlesville isn’t quite as far along in the exodus as Ponca is, as Bartlesville is not losing population.  Yet.

Over the past thirty years, Bartlesville’s population has hovered around 35,000, give or take a 1,000; in short, zero population growth.  That is an alarming trend, for that means that we are only adding enough new people to keep our head above water.  Eventually, though, as the city’s population continues to age, the departure rate will exceed the arrival rate, and the population will decline.  As I pointed out, this isn’t just a Bartlesville problem, it is an Oklahoma problem, as two areas accounted for all of the state’s feeble growth the past decade – Tulsa, and Oklahoma City.  Tulsa is the most interesting of the two because, unlike Oklahoma City, which continues to annex huge swaths of land to maintain its growth, Tulsa did not, and the population of the core city shrunk by around 20,000 the first five years of the decade while Tulsa County and the surrounding suburbs continued to grow.  Interestingly, as the Hispanic population of Tulsa jumped, so did the City of Tulsa’s, as it regained pretty much the entire population it lost in the first half of the decade in the second half of the decade.  Also interesting is where in Tulsa the growth occurred, outside of the boundaries of the Tulsa School District.

There are two good indicators that a city is stagnating.  The first is the number of traffic signals.  Since traffic signals are warranted by the amount of traffic, and traffic grows only in those areas that have growth, then removal of traffic signals is a good indicator of a lack of growth.  Of course, some jurisdictions will hang on to traffic signals even when there is no longer the traffic to justify them, but all in all, where signals are removed, you have stagnation and decline.  In the case of Bartlesville, there have been many signals removed, mostly downtown, which is now four-way stop heaven.  This is not a good sign.

An even more effective indicator of stagnation is the state of the schools.  Schools that drop programs or close are an indication of a dearth of young people, and without young people, a community will eventually die.  Tulsa Public Schools is planning on closing 17 schools this next school year, most of them in the stagnant neighborhoods of the school district.  Given that Tulsa’s growth is outside the Tulsa School District boundaries, this should be very alarming to those neighborhoods within the Tulsa School District, as it is quite obvious that those neighborhoods are aging and deteriorating rapidly, and, if you look at the census data, those are the areas that saw the highest exodus.

Copan, a community about ten miles north of Bartlesville, is at a point where the town leaders must accept the stagnation and quickly decide how to stop it.  The student population in the Copan schools has dropped over 20 percent over the past 18 months, and now the total enrollment, district-wide, is less than 250.  There are so few students that there aren’t enough to field larger sports teams.  While the idea of closing the district is not palatable to most, unless Copan attracts people with school-age children, and sustains that attraction, then the closing of the entire school district is inevitable.

Bartlesville Public Schools just announced that they will be closing one of the seven elementary schools at the end of this academic year due to a lack of students.   To add insult to injury, they intend to sell the building, as the district does not see the need for the seventh school in the future.  Hello!  Is anyone paying attention to this?  THE SCHOOL DISTRICT DOES NOT SEE A NEED FOR THE SEVENTH ELEMENTARY SCHOOL IN THE FUTURE.  In other words, the school district does not foresee any growth in the number of school-aged children in the future.  Thirty years ago, Bartlesville had two high schools, which were subsequently merged into one.  However, the school district kept both buildings, just in case they needed two high schools in the future, by using one for ninth and tenth grade and the other for eleventh and twelfth.  That way, if they needed two high schools again, it would be quite simple to do, as they still had both high school buildings.  Fast forward thirty years.  The two high schools are still one high school, and the district wants to divest one of it’s elementary schools, never to be used as a school building again.  No reason to hang onto a building that has no potential to ever be reused.

I know that I angered some people saying that I was concerned about stagnation, but someone has to mention the white elephant in the room.  Now, the school district has proven me right, that we are indeed stagnating.  Bartlesville can either continue to put its collective head in the sand and pretend that that reality doesn’t really exist and will magically go away, or it can acknowledge the painful reality and come up with ideas on how to reverse the malaise.  No matter what the sunny demagogues try to tell you, doing things the exact same way they have been done for the past 60 years will not solve the problem, but will only hasten Bartlesville’s demise.