Introduction

I'm a boom-a-rang Tulsan. If you don't know what that means, I grew up here, moved away in college, and stayed away for many years but then came back to my hometown. I moved back to Tulsa in 1999—one year before the new millennium. While I was away, I lived in various other cities, including New York, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, Dallas, and Alexandria, Virginia. I loved those cities, but they weren't home. Something about Tulsa called me back, and so my husband, a native New Yorker, & I came back here to raise our kids and live our lives. When I try to explain the appeal of Tulsa to my friends who still live in big cities, who live high-paced adventurous sleepless cities, I simply say, "life in complicated; Tulsa is easy." Sometimes we just need things to be simpler.

When I first moved back here, I had no interest whatsoever in local politics. It seemed so dull. I was still living with an east coast, big city mentality pretending that keeping up on the latest in the former eastern bloc counties was somehow more important to my life than the election of my city councilor. Then someone decided to knock down three houses in my neighborhood and replace them with a surface lot. Our home, at that time, was in the Yorktown historic district. For those who live in a historically zoned district, you know that there are some inconveniences—you must get approval before you make most changes to your home to ensure that those changes are consistent with the historic character of the neighborhood. So your storm door and windows must comply with certain standards. For the life of me, I could not figure out how a surface parking lot could in any way be consistent with the historic nature of our 1920's neighborhood of bungalows. It was then that I had my crash-course on local politics.

Since then, I've become much more immersed in local issues. I have served on the Planning Commission and the Preservation Commission. I was significantly involved in PlaniTulsa, and helped in several local campaigns. As my term on the Planning Commission nears its end, and Tulsa approaches an enormous turning point this fall, I have decided to take some time to write down my thoughts. I believe that the city needs more avenues to discuss and reflect upon issues that directly affect citizens. I hope that my blog provides one such avenue.