Tulsa District 4 Councilwoman Laura Bellis and challenger Aaron Griffith are both critical of the city’s continued prosecution of tribal citizens within reservation boundaries, but Griffith says Bellis should be more vocal in opposing Tulsa’s position in multiple lawsuits.
Asked about the cases, Bellis said she opposes the city’s stance in the lawsuits but that the mayor is responsible for directing the city’s legal department in how to respond to individual cases.
Since the 2020 McGirt v. Oklahoma decision functionally upheld the eastern half of Oklahoma as a series of Indian reservations, Tulsa is the largest city in the United States to fall almost entirely within Indian Country. The current mayoral administration is engaged in at least two separate lawsuits over Tulsa’s decision to continue exercising criminal jurisdiction over tribal citizens in municipal court.
Bellis, 35, said the Tulsa City Council does not control the city’s legal strategy but criticized Mayor G.T. Bynum’s administration for continuing the cases.
“I think the rulings are really clear on this, and we have a strong-mayor government so the mayor’s office and legal are pursuing that,” Bellis said. “But I personally do not agree with that approach. I think we should respect tribal sovereignty. I think we are wasting time and dollars fighting something that we should be collaborating on. Other cities have figured this out. We can make agreements and let it be handled appropriately.”
Griffith, a citizen of the Muscogee Nation, called the city’s position in the lawsuits “a big loser for the city.”
“I will not support funding to continue that lawsuit,” Griffith said. “I think it’s a lost cause like the Confederacy that needs to just die.”
Funding for the city’s lawsuits comes from the legal department’s budget and does not have a separate line item approved by the city council.
Griffith, 49, also criticized Bellis for not speaking out against the lawsuit sooner.
“I have a pretty good record of being a public advocate for tribal sovereignty and standing up for my community, and I will never shy away from that or let anyone intimidate me or try to silence me when it comes to making sure the law is followed,” Griffith said. “I won’t let our city illegally usurp municipal jurisdiction over tribal members, willfully and negligently — without even so much as a whimper — unlike my opponent who prides herself on being a social justice warrior.”
Bellis is from Philadelphia and moved to Tulsa in 2011 as part of the Teach for America program. She taught at Hale Junior High for five years and started with the Take Control Initiative in 2016.
She said she began following municipal government in 2015 after her students asked her questions about then-Tulsa County Reserve Deputy Robert Bates shooting and killing Eric Harris.
Bynum appointed Bellis to the city’s Human Rights Commission in 2016, but she later wrote an op-ed critical of the mayor for allowing the June 2020 Trump rally to take place in Tulsa three months into the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, she was elected to represent Tulsa City Council District 4, which covers a broad swath of the city south of Interstate 244.
Despite past disagreements, Bynum has endorsed Bellis’ reelection campaign.
Griffith was born in McAlester where he says his neighbor growing up was former U.S. House Speaker Carl Albert. His family briefly lived in Oklahoma City before settling in Tulsa where he graduated from Edison High School.
He has lived in Tulsa City Council District 4 for 37 years and has been a carpenter for 24 years. He is a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters Local 943, which has endorsed his campaign. Previously, he was a member of the Tulsa Public Schools Indian Education Program Parent Committee.
Bellis has endorsements from the LGBTQ Victory Fund and Tulsa School Board Vice President John Croissant, as well as the Tulsa Firefighters PAC and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 584.
Bellis said she has not formally endorsed any other candidates, but she had “collaborated” with Jackie Dutton in District 3 and is “excited” for her campaign.
Bellis initially said she “looked forward to working with whoever wins” the mayoral race, but after a pause added that she had “major concerns” about Brent VanNorman and gave him “whatever the opposite of an endorsement is.”
She cited VanNorman’s failure to address parts of a question at a mayoral debate about some his prior statements, including one statement that appeared to imply he believed public officials should be required to be Christian. During the debate, VanNoman clarified that he does not believe public officials should be required to be Christian, but he did not address parts of the question about other statements he wrote during a campaign for the Virginia House of Delegates in 2013.
“He only addressed one piece of some prior comments he had made, and that concerned me. I want to hear the rest of his answers,” Bellis said. “But I’m glad he thinks as a Jew I’m allowed to serve on the council.”
Griffith endorsed State Question 832, a proposed state question that would raise the minimum wage in Oklahoma over a series of years. Griffith also endorsed requesting the Oklahoma Legislature to increase the penalty for stealing copper during extreme temperatures, citing the theft of copper from Big Al’s Healthy Foods, a restaurant in the district.
Candidates say homelessness the top priority, Griffith proposes charter amendment
Bellis said her top priorities include housing, homelessness and mental health. She said much of the city’s social services are centralized around Tulsa City Council District 4 but that the city needs to maintain and improve existing services.
“That’s something I think it’s really important to stay laser-focused on,” Bellis said. “Upstream, something I’m focused on, is eviction prevention, so we can stop people from becoming homeless in the first place.”
Bellis said reforming the city’s zoning and permitting process to help alleviate the city’s housing crisis is a priority.
“Paired with that comes into play development and housing feasibility and doing things both from a zoning perspective and, of course, a permitting one — (a) hot topic I keep hearing the mayoral candidates talking about,” Bellis said with a laugh. “Making sure it’s really feasible for people to develop and to address our housing crisis, but also balancing that with helping preserve neighborhood integrity, which is a really delicate balancing act.”
Griffith also cited affordable housing and homelessness as his top issues, but he attributed the problems to conversion of housing into short-term rental properties.
“My top priority would be the quality of life and cost of living in the district. First, in terms of affordable housing and the homelessness issue, I think the city’s policies of ‘deregulate everything’ and just ‘build, build, build’ isn’t addressing the core causes of the issue,” Griffith said. “It’s treating the symptoms, but not the disease. And the disease in Tulsa, in my opinion, is the unmitigated, exponential and unrestricted growth of short-term rentals.”
He said Tulsans do not know the number of short-term rentals in the city since some owners do not follow municipal law requiring registration with the city. He said enforcement of city regulations on short-term rentals only occurs when a neighbor complains.
According to the city’s website, license fees from short term rentals are used to hire a “compliance monitoring company” to identify unregistered short term rentals and assist with enforcement.
“[Local news] did a report on [code enforcement], and they basically said, ‘We’re 2,000 cases behind, and we get 22,000 cases a year and we have a staff of 13 people,'” Griffith said. “We’re not resourcing our operations and prioritizing where we need to be to ever get those problems addressed and get to where we fully need to be — to a level citizens should expect.”
Griffith cited sanitation, code enforcement and permitting as departments that he wants to see have more resources. He predicted the city’s underfunding of the sanitation department would become more apparent once Zink Lake opened.
“They knew full well what kind of issues we’d run into in terms of recreating the river in terms of the E. coli,” Griffith said. “And it was just not politically convenient for anyone to give the cold, honest truth to people that we have a lot of old, private sewer lines that are leaking, and they need to be fixed if we want to enjoy these new amenities we have in the river.”
Bellis also advocated for creating better data-sharing policies to allow for social workers, hospital workers, firefighters and police to share information about individuals who frequently cycle between interactions with various different public and private employees.
“We can do better data sharing in governance there to do better coordinated care for people and save a lot of time and resources while also better helping people,” Bellis said.
Griffith also advocated for an amendment to the city’s charter to tie all city employees’ pay to the consumer price index, referencing a proposal to tie city councilor, mayoral and the city auditor’s pay to the CPI.
“If tying the salaries to the consumer price index is a good way to take out the partisanship and the politics of determining the salaries of elected officials, it should be the same standard for all our employees in the City of Tulsa,” Griffith said. “I think that would help alleviate a lot of our recruitment issues.”
Tulsa City Council District 4 candidates talk education
Asked the City Council’s role in improving education in Tulsa, Bellis said it was important for the council to ensure that areas around schools have necessary infrastructure.
“There are so many conditions that exist in and around a school that the city is part of building. We are the ones that are building the conditions that [students] live in through our policies and our investments,” Bellis said. “To me, it’s really those conditions that surround schools.”
Bellis also said the council needs to be “directly responsible” for trying to decrease the eviction rates affecting Tulsa Public Schools’ students.
“Of course, that affects families and attendance and outcomes. How could it not?” Bellis said. “Right now, [school staff] are trying to make sure people are fed, clothed, housed and so much more, and the city does have a role in all of that.”
A frequent speaker during public comment portions of board meetings, Griffith described himself as a “somewhat of a critic” of Tulsa Public Schools over the years, and he criticized the hiring of “uncertified adjunct teachers” by Tulsa Public Schools and the number of teachers working without college degrees.
He said he wants the district to invest more of its resources into teachers and classrooms while reforming the administration to make the district more attractive to teachers.
“I would like to be able to say it’s administration, but they don’t produce employee organization charts. I would say looking at the numbers, that’s a big part of it,” Griffith said. “Too many chiefs, not enough Indians. Pardon the pun.”
Asked about being a plaintiff in an ongoing lawsuit alleging that the Tulsa Public Schools Board of Education violated the Open Meeting Act, Griffith declined to discuss specifics, but he pushed back on the idea the lawsuit is frivolous.
“I will say this. I have been criticized in my campaign as that being a frivolous lawsuit, and there were some issues that were specifically addressed to me in regards to Title I and Title VI tribal consultation for federal funding,” Griffith said. “To my critics, I would say this: If you want to criticize me because there are some technicalities that have dismissed some of my major claims in this lawsuit, then you should make the same claims about the Race Massacre lawsuit. It was dismissed on similar technicalities.”
(Update: This article was updated at 12:35 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2024, to include additional information about short term rentals and the city’s legal department.)
