Mayor Nichols discusses community conversations, homelessness, and golf course improvements

Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols sat down with News On 6 on Wednesday to discuss a variety of issues impacting the city, including upcoming community conversations, homelessness efforts, and improvements to the city's public golf courses.

Q: Let's start with these upcoming community conversations. What can Tulsans expect from them?

A: "Absolutely. Yeah, it's really exciting. So it's the opportunity for citizens to meet and talk with me, city councilors, the city auditor. I think even more important, we'll have all the city departments there as well, so you can build those one-on-one connections with folks all across the city. Not everybody wants to talk to the mayor, but they may have an issue. They want to talk to somebody in development services or somebody in the parks department or somebody in public works. These conversations give you the opportunity to do it, and we're doing them all across the city. So we have five of them, starting on the 22nd of this month at Hard City Library in South Tulsa. We'll then be out east at Hannah Hall on the 28th. May 5, I think we are in West Tulsa, at the Dream Center West, and then we'll head to Midtown OU Tulsa, and then on north at Hawthorne."

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Q: What are you hoping people take away from these conversations?

A: "The goal is really that people establish really connections with folks in the city who they really feel like they need, you know, a voice with and so that's the reason why we're doing it, not just with the mayor, not just the city council. It's not just the auditor, not just the departments, but all of us all together. You know, in my time in office so far, the one thing that I know is that I know we're gonna have to solve all these problems together. It's gonna have to be the city working with the community. And these community conversations are really a pathway by which we kind of, we kind of think about how we do that together."

Q: One of the big issues facing Tulsa is homelessness. How is your administration addressing it?

A: "Yeah, we just really started the work. You had an executive order that established a decommissioning team. So we're really being very thoughtful about how do we move people out of encampments and improve their outcomes. This is not just about shifting the problem from one encampment to the other, but how do we do that in a coordinated way? So we're working there. We're working also to increase the shelter space, where we're looking everywhere for a true low-barrier shelter so anybody who needs help can find a place there. And doing that in conjunction with the work we're doing around affordable housing, right? So we've created this housing acceleration team. Our goal is to get those 6,000 units, affordable units out of the ground in four years. That's going to help us not just make sure that, you know, we're getting people in the shelters, but we're getting them into permanent housing. We're getting them onto a better life."

Q: How do you plan to overcome any resistance to these changes?

A: "I think transparency, right? Transparency as it relates to where we might have multifamily housing units, right? Transparency with the folks who need the help on how we're going to support them as they go on their journey to get better outcomes. I think the goal is to be honest and be transparent with folks with a really strong plan. And so it's us, it's all the folks in the practitioner world supporting folks who are homeless, but ultimately, it's going to be all of us as a community figuring out, how do we wrap our hands around folks ensure they don’t end up back on the street, which is something I think every Tulsan wants, right?"

Q: I know you're excited about improvements to Tulsa's golf courses. What's the update on that?

A: "I mean, if you know golf in Tulsa, you know, next door because and he has been at Southern Hills for 30 years, three decades, his partner, Randy, they are going to bring an excellent level of excellence to Tulsa golf that we haven’t seen. You can go to TulsaGolf.org to check it out. But I mean, you know, from the upgrades to the facilities to making sure we're doing outreach for young people and folks who haven't traditionally been a part of the sport. We're going to have the best public golf courses in the country. I'm convinced of it, because Nick and Randy and Mark is the directors of golf. They're going to do an amazing job."