One Year in Office: Mayor Nichols looks ahead with 2 News

Mayor Monroe Nichols sits down with 2 News

By: Christine Stanwood

TULSA, Okla. — Mayor Monroe Nichols sat down with 2 News Anchor Christine Stanwood to talk about issues Tulsa is facing.

This is part of a monthly series on 2 News Today.

WATCH: Mayor Nichols looks ahead with 2 News

Mayor Monroe Nichols sits down with 2 News

Transcript:
Stanwood: I've been told that you have officially hit one year in office. How does it feel?

Nichols: It feels great. It feels great. Yeah, I mean, it's been an incredibly busy year. We have a phenomenal team up here, both here in the mayor's office but all across the city, and you know we've taken on a lot of challenging tasks, but I think we've done pretty well. We got a long way to go, but I feel really good about where we're at right now.

Stanwood: What are some of the highs from the last year?

Nichols: You know, I think the consistency that we've had, you know, we've worked on issues, everything from homelessness to housing to education.

Economic development, public safety, and, obviously, you know, repairing our relationships with Indian Country. And as you look across the board, like, you know, we just got the winter shelter open, we'll have a low-barrier shelter coming. We're decommissioning encampments the right way, getting people housed and served on the homelessness front. The housing impact fund has been launched, and so, pretty soon, we'll start deploying the resources to get us closer to those 6000 affordable units over the next 3 years.

On the education front, we launched the Office of Children, Youth, and Families, and so we're working every day to make sure we give 15,000 additional Tulsa kids a pathway of economic mobility. The economic development front, I think there's almost $2 billion of capital investment being invested in this community right now.

We were in Tahlequah visiting with our partners at the Cherokee Nation about ways in which we can continue to work together. So it's been a.. been a pretty wild ride. I'm very proud of all of it.

Stanwood: What do you see room for improvement, for the next year?

Nichols: I think there's room for improvement across the board. One of the things that we keep ourselves really committed to is looking at the data, and so I'll take housing as an example. We have a clear goal of 6000 affordable units over the next 3 years.

And we have a housing tracker that shows we're about 10% to that goal. S,o as we deploy the resources that we're going to be deploying.

It's also making sure our internal processes are really good because if you spend a bunch of money, but you don't have great processes in-house, you know, permitting things like that don't necessarily keep up with the resources. So, for us, I think room for improvement is making sure we get it right here, so that as we're investing the money that Tulsans give us, it's getting the desired impact, and so we work on that.

Every single day, absolutely,

Stanwood: You know, just this week we saw our first big cold snap. Yes, we saw December coming in with a roar. The city streets were ready. You guys utilized your salt trucks pretty early on overnight. The city's roads were very well maintained. How else do you guys want to improve when it comes to winter weather preparedness?

Nichols: You know, I think the city's done a really good job of that for a long time. That predated me. I was incredibly impressed when I got here last year.

When we had the first winter snap of my time in office, the preparation of the team here at the city is like second to none. It's quite amazing. Just Sunday night, I think we had like 200 people ready crew-wise to address any issues that were out there. They started at midnight.

The highways were a little tricky, but the city streets were pretty amazing, and so I just, you know, for me, I think that's one of the things that we do better than just about anybody is the preparation around the winter. I think an area for improvement for us is gonna be how do we make sure that people who need to be warm, that we make sure we continue to work on our capacity to make sure they're, it's the reason why we have the winter weather shelter.

Just making sure we're able to take care of people in those cold snaps is gonna be the thing that we continue to be focused on, and it's my impression that those 250 spots will be open soon.

So the way it works, there's 60 right now. By the end of December there'll be capacity for 125. If we hit what we would consider to be a winter emergency, we have a capacity of 250.

Stanwood: Is that forecast or is that something that you deem?

Nichols: So we would probably do the forecast so we can prepare, right, like part of it is like staffing and those types of things, um, because we would then operate that winter shelter, but we also have other emergency shelters that we would be operating just like we did last year. The problem that we came into this year with, though is that the Rose Bowl, for example, which ended up being an emergency shelter, not available this year, and so we'd be scrambling to figure out, you know, where do you find the kind of capacity you need for a pretty sizable chunk of folks. We don't have to worry about that this year because we have the winter shelter set up.

Stanwood: Let's talk about the sales tax because, man, you dropped that after our talk, and I was like,' oh, this would have been so good.' How are you working to get more people on board with that vote?

Nichols: So I mean, I think the reality about that situation is I think voters, citizens, are in a good place. They understand the challenges that we have. I think they understand the opportunities that are in front of us. I think the challenge is gonna be working with councilors so they get more comfortable with it. My impression I get from them is that's something they're gonna take up in January. We look forward to working with them.

But I think the need is clear.

I'll tell you, I think this is, this is certainly since our last sit-down. I went to Denton, Texas, to the University of North Texas on a recruiting trip with the Tulsa Police Department, trying to recruit the next class of individuals to serve in law enforcement here.

And there were probably 12 or 14 other law enforcement agencies. I mean, we didn't come within like $15,000 in starting to pay any of them, and we were the only department that had the bachelor's degree requirement. And so, like building an excellent department over time is gonna take us to.

Think about how we resource the city a little bit differently. Homelessness continues to be a focus of ours. Uh, we've gone out and worked with the best experts we can find anywhere who've evaluated our strategy right now and looked at other places that have been really successful, and they tell us you've got the right strategy. You don't have the scale, you don't have the resources to put behind that's gonna help you get to where you need to go, and the time frame that I think people expect and deserve, that's gonna take us looking at it differently. I, as you know.

You're gonna have a kiddo. I think that kids are our greatest asset, and I think we have to invest in them. So a big part of that was making sure we invest in young people, make sure we take care of the things that we already have, and then protect the investment of the taxpayers by making sure they get some return on the things that they're investing. So the 7/10 of a penny,uh,still remains to be a focus of mine.

You know it's not just a conversation about increasing taxes. It's how do we invest to make sure Tulsa comes out on the other side of these challenges and these opportunities, having done it better than anybody across the country, and that's really where our focus remains.

Stanwood: Let's end on this. Our community lost an icon, a legend, this last week, remembering Mother Fletcher. What is it like to not only honor and remember her legacy but also cherish the remaining survivors, the first generation-- from the Tulsa race -- map for her, you know, say a little bit about her.

Nichols: So there were two memorial services for her on Saturday. The first was in Bartlesville, and before we all knew her, I didn't meet her until she was like 107.

But to hear the people in Bartlesville had no idea that she was a race massacre survivor talked about the kind of person she was, it was the coolest thing ever. I mean. She was like volunteering at the community center and this kind of quiet confidence where she was like everybody's grandmother, just a sweet almost perfect type of a person that they described at this. That you know, I just never knew that about her. I've known her since we all got to know her as a survivor of the race massacre. So you take that and then you think all the things that we know about her were done when she was 107 or older, the kind of stamina and energy.

And focus and sharpness and all those things, it's just pretty phenomenal. I'm 42 years ol,d and I gotta admit I get tired sometimes. I'm not sure she ever really did until the end, until she passed away, she was still sharp. She.. it was not one of those endings where she didn't know what was going on. She still was very sharp. Um,one really cool story about her, you're gonna ask me this, but I'll tell you this.

So when she got a little bit older, she went and worked in shipyards during the war, um, and you know, you think about, here's this person who, you know, survived a race massacre, nobody's held accountable, and here she is serving her country. But if you ask her, and I found out this, the story, she did it because her brother Hughes Van Ellis, who was one of the other three remaining survivors, who died in 2023, but her brother was in the Navy.

And she said I did it because I wanted my brother to come home and if he was in the Navy I was gonna help build ships. Isn't that phenomenal?

And so I just feel really grateful to have known her, grateful for what she meant to this community. It's one of the reasons why we established the Greenwood Trust. It's a private charitable trust that's focused on reinvestment and making sure that we can, you know, begin that road to repair the harm caused by the massacre. So we're focused on it, but she was just an amazing soul, and I was glad to have known her.