Catherine Roberts

Tulsa Mayor Dewey Bartlett will seek a second term in office. 

He formally announced his plan to run again for mayor Monday afternoon at the newly constructed New American Bank & Trust building at 61st and Yale.

"I hear one resounding theme over and over again: things have definitely turned around in Tulsa, Oklahoma," Bartlett said. 

He said Tulsa should stay what he called a positive course begun under his administration. 

The Tulsa World gets a new owner.

BH Media Group, a division of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., will purchase the daily newspaper, in a sale that will close in March, according to the Tulsa World’s website.

Tulsa’s Lorton family has owned the paper for four generations.

“It was a surprise,” said the World’s Managing Editor Susan Ellerbach. “The Lortons have been such a big presence in our newsroom … It was a very emotional morning for us all.”

She says neither employees nor subscribers to the Tulsa World should expect changes.

With a Complete Streets resolution passed by the City Council, Tulsa will be incorporating biking, walking and public transit into plans for street projects.

A session Friday at City Hall provided tips to local and regional agency staff members on ways to secure federal funding for biking and pedestrian projects.

James Wagner is with INCOG, which helped put the session together.

An Oklahoma Senate bill would change the appeal process for certain terminated police officers.

This comes after an incident last year in which an Owasso police officer was reinstated through arbitration proceedings after being fired for using excessive force.

Senator Brian Crain introduced the bill, which passed unanimously in committee.

The Port of Catoosa had a record year in 2012 and a record month in January, 2013, for shipping totals.

That’s despite $100 million of deferred critical maintenance that needs to be done.

A system failure resulting in the closing of the port could result in a loss of $2 million per day.

A federal TIGER grant will fund the rehabilitation of the port’s main dock, doubling its capacity.

More funding is needed, however, to perform critical repairs to the lock and dam system.

It’s a little early for hail in Tulsa, but that’s what John Wiscaver with the Oklahoma Farm Bureau has been learning about this week.

He was in South Carolina Wednesday to witness the first-ever full-scale hailstorm simulation.

“Oklahoma is kind of ground zero for the most exposure to hail of anywhere in the country,” he said, “and as an insurance company we’re always very interested in trying to find ways to communicate to folks the importance of making better choices when they’re putting on either a new roof or replacing a roof.”

The Governor responds to the voting down of a change to tobacco laws she proposed in her State of the State address.

Details have not been finalized yet about an initiative petitions regarding proposals aimed at reducing second hand smoke risks.

Governor Fallin announced plans for the petition after the failure in the Senate General Government committee yesterday of a measure to restore control over tobacco regulations to local governments.

Design plans for Central Library’s renovations will be unveiled this evening.

They’ll be on display at 6 p.m. tonight at Central.

Work on the site will begin in September, and is expected to last two years.

Tulsa Library CEO Gary Shaffer says in the meantime, Central Library will temporarily relocate.

“We have rented space at 11 and Denver,” he said. “Most people know it as the old Safeway store, or the old Homeland store.”

Governor Fallin won’t get her wish, expressed in her State of the State address, for return of local control over tobacco regulations.

A bill that would have allowed local governments’ ordinances to override the state law failed in the Senate General Government Committee earlier today.

The bill would have meant that cities could enact regulations that were either more or less stringent than the state’s law.

During the standing-room-only committee meeting, Oklahoma State Health Department Commissioner Terry Cline testified in favor of the bill.

The high profile murders of four women in the Fairmont Terrace apartments early last month have a lot of us—including the City of Tulsa, which recently formed a new public safety intelligence group—thinking more about safety. Our series looks at the various answers to this question: What’s the best thing you can do to protect yourself from an attack?

For a lot of people here in Oklahoma, the answer to the question of the best way to protect yourself from an attack is simple: carry a gun.