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The Nonprofit Smart Growth Tulsa: An Update on Its Goals and Activities

Aired on Wednesday, March 15th.

On this edition of ST, we offer a wide-ranging chat with Bill Leighty, the executive director of Smart Growth Tulsa, which was founded in April of 2014 and incorporated as a nonprofit just recently. This organization, per its website, is "committed to policies, not politics. We seek to create healthy communities that work for everyone, with strong schools and local businesses, improved mobility options and jobs that pay well.... We recognize the benefit of increased population density and tightly controlled sprawl to improve safety and save money on infrastructure and maintenance costs. We advocate for smart growth solutions to create safe, healthy, and affordable live, work, and play neighborhoods served by adequate public transportation. We are committed to creating local jobs and protecting the environment. We support smart public investments and common sense solutions based upon proven ideas, not just good theory. We want major capital spending projects to be entirely consistent with our comprehensive plan and subjected to a sound return on investment analysis before they are considered. We celebrate Tulsa's assets but strive to improve our city in virtually every area of life."

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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