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Making the Case for Both of the Upcoming Tulsa County Jail-Tax Propositions

Tulsa Jail
Aired on Wednesday, March 26th.

Prison overcrowding is, unfortunately, a well-known nationwide phenomenon. It's also a familiar and quite serious problem here in our own backyard, as it were, and thus many local residents feel that if we don't step up and take action, it's only going to worsen --- that is, it'll go from very bad to even worse. On Tuesday, April 1st, Tulsa County voters will be asked to consider two sales-tax initiatives. One asks voters to approve an expansion on the Tulsa Jail; this expansion would cost around $9.3 million and would cover the building and operating of four new "pods" to exist with the current jail. (Two of these pods would serve the jail's general population, one would be for juveniles, and the remaining one would be a mental-health facility.) The other initiative on next Tuesday's ballot asks voters to approve the construction and consolidation of a new --- and, in the opinion of our two guests today, greatly needed if not long overdue --- Tulsa County Juvenile Justice Center, which would cost about $45 million. Our guests on ST are Karen Keith, the Tulsa County Commissioner for District 2, and Judge Doris L. Fransein, Chief Judge of the Juvenile Division for Tulsa County.

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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