Casey Bradford On Why He's Running For Tulsa Mayor

Voters will head to the polls on Tuesday to decide who will become the next mayor of Tulsa.

One of the candidates, Casey Bradford, joined Jonathan Cooper on News On 6 to talk about his plan.

Coop: You're a political newcomer, right? Tell us about why you wanted to get into politics and why you wanted to run for mayor of Tulsa.

Bradford: After a decade spent in the United States Army, came back, started a company, a business, and realized that the systems that we currently have in place aren't necessarily working for the people of this city. If anything, they act as a hindrance a lot of times. We built several different companies, and every single time, we just met roadblock after roadblock, and I got tired of just dealing with it, and figured one day I would show up and see if I could change it.

Coop: Tell us about the companies that you currently own here in the Tulsa area.

Bradford: So we've kind of shunted everything down to one. We've got Lounge 88, Shady Keys, that's still in operation as we're pursuing this. And, yeah, we're driving that fully forward.

Coop: In your mind, what's the biggest issue that's facing Tulsans right now, and why did you want to run for mayor?

Bradford: Tulsa is great at beautiful, beautiful things, but what we've been neglecting is the foundation of the city. And we're seeing that with a rise in homelessness, a rise in crime rates. I mean, there are 900 children within TPS that are that are homeless right now. We're seeing that in our power grids, the infrastructure of our power grids that are 50, 60 years old and being completely neglected. We're seeing that in our lack of or our inability to retain police officers and teachers, and we're, you know, painting Elon Musk's face on the Tulsa Driller and building great parks and dams, but we're not addressing the underlying issues that are the foundation of the city.

Coop: How do you plan to fix some of those issues? Have you thought about that? Have you talked to some people?

Bradford: Oh, yeah. So there are a lot of brilliant people in the city, a lot of people with phenomenal ideas and concepts that have been mulling these over for years, and we've gotten to meet with a lot of them, talk with a lot of them, and kind of listen to what they have to say that have been around here, 20, 30, 40 years, that have been, you know, on that soapbox talking about the same issues, saying this is going to be a problem one day, and we are hoping to lean on the expertise of a lot of the people inside of Tulsa to actually address these issues.

Coop: What makes you unique compared to some of these other candidates that are running?

Bradford: So I did a decade in the United States Army. Started off as a Chinese Mandarin linguist, worked for the NSA, translating for the government real time. Got into cyber security, which is another major issue that we're experiencing here in Tulsa, nationwide. From there, I went on and started working with partner nations across the globe, and working with them, even though there were massive religious differences, massive cultural differences, and finding commonalities between some of these, these very polarizing, extreme individuals, and bringing them together for the completion of a mission. And I think what we're seeing in politics, not only in Tulsa and the state, but across the nation, is a lot of our leaders are using those divisions to, you know, try to get their policy or whatever passed, but they're not actually taking into account what the people are there for, and understanding the representation that they should be of the constituents.