Public Eye is here to help Oklahomans with problems
Dear readers,
Some years ago, when my wife and I were expecting our first child, we rented a small house from a landlord who we thought was a gem. He was folksy, fun to talk to. He seemed to be giving us a good deal on the rent. We felt lucky.
That all changed during the first big rain. The septic system overflowed and backed up into the basement, filling it with raw sewage. Everything we had stored down there, including baby shower gifts, was ruined.
Our landlord, without investigating the situation himself, insisted we had caused the backup by flushing improper things down the toilet. We had done no such thing. He refused to pay for the fixes and left it to us to pump out the basement. We never even broached the idea of him paying for our ruined goods.
What he didn’t know, though, was that my wife was a reporter. She was in between jobs and had time on her hands. Putting her journalism skills to work, she plumbed public records, discovered code violations and found previous tenants of the landlord who had similar stories. The county where we lived required regular septic system inspections. My wife found out the landlord had managed to skirt the requirements and discovered the system had not been properly serviced in years. It was decades past its useful life. After pumping out the basement, we saw wellworn water stain lines on the walls that were evidence of past floods, which previous tenants confirmed. The landlord had disguised the smell and the lines by using oil-based paint.
What my wife discovered was a landlord who had a long history of cheating tenants. He was able to get away with it because most of his tenants, like us, were of modest means and didn’t have that wherewithal to fight back. By the time my wife was through, she had gathered enough evidence to force him to return our damage deposit and break our lease. And, of course, we reported him to the proper county authorities who deal with landlord-tenant issues.
I hear stories all the time of people who faced frustrating situations like ours but were ultimately forced to give in. They didn’t know who to contact for help. Or they did reach out but were stymied by impossibly slow or indifferent bureaucracies. Maybe it was a landlord problem, or an issue with a utility company or a sketchy car dealer. Perhaps it was a neighborhood nuisance, like toxic fumes persisting in the air or a dangerous property not properly fenced off that no one seems to be doing anything about.
Maybe you’re facing a situation like that now.
We want to help. This week, we’re launching a new investigative initiative. We’re calling it “Public Eye.”
The idea is to use our investigative resources to help answer your questions or find solutions to your problems. We want to help readers who don’t have the resources to investigate their own issues or feel like they aren’t getting answers from the people whose job it is to help.
Since we started announcing this initiative we’ve already heard from lots of readers. Expect to see a story every Tuesday and perhaps more often. And expect to see call-outs from us asking for your help in finding answers when we can’t.
Of course, we can’t tell every story or investigate every complaint, but we want to do the best we can to shed light and bring relief to as many problems as we can. So, if you’re having a problem you can’t resolve, or maybe you did resolve it but want the broader public to know how you did it, let us know by emailing us at publiceye@oklahoman.com.
We look forward to hearing from you.