"Well, hello everybody, my name is Ronald Durbin."
Attorney Ronald Durbin knows how to make a splash. Minutes before Wednesday's city council meeting, in the hallway in front of the chamber, he announced that the city and three councilors were being sued.
"We’re here to hold them accountable for their failure to follow the Oklahoma Open Meeting Act," he said.
The lawsuit centers around text messages sent between councilors at a meeting last week.
"Discussing city business privately amongst yourselves while a quorum of the council is present is inappropriate," said Tulsa City Councilor Grant Miller.
In the texts, Miller was called "ridiculous" by some of his colleagues.
NewsChannel 8 asked Miller if he would have preferred them to have said out loud, "Councilor Miller, I think your idea is ridiculous?"
"Absolutely, 100%. That is the essential part of an open government," he said.
"You know, if Councilor Miller says something absurd and ridiculous, I want to hear the councilors say that in the meeting. Tell me why, as a citizen, he’s being ridiculous about wanting $10 million for homelessness over the Gilcrease," said Durbin.
Despite Miller being at the center of the storm, he's not the plaintiff.
"We’re going to find where the bones are buried," said Freeman Culver, president of the Greenwood Chamber of Commerce.
Culver is the plaintiff, worried that behind-the-scenes communications may have impacted funding for his community.
"Who wants to shine light on what’s been going on with things like the ARPA funding and the allocation of those funding? How did we get to those decision?" said Durbin.
Meanwhile, as for the councilors, all three referred us to their attorney Laurie Phillips.
"This is something small that's been blown up into a big thing," said Phillips.
"If councilors can text each other during meetings, as these councilors seem to believe they can, then what’s the point of public meetings?" said Durbin.
Durbin says, before the lawsuit was filed, they tried to work things out, asking for a new policy that would deal with cellphones in meetings, but heard nothing back. Now...
"We are asking that every single solitary action that has ever been taken by this city council in violation of the Open Meeting Act be invalidated. Anything that they have done that we can discover they’ve violated the Open Meetings Act, we are going to seek to have it invalidated," he said.