Speaker numbers apply only to this recording. Names come from transcript evidence. “Possibly” marks uncertain attribution.
The Asian Affairs Commission of Tulsa held its regular monthly meeting on 2026-11-03 (November 3, 2026) at 6:00 PM UTC, chaired by Patty Saphila. The meeting focused on the dramatic decline in Asian business ownership in Tulsa since 2018, featuring testimony from three local business owners. The commission also debated and ultimately voted to transfer the stewardship of the Tulsa Asia Fest to the Tulsa Asian Collective. Deputy Chief of Staff Brenton Todd addressed the commission, encouraging their recommending role and the building of leadership pipelines.
Thank you. All right, everyone. Welcome to our November meeting and our last meeting of 2026. As a reminder, we do not meet in December to spare you the craziness of winter. Excited to be here today and really excited to have community members in the audience. If this is your first meeting, please bear with us. I'll try and explain what's happening so that you're not totally confused by Robert's rules. The first thing we're going to do is approve the meeting minutes from the October meeting. So every commissioner has a copy of what we talked about last month, and we'll look over it just to make sure it is accurate and reflects what we remember of that conversation. When we're ready, someone can make a motion to approve the minutes. Yes. I only seconded. So please. And hear you assume. I read it yesterday, so I seconded it in my heart. Welcome to approve. Second. All in favor. Alright, meetings minutes for October pass. And now I'll give a quick chair report. My name is Patty Saphila. I'm very happy to be the chair of the Asian Affairs Commission and so happy to have so many people in the room who aren't commissioners. You know, it's nice to have the community here. We know it's not easy to get to City Hall on a Tuesday in the middle of the day. So thank you all for joining us. Um and for my chair report, I wanted to start by welcoming our newest commissioner, Rex. Welcome. Would you mind giving just a quick introduction about who you are? Yeah, hi, I'm Rex Thurdi. I'm uh representing the Indian community and hope to look forward with uh working with all you of you guys uh having uh vice president for India Association and the committee at the Hindu Temple. So we look forward to having uh a joint uh stuff and go from there. Thank you so much. Great. You will say that too, and for the next meeting, I would be monitoring myself to bring food. All right. Hopefully, yes, all right. Um it has been one of my initiatives as chair to make sure there's always a snack at the meetings. As an Iranian woman, I would never welcome a group of people to my home without snacks. So same goes for City Hall. So today, Jerusalem Market brought some lovely baklava. I brought some dried fruit leather. I went to Houston last week and had to stock up while I was there. Um, and so please grab some during or after the meeting if you'd like. In addition to welcoming Rex, I also wanted to um share that Commissioner Chong, Meg Chung has um stepped down from the commission and wanted to thank her for her service. And on that note, the way our commission works is we have seats that are at large that anyone who lives in Tulsa can join.