This is the story of a speed hump that still isn’t built, a poorly worded Microsoft Word translation and one woman in Tulsa’s Sequoyah neighborhood who is frustrated she can’t effectively communicate with her neighbors.
That’s Emily DelGrosso. All she wanted was to keep the midtown neighborhood safe from speeding vehicles.
What she got was an extended trip through the bureaucracy of a city that has a rapidly growing Spanish-speaking population and, she believes, may not have the resources to fully service them. According to the 2024 American Community Survey, roughly 17% of Tulsa County residents identify as Latino.
“I’ve never expected the city to help me communicate with my neighbors outside of me doing what they’re asking me to do,” she said. “The city says, ‘If you want this benefit from the city, if you want access to this resource from the city, you have to do this,’ and I’m trying to do what they’re asking, but I don’t have the resources to be able to do it.”
DelGrosso decided to begin the process for her street, near Sequoyah Park, after she noticed a neighbor placed a makeshift speed limit sign in the neighborhood. She submitted an official application in early 2024 and wasn’t approved to move onto the petition process until that summer.
But the city needs to study a street before it gets a speed bump.
Depending on the street, speed limits gathered during data collection must be higher than 5 to 7 mph than the posted speed limit. Eligible streets must also receive an average of 600 and 5,000 vehicles per day, depending on the street.
The City of Tulsa’s traffic study for DelGrosso’s neighborhood determined the street received 1,283 vehicles per day at a speed of 30.87 mph, qualifying the area for a speed hump. With that in hand, she was ready to start petitioning her neighbors.
Petition stalled by language barriers
The petition process, which has a 45-day timeline, is when the applicant must reach out to 80% of addresses near the location and receive at least 67% “yes” votes to add the speed hump. That means a lot of door knocking.
The problem: Most of DelGrosso’s neighbors don’t speak English. DelGrosso would find herself standing at the door trying to explain, in English, why the neighborhood needed a speed hump. None of them could understand her explanation — the language was a speed hump of its own.
“It feels defeating a little bit,” DelGrosso said. “I’m not even the person whose access is limited in this situation, and I still don’t know where to go from here.”
DelGrosso brought her friend Jessica Noonan, who has worked on community advocacy projects with her, on one door-knocking trip. They found one bilingual speaker. Everyone else only spoke Spanish.
So she asked the consultant the city contracts with on “traffic calming petition forms” to translate the form into Spanish, according to emails DelGrosso shared with the Flyer. Ten days later, the contractor, Kimley-Horn, informed DelGrosso the city would translate all the Neighborhood Traffic Calming Program documents into Spanish. Translating more than the petition sounded like a win – but it caused a longer delay for DelGrosso to begin the petition process.
Her sense of victory lasted until Kimley-Horn’s staff informed her they used Microsoft Word to translate the documents — and noted the text might not be 100% accurate. The City of Tulsa didn’t provide her with an official translated copy until July of this year, more than a year since she first started advocating for the speed hump.
“I didn’t feel comfortable putting my name on it,” DelGrosso said of the form, “because if I’m going out and knocking on doors and handing someone something, I don’t want it to be clear to them that no one put time into this — nobody was thinking of you when they created this.”
A city program exists, but not for residents to talk with one another
The City of Tulsa has a policy to help its employees connect with Spanish speakers. But that program doesn’t extend to private citizens communicating with their neighbors.
“The City of Tulsa has one of the most robust language access policies and procedures in the area,” city spokeswoman Maria Sepulveda said. “We’re proud of the work we’ve done to accommodate the variety of languages read and spoken in the area, and we consistently strive to find areas for improvement.”
Since 2023, 29 vital documents, which the city defines as forms needed to participate in a city program or activity, have been translated into a different language, according to data provided by Sepulveda.
As of Sept. 18, the city’s communications department has received 374 Spanish media calls and 79 community calls as well as translated 137 press releases this year. Interpretation services staff have answered over 120 calls from the city’s finance and development services departments.
If you don’t actually have the capacity to ensure that the citizens of Tulsa have access to the benefits that you offer, to city resources, to paperwork that’s required, then that’s reality, but we don’t need to have a policy in place that says that’s something that you do.
Emily DelGrosso, Tulsa resident
City staff in the field are trained to call 311 if they need assistance speaking with a resident speaking a different language, Sepulveda said. They make the same recommendation to the public. And if the city can’t help staff, there’s a translation company on contract to help.
But that’s only if the resident is talking to the city. There’s nothing about neighbors talking to one another.
“If you don’t actually have the capacity to ensure that the citizens of Tulsa have access to the benefits that you offer, to city resources, to paperwork that’s required, then that’s reality, but we don’t need to have a policy in place that says that’s something that you do,” DelGrosso said.
Sepulveda, who works directly with Spanish-language media and the Latino community, said for the most part, she gets positive feedback from the community.
“So I was a little surprised by Emily,” she said. “We did work on that handbook and it’s actually already live online, so people do have access to that Spanish application and handbook in Spanish and also in English.”
In late July, DelGrosso stood in front of the city council and told them about the speed hump that got lost in translation. That same day, she received the Spanish translation of the petition. A few months later, in September, the city notified her the entire packet detailing the traffic calming program had been translated to Spanish.
Bridging the gaps
It’s been 19 months since DelGrosso started the process to add a speed hump to her neighborhood. Progress has been stalled.
The city has recommended DelGrosso connect with bilingual neighbors to help speak to those who may not speak English, but she’s struggled to find anyone in her neighborhood to bridge the gap between languages.
“I understand that it’s probably not practical for the city to pay somebody to come out and walk beside me and knock on doors and communicate with me – in no world do I think that’s the solution,” she said. “I do think there are pivots we can make.”
She has advocated for the petition process for speed humps to change to a mail-in ballot, including pre-paid postages and available in multiple languages, to help with communication barriers among different communities.
“If one of my neighbors who only speaks Spanish had tried to solve this, how far would it have gone?’” DelGrosso said.
Terry Ball, Public Works Director at the City of Tulsa, told DelGrosso the program is voluntary and has always been up to residents to take the lead. The program has worked “smoothly over the years,” Ball told DelGrosso by email.
“There are no plans to change how this program is overseen other than adding the Spanish translation packet,” he said.
DelGrosso’s journey has been meandering. She has translated documents, but she needs a translator to talk to the neighbors. If she can get them to agree, it’s a victory.
But it could be a short-lived one. Sequoyah will have to wait for the city to work through its list of 40 other speed humps.
Angelica Perez is the Eastside/La Semana reporter. You can reach her at angelica@tulsaflyer.org. También habla español.
This article was produced as part of a partnership between the Tulsa Flyer and La Semana, a Tulsa-based bilingual Spanish-English newspaper serving Latino communities in Oklahoma.
News decisions at the Tulsa Flyer are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
Lea este artículo en español aquí.
