TULSA — City Councilor Grant Miller has had something of a bumpy ride during his first year in office.

He’s had a total of 17 ethics complaints filed against him - all anonymously, it should be noted, and thus far he’s been cleared of 15 of them.

Meanwhile, he’s getting on with the business of working with constituents to solve issues in his district.

[Hear the KRMG In-Depth story on Councilor Miller and the Facebook group here]

He’s had some success dealing with problems for one neighborhood in particular, and tells KRMG that’s largely because he and those constituents found a way to work together, utilizing a Facebook group.

“They can tag me when they have problems,” he told KRMG, adding that “the things we’ve been able to work together to accomplish in that area have been really good, just by use of this Facebook group.”

He said the group does a good job of staying on topic, and not getting sidetracked into what he calls “a bunch of junk going on.”

“We should have one of these for every neighborhood,” he says he told a recent town hall audience.

In particular, the issues involved a public trail, known as the Skelly Bypass Neighborhood Trail, which runs parallel to Interstate 44 and Skelly Drive from roughly South Yale Avenue to South Hudson Avenue.

Constituents told him it had fallen on hard times, Miller says, with overgrown trees, missing lights, homeless encampments, and rough, broken pavement.

Through the Facebook group, he began hearing about specific issues and addressing them.

“They’d tell me ‘hey there’s a big spool of wire up here, hey, there’s a homeless person here, hey, we need a crosswalk here because it’s unsafe to cross,’” he told KRMG Tuesday.

“We’ve just been step-by-step getting that all put back together. The lights were all off so we got in touch with PSO, they got out there, got all the copper reinstalled, got the lights back on. We’ve got trash cans out there, the trees are all trimmed up. We got the crosswalk put in. We’ve, you know, cleared the area of homeless for the most part.”

He says the job of repaving the trail is still pending, but he hopes to use money set aside through Improve Our Tulsa to expedite that project.

And meanwhile, he hopes to replicate the success of the social media group elsewhere in his district.

“I’m one person, I can’t see everything going on in every neighborhood. But, when we get in a group like that and we all work together, we can really make differences. And if we can do that in multiple neighborhoods throughout the district, I think District 5 could really have some great improvements.”