Mayor of Tulsa

While another year of challenges faced our city, Tulsans have increasingly faced those challenges with determination, resilience and solutions to ensure better outcomes.

Over the past year we dealt with a pandemic, civil unrest, a polar vortex and a ransomware attack on our computer systems. Yet through it all, Tulsans have shown consistent resolve.

Right now, we are authoring a period of history unlike any we have seen in our lifetimes. Tulsa is seeing record levels of investment, and I am honored to be the mayor of such a world-class, globally competitive city. One of the most important things we did this year was establishing a new tool to drive economic development in our city. This tool is called the Tulsa Authority for Economic Opportunity (TAEO), which is a move that merged multiple authorities, boards and commissions to streamline and strengthen how we approach economic development in Tulsa. This move has allowed us to expand our impact by eliminating inefficiencies and increasing resources. In the last five years, we saw more than $1 billion in new investments announced in our city. We also opened Oklahoma’s largest business incubator with 36 Degrees North right here in City Hall. This incubator is now fostering new businesses and ideas in Tulsa and is helping recruit and retain talent in a building with the resources to help make those ideas a reality. When I think about resilient cities, I think about cities that set themselves up early on to deal with potential stressors and adverse events. One of the ways we did that at the City was initiating Tulsa’s first Rainy Day Fund — a fund that, in combination with furloughs early in the pandemic and other cost-saving measures, helped us save every job at the City and helped us pass a balanced budget without the need for federal funds to bail us out.

In 2021, we championed, broke ground and continued momentum for projects that will improve Tulsans’ safety and quality of life. In November, we began the largest publicly funded road project in our history with the start of construction on the 81st to 91st Yale Avenue widening project. We also passed the largest pay increase for the Tulsa Police Department in its history, bringing us into better contention with other cities on starting police officer pay and helping us to attract the finest public servants to our city. We are working now more than ever to ensure we are operating the kind of city we want to leave to those who follow us. Future generations of Tulsans are going to look back on these years when we first started hosting naturalization ceremonies in Tulsa and be able to point to this generation having ushered in a new wave of citizens, ideas and strength to our city. None of what happened this last year would have been possible without the support of so many Tulsans. Our community is working together in ways it never has before, and as we continue to combat challenges with ideas, adverse events with resilience, and differences of opinion with shared decision-making processes, I want to thank everyone who is doing their part to help move Tulsa forward.

G.T. Bynum Mayor of Tulsa

At the September 2021 groundbreaking for Alfresco Group’s boutique hotel property, the Stradford21 hotel, in the new 36th Street North Tax Increment Financing (TIF) district.