TULSA, Ok — Click here to listen to a KRMG Morning News 8am In-Depth Hour with Tulsa Mayor GT Bynum
Mayor G.T. Bynum
2017 State of the City
Nov. 2, 2017
Thank you for that introduction and for the chance to speak today. As any of us who work in
public service know, you don’t do it alone. I am incredibly thankful for the love and support of my
family, and I want to acknowledge some of them in attendance today: My wife, Susan; my Mom,
Suzie; and my grandfather – the Dean of the Former Mayors of Tulsa – Bob LaFortune.
We have so many transformative initiatives under way in Tulsa. But before I go any further, I
have to share some really exciting news with everyone here about Amazon…
On Amazon’s website today, Legendary Tulsa author Michael Wallis’s new book is on sale for
only $19!
That is a GREAT price! I hope everyone here will check it out. In fact, I think each person in this
room should buy 100 copies. Whatever it takes…
But back to the City, we are thinking big and moving fast on a number of fronts. I want you to
know how lucky I feel to work with the members of this City Council every day. Councilors
Vanessa Hall-Harper, Jeannie Cue, David Patrick, Blake Ewing, Karen Gilbert, Connie Dodson,
Anna America, Phil Lakin, and Ben Kimbro are my partners in everything we do and everything I
am going to talk about today. This is an outstanding City Council and I’m proud of the working
relationship we’ve established.
I am thankful to deliver the State of the City to this audience because so much of the inspiration
we’ve taken at the City over the last year has come from the business and philanthropic
communities.
In December, the City Council and I adopted a new vision statement for the City of Tulsa: To
build a globally competitive, world-class city.
We're setting aside regional fights to work with our neighbors in competing on the real playing
field of the 21st Century: National and international competition.
To do that, we’re pursuing a broad range of initiatives – and our models for excellence are great
Tulsa businesses.
Now, a politician saying we need to run government more like a business is one of the oldest
clichés around. It is usually a hollow throwaway line, intended to get applause. And if there’s
any further detail than that, it is lines like, “We need someone who knows how to add up a
payroll,” or “We need to make more than we spend,” or “We need to cut wasteful employees”.
To be fair, all of these are true. But is that how low we’ve set the bar for government? Knowing
how to add, not going bankrupt, and proficiency in firing people are the standards of excellence?
In Tulsa, we are renewing a spirit of high expectations and that starts with the City itself. Our
goal is not to run the City just like any business – our goal is to run the City like a GREAT
business.
Running the City like a great business starts with our team.
During the transition period last year between the election and being sworn in, I took advantage
of the time given to reach out to some of the great organizational leaders in our city. I wanted
their advice and guidance on how best to go about leading a large organization like the City of
Tulsa.
One of those people was the incoming chairman of the chamber, BOK CEO Steve Bradshaw.
Steve gave me a lot of great advice, but one idea has proven particularly useful. Steve routinely
meets with small groups of employees chosen at random so he can hear firsthand from them
how to make BOK a great place to work.
I loved the idea and started doing it immediately after taking office. Every month, six City
employees are selected from a random generator and we go to lunch. This is one of the most
valuable meetings I have every month. We discuss the joys and challenges of working at the
City, and they give me practical ideas for making our workplace better.
Best of all, it has helped me get to know our 3,600 employees as people – and here's what I've
found:
Your employees at the City of Tulsa are incredible public servants. After years of budget cuts,
the people who work at the City do it because they love to serve. They aren't doing it for the
great pay.
These are the police officers who selflessly sprint toward danger to keep you safe. These are
the firefighters who rescue your neighbor from a fire or resuscitate your dad after a heart attack.
These are the street crews that are out in the ice and snow to clear your way to work, or out
cleaning up debris from the first August tornado to strike our city since the 1950s. These are the
people delivering the water you mix with baby formula for your newborn and who design the
streets your teenager learns to drive on.
They do all this because they love to serve you. And I am so honored to serve them, and to be a
part of their team.
This month's random employee lunch is today, and my teammates from the City are joining me
at this table for the State of the City. Please join me in thanking these public servants and the
thousands they represent.
But we’ve done more than just have lunch every month.
Chet Cadieux and his team at QuikTrip were very generous in teaching us about their employee
feedback process – a system that empowers every employee at QuikTrip to make it a better
place to work. We’ve installed the same system at the City as part of our long-term process of
building the best possible workplace for our employees.
Paula Marshall and her team at Bama taught us about their approach to employee health, and
we used that to overhaul not just our insurance program, but our fundamental approach to
employee wellness.
In a flat budget, we prioritized the stabilization of our pension system for the long-term and
budgeted pay increases for those employees whose performance merits them.
At the City of Tulsa, all of us are a team.
Running the City like a great business also means your products are excellent. And for us, no
service is more important than public safety.
The reality is that after years of declining manpower, our Police Department has not been
staffed appropriately and you see that in the unacceptably high homicide and violent crime rate.
We are addressing this with great urgency along two lines:
First, we are presently undergoing the largest single-year hiring of new Police officers in Tulsa
history. While our average annual academy size in this century is 31 officers, this year we are
hiring 90. We’re doing in one year what would normally take us almost three years to
accomplish.
We are hiring 90 new officers this year – the maximum we are capable of recruiting and training
in one year – and we plan to do it again next year.
We are also implementing one of the most comprehensive community policing initiatives in the
nation. In my first month as mayor, we convened the Tulsa Commission on Community Policing.
The goal of community policing is for everyday citizens to work with police in making a
community safer.
Some cities have done this by implementing the use of body cameras or by appointing citizen
advisory boards or by improving the training officers receive. We are doing all of those, and
much more. In total, the Commission made 77 different recommendations for community
policing in Tulsa and we are committed to publicly tracking our implementation of every single
one of them.
When it comes to Fire protection, we have manpower needs too.
Thanks to the help of our Congressional delegation, the City received a grant to hire 60 new
firefighters this year – something that would have taken us years to accomplish on our own.
And with a fleet of firetrucks that until last month counted a 10-year-old truck as its newest,
we’ve expedited the replacement of broken-down trucks after years of delay.
Beyond public safety, we have focused on major infrastructure initiatives. Our medians and
rights-of-way are now being mowed at the correct frequency. We have expedited the re-wiring
of every single highway light in town after they were stripped by a ring of thieves – and we’ve
arrested the thieves. We’ve hired additional street maintenance workers and traffic signal repair
crews. Our goal is to deserve the title of America’s Most Beautiful City.
Running the City like a great business also means we are focused on growth.
As I mentioned earlier, we have shifted our focus away from the old parochial skirmishes over
shopping malls and reoriented our focus toward national and international competition. Our
partnership with the Tulsa Regional Chamber has been incredibly successful along these lines.
We had more corporate relocation site visits in the first quarter of this year alone than we had in
all of last year combined. We’ve landed major new employers like the Greenheck Group, and
we’ve harnessed broad community support behind major targets like Amazon.
We’ve expedited the construction timeline for the largest economic development capital
improvements program in city history – Vision Tulsa – so that 80 percent of the projects will be
funded in the first five years. That means in the next five years you will see a lake in the
Arkansas River, USA BMX conducting their Olympic training and trials in the Greenwood District
of North Tulsa, bus rapid transit lines transforming the use of public transportation, and pilots
from around the world training at the Oklahoma Air National Guard’s new simulator facility.
You will see a facility worthy of the greatest collection of Western art in the world under
construction at Gilcrease Museum and you’ll see Tulsa kids having their horizons broadened at
the new Tulsa Children’s Museum.
All of that, and I didn’t even mention the greatest public park gift in the history of the United
States of America – The Gathering Place – which will attract visitors from around the world. I
love that my kids will grow up with the expectation that of course the best park in the world is in
their hometown.
We are making Tulsa a more welcoming place for its newest citizens through the New Tulsans
Initiative, which will connect our growing immigrant community with opportunities for education,
employment, and leadership.
And, we are partnering with one of the world’s great philanthropic foundations, the Rockefeller
Foundation, to develop a plan for comprehensively addressing issues of racial disparity that
have divided our city for far too long.
We are making long-term investments based on data. Analysis by Tulsa Data Science confirms
that the strongest correlation to per capita income is a high school diploma, and one of the
greatest indicators of high school graduation rates is third-grade reading proficiency. Yet in
Tulsa Public Schools only around 50 percent of third graders are reading at grade level. But
there is a solution and it is called Reading Partners.
The premise is simple: An adult spends an hour a week practicing reading with a kid who needs
a little help. For kids who participate in the program, they have over a 90 percent success rate.
We could go from 50 percent of third graders reading on grade level to over 95 percent – IF we
have enough volunteers. I am proud to tell you this year the City of Tulsa became the largest
employer partner in the nation with Reading Partners. And at the end of the year we will be able
to show you the improvements made, thanks to your City employees who gave up their lunch
break for one day a week to change a kid’s life.
If you would like to join us in changing the lives of Tulsa kids, all you have to do – and you can
do it right now, I won’t take it personally – is pull out your phone and text READING to 444999.
You’ll receive a prompt-in response for more information, and Reading Partners will take it from
there.
We have also changed the way the City works with our schools. On my first day as mayor, we
convened the Mayor’s Education Cabinet, which consists of the three K-12 superintendents,
presidents of our higher education and career tech institutions, and pre-K leaders. The purpose
of this group is to advise me on ways the City can be more helpful to local educators.
One of the best initiatives to spring from this was the federal financial aid application drive we
co-sponsored with the Tulsa Regional Chamber, which resulted in a significant increase in high
school seniors applying for financial aid – opening opportunities to higher education those
students may not have otherwise had.
We are doing all of this because we believe a unified, diverse, and educated community with
tremendous quality of life will fuel economic growth in the years ahead.
Running the City like a great business also means we are laser focused on outcomes.
In December, we established the Office of Performance Strategy & Innovation with the goal of
delivering better outcomes in a more transparent way. We are implementing what is known as
Moneyball For Government, based on the book and movie about Billy Bean of the Oakland
Athletics.
The idea is to use data to test what strategies are delivering results and which are not. You take
funding away from those strategies that don’t demonstrate success and you put it toward the
strategies that do. When I explain this to business people, they generally find it adorable that
government has just caught on to this idea because business has been doing it as long as
business has existed.
In Tulsa, we are already a global leader on this front. I’ve been asked to speak around the
country regarding the approach we’ve developed to break down silos and work together on
achieving better outcomes, and just last week addressed an international convening of city
leaders in Paris. At a time of such great division, nationally and internationally, there is
tremendous admiration out there for the way we are pulling together in Tulsa to solve our
greatest challenges.
A great example of this is the City’s active involvement in the Birth through Eight Strategy for
Tulsa – or BEST – which is helping make Tulsa the best place in the United States to be a new
baby. Tulsa is a community that will support all parents and children so that each newborn child
shares in the core American promise of equal opportunity to all. The BEST plan, when fully
implemented, will provide integrated support and services to 32,000 children each year, from
Birth through Age Eight, across all of Tulsa. Dozens of organizations are coming together for
our children to make this vision a reality.
We are harnessing data to improve our effectiveness, but we are also making it more
transparent by putting data online in formats usable for everyday citizens. We have
implemented biweekly stat meetings with our operational departments to keep them focused on
results.
We are replacing our quarter-century-old computer systems at the City with new technology that
will improve performance dramatically. To put this in perspective, the records management
system our Police Department relies on is older than I am. Tomorrow, Apple will release the
iPhone 10 – one of the most advanced pieces of technology ever placed in consumer hands.
Here’s a photo of the Apple Computer that was issued the same year as our Police Records
Management System:
That computer is literally made out of wood!
Our advancements in technology aren’t just for City employees. We released the Tulsa 3-1-1
app, which any of you can download at the app store for your phone. If you see a pothole, or a
light that is out, or a sign that needs to be replaced, you can just pull out the app and report it. It
will identify where you are and send City crews to fix the problem.
A focus on outcomes also means you sometimes don’t use the strategy you originally expected.
That is certainly the case in our discussions with the County over the jail. My goal was to end
the fight, and after decades of fighting we did end it. Is the strategy we are deploying to end that
fight perfect? No. But we are not going to allow the relationship between the City and the
County to be defined by a fight over the jail any longer. We have too many big things to
accomplish together.
I hope you see, we have accomplished a great deal this year to make the City of Tulsa more like
the great businesses represented in this room today.
I didn’t come here today for us to rest on our laurels. In a city with high expectations, we are
always focused on the road ahead and the big goals to be accomplished. Today, I want to
share five major announcements with you.
The first is around real estate development. For years, the City of Tulsa has relied upon a
Frankenstein regulatory monster to manage real estate development within the city limits. It’s
not literally a Frankenstein monster. That would be amazing, but it’s a metaphor. Our
development process is overly cumbersome, and it has unquestionably hurt our ability to grow.
When it comes to development, we are not competitive enough in Tulsa County – let alone in
the region. So, we’ve decided that managing the problem isn’t good enough. We are blowing up
the process and starting from scratch with a new approach.
We are shifting to what is known as self-certification. Basically, the City will authorize architects
and engineers to certify building code compliance on behalf of their clients instead of running
them through the City bureaucracy. The City will audit a percentage of the projects and if a
particular architect or engineer isn’t doing it correctly they can have their certification privilege
removed. The City doesn’t allow high-risk projects, like high-rise buildings, to be self-certified
but for the vast majority of construction projects they move swiftly along. Phoenix in particular
has enjoyed great success with this approach.
The days of development in Tulsa being cumbersome and time-consuming are drawing to a
close. Instead, we will have one of the most innovative development processes in the country.
Our second major announcement is about Tulsa’s streets. First, it is important to
understand what a positive difference our street program has made over the last decade. If we
hadn’t passed those initiatives, our overall street quality in Tulsa would be a Pavement
Condition Index rating of 42 out of 100. Instead, thanks to Tulsa voters, we’ve carried out a
record amount of street work and have an overall Pavement Condition Index rating of 69 out of
100 (a 64 percent improvement to the overall PCI score vs. where we would have been with no
investment).
In case you haven’t noticed any street construction lately, we are working all over the City to
rehabilitate our 4,500 lane miles of streets from streets that look like this….
…to streets that look like this….
We still have a lot of work to do in the years ahead to get where we need to be. We need to
improve the speed with which we carry out these projects.
To that end, I am pleased to announce the establishment of a blue ribbon task force, which will
reform our street work process. It will be chaired by one of the most respected transportation
experts in the country, former Oklahoma Secretary of Transportation Gary Ridley. Secretary
Ridley is here today, and I want to thank him for finding yet another way to help our city.
As we anticipate the continuation of the City’s decade-long focus on street repairs with a
general obligation bond renewal in 2018, I am eager for this group to lend their expertise in
improving the efficiency of our street projects citywide.
Our third announcement is an exciting partnership. We want Tulsa to be a national leader.
The pioneering work of our philanthropic community led the New York Times to dub us “Beta
City” because this is the place where new ideas in the not-for-profit world are tested. I want us
to live up to that in all we do.
One of the most important ways we can improve as a community is to better understand what
people hope for and expect from living in our city, what they think of the opportunities and
services being provided – what they do and don’t like, what they want to see blossom and what
they want to see go away. To this end, the City of Tulsa is partnering with the world’s
preeminent opinion research organization, Gallup, to establish the Gallup-Tulsa Citivoice Index.
The Gallup-Tulsa Citivoice Index will measure the most important outcomes for city residents
and provide local leaders with insights we can use in building the best city possible – as that
ideal is defined by Tulsans. Not only will it be incredibly useful for us in delivering a better city
for Tulsans, we believe it will instruct discussions around civic issues nationally.
Our fourth announcement involves Tulsa County. One hundred years ago, Tulsa was a rural
county. Tulsa had a few thousand people and was separated from neighbors like Broken Arrow
by miles of agricultural land. In the subsequent 100 years, those cities flourished. Today Tulsa is
an urban county of vibrant cities. Yet we are still relying on the same governmental arrangement
as we did 100 years ago, with overlapping responsibilities and duplication.
For years, people have talked about a merger of city and county government. Often, it is
couched in terms of a wholesale merger. Yet recent studies have shown that such mergers are
remarkably rare and attempts to pull them off usually prevent meaningful improvements. Much
greater success has been attained by merging particular functions.
To that end, I want to announce that the Chairman of the Board of County Commissioners, Ron
Peters, and I are forming a City-County Parks Realignment Commission. The Commission will
be composed of several committed parks supporters. We have seen how City-County
authorities work when it comes to our Health Department, our Library System, and the River
Parks Authority. Now, we want to have a public and transparent review of a potential merger of
aspects of our parks systems into one healthy, accessible, well-maintained system that can
endure for future generations of Tulsans.
Our final announcement today is the most urgent.
In my first year on the City Council in 2008, the most pressing issue facing our community was
the unfunded street repair backlog. We spent months researching how to address the problem
and how much it would cost, engaged Tulsans in the discussion every step of the way, and
when it appeared on the ballot, Tulsans approved the largest streets improvement program in
Tulsa history.
Five years later, in 2013, we knew the job wasn’t finished. So again we spent months
researching what needed to be done and how much it would cost. We engaged Tulsans in the
discussion every step of the way, and when it appeared on the ballot, Tulsans approved a 50
percent increase over what was previously the largest streets improvement program in city
history.
Then the most pressing issue was that we didn’t have enough Police officers. But no one could
tell us how many we needed. The philanthropic community brought in one of the top policing
experts in the nation and she spent months studying our department. We then took her findings
and determined how to pay for them. We engaged Tulsans in the discussion every step of the
way, and when it appeared on the ballot, Tulsans approved the hiring of 160 new Police officers
by a 2:1 margin.
Then we didn’t feel we were competitive enough when it came to recruiting and retaining quality
talent. So we spent three years studying different economic development projects and how
much they would cost. We engaged Tulsans in the discussion every step of the way, and when
it appeared on the ballot last year, Tulsans approved Vision Tulsa – the largest economic
development program in our city’s history.
What is the lesson in Tulsa over the last decade? Through all that time we had different mayors
and a rotating cast of city councilors – so it isn’t specific to a person. My takeaway is that if we
all pull together, study our greatest challenges thoroughly, and present voters with a means of
fixing them, then Tulsans will fix any problem facing our community no matter how big it may be.
The quality of our educational system in Tulsa is the greatest economic development challenge
we face today. It is the greatest quality of life challenge we face today. It is the greatest criminal
justice challenge we face today. And I believe with every ounce of my being that if Tulsans
could fix it, we would.
But we can’t. Right now, we can pass property-tax initiatives to build football stadiums and fix up
buildings and buy iPads for kids – but if we pass a property tax to pay our teachers the kind of
wage that will keep them from fleeing to Arkansas or Texas, the state will reduce our allocation
by an equivalent amount. They will punish us for trying to help.
This upcoming legislative session, we are going to try to change the dynamic. We’re going to
quit waiting for someone else to save us, and try to empower Tulsans to take our destiny into
our own hands.
I am so thankful this is part of the Tulsa Regional Chamber’s One Voice agenda, but that is not
enough. We need every family, every business owner, every employee, every voter to let your
legislators know WE WANT TO HELP. We need their permission to help. I believe if they will let
us, we can address this challenge in the same way we’ve addressed those that came before us.
Thank you for this opportunity today. It is an exciting time in Tulsa, and our best days are
ahead.
Thank you.