At a time when the bitterness of national politics has crept into nearly every corner of government, Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum has maintained a reputation for staying out of the fray.
Bynum is a registered Republican in a deep-red state but oversees a politically mixed city. After serving on the City Council for eight years, Bynum challenged and defeated the incumbent mayor, a fellow Republican, by consolidating support from Democrats and independents while still drawing GOP support. Since taking office in 2016, he’s focused on local concerns and nurtured strong relations with the City Council (not a given with past Tulsa mayors).
He prides himself on having passed eight budgets with unanimous votes and no last-minute amendments. “I’ve made a point of saying, ‘I’m going to treat this like I’m the CEO of a large nonprofit, not like it’s a political job where I’m trying to use the office of the mayor to aim for something else,’” Bynum says.
The mayor, 47, has helped draw new employers to the oil and gas capital, including the two largest ever to land in Tulsa. Working with local philanthropies like the George Kaiser Family Foundation, the city has also attracted thousands of remote workers using financial incentives. Voters last year approved the largest-ever bond for improvements to street infrastructure. Tulsa is now celebrating the opening of Zink Dam and Zink Lake, a $48 million recreational project on the Arkansas River that’s been dreamed about for decades.
Bynum’s success is tied partly to his personal qualities. An unassuming presence in bookish glasses — he once described himself as having “the raw animal magnetism of a young Orville Redenbacher” — he is known as a good listener. People sometimes come out of meetings commenting on having only gotten a look at the top of his head, because he’s such an intent notetaker.
Bynum is willing to hear some unpleasant truths. More than any mayor before him, Bynum pushed the city to confront the violent legacy of the Tulsa Race Massacre, a deadly 1921 attack on a Black neighborhood. A white mob killed as many as 300 people and destroyed hundreds of properties over two days. Early in Bynum’s tenure, the city began searching for the graves of people killed during the massacre. This summer, it identified the first victim found in one of those graves: C.L. Daniel, a World War I veteran whose body had been lost for more than a century.
The massacre was “the worst thing that’s ever happened in our city, and like some Orwellian nightmare, nobody talked about it for 80 years,” Bynum says. “It’s important for every generation of Americans to understand this [racial violence] is entirely possible if you don’t have people who are willing to be reconcilers.”
The COVID-19 year of 2020 was Bynum’s most challenging time in office. He angered conservative residents by imposing a mask mandate. After the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis that summer, Black leaders in Tulsa — many of whom had supported his first campaign — criticized him for what they considered inadequate efforts to overhaul police practices. Some of his staff resigned.
But, even with newly energized critics on both the left and the right, he won re-election that year with majority support against an open field of challengers. He promised in the 2020 campaign not to run for a third term and will leave office in December. It’s clear that he’s leaving the city in better shape than he found it — maybe even better than any of the three previous members of his family who’d served as mayor.
His proudest achievement, Bynum says, is demonstrating that “people from different political parties and different partisan beliefs can work together on the greatest challenges that face their community and find solutions together.”
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