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PrintTulsaPeople's 2010 Tulsan of the Year - Kathy Taylor
She surprised the city with her announcement that her first mayoral term would also be her last. But after four years of dogged service to Tulsa, the effects of Kathy Taylor’s leadership are evident in more ways than one.
Whether they loved her and everything she stood for, or whether they strongly disagreed with her, friends and adversaries alike share a common view about former Mayor Kathy Taylor: She was one of the most committed, competitive, energetic and relentless leaders they ever encountered.
If she felt a particular course of action (for example, moving City Hall or locating a ballpark downtown) would be in Tulsa’s best interests, she pursued her goal with pit bull-like persistence.
“She is one of the hardest-working people I’ve ever been around,” admits Jenks Mayor Vic Vreeland, who, particularly on issues of regionalism, frequently butted heads with Taylor. “I got along fine with Kathy as a person, but we disagreed on a lot of stuff. She didn’t always play well with others.
”In one legendary exchange between the folksy Vreeland and Taylor, she reminded him that he promised to take her hunting sometime. Vreeland replied: “But I didn’t promise I’d bring you back.”
“Yeah,” Vreeland confessed, laughing. “I probably said something like that.”
Vreeland was far from the only person with whom Taylor clashed while carrying out her official duties. She also engaged in her share of prickly encounters with members of the Tulsa City Council. Yet, in spite of the intermittent dustups over policy differences, many still would argue that Tulsa is better four years after she ran for office with a simple message: Make life better.
“There is no doubt in my mind we did (make life better in Tulsa),” says Mike Bunney, Taylor’s chief economic development officer. “In almost every area we’re better off, from the streets-improvement package to the airport and aerospace industry to the growing revitalization of downtown. We have made life better.”
It is because of these accomplishments, her dedication to public service and the undeniable impact she has made on the city that TulsaPeople Magazine has selected Kathy Taylor as its 2010 Tulsan of the Year.
The price of public service
With just over a month to go before the end of her term on Dec. 7, Taylor was still keeping a prodigious pace, dealing with budget woes and preparing the way for her successor. For her, there would be no coasting across the finish line of a job she basically performed on a volunteer basis (after pledging not to take a salary) since being elected in April 2006.
“I only have one way of doing things,” she says during an interview at the new City Hall located in the One Technology Center building. “ … and that’s 150 percent. I don’t have a low speed.”
Taylor’s high-octane leadership style meant 14-hour-plus workdays over her four-year term. Even after shutting off the lights and going home, there were still ideas to be mulled, action items to handle and correspondence to be sent. Staffers attest to many wee-hour e-mails from Taylor, even after they had spoken to her by phone just a few hours earlier.
Taylor’s zeal for work is not just an output of her personality, but it stems also from a strong sense of obligation, suggests her daughter, Elizabeth Frame Ellison. Her mother, she says, lost both her parents by the time she was 19. Unsure how her college education would continue to be funded, Taylor received financial help from a sorority friend’s father.
“She always felt fortunate not to have to drop out of college after her parents passed,” says Ellison, executive director of the Lobeck-Taylor Foundation. “She worked hard and felt privileged to give back to the community. Growing up, we were always volunteering, whether it was planting signs in yards for someone’s political campaign or serving food to people in need.
“She always says that service is the price you pay for the space you occupy.”
Taylor employed this principle in spades as Tulsa’s mayor.
“This is a seven-day-a-week job,” she says. “It’s a business. You’re always on call, and I keep my phone on 24 hours a day. I just don’t know that there’s any other way to do it.”
One call Taylor will never forget came early on the morning of Dec. 10, 2007. A record-setting ice storm had plunged Tulsa into darkness, bringing down power lines and trees across the city. Taylor sees those long, difficult days as a defining moment in her mayoral term.
“That call came in at 5:23 a.m.,” she remembers. “We learned from PSO that 75 percent of the city was without power and there was no way to communicate.”
An Emergency Operations Center was established and Taylor worked with the Public Works, Police and Fire departments; Emergency Medical Services Authority; and dozens of employees to lead rescue and recovery efforts across the city and create plans to restore power more quickly.
“We worked nonstop in the basement there for days, and during that time, I saw us really come together as a team,” she says. “It really was a crucial moment for us. I know that we saved lives through our efforts.”
Getting down to business
Taylor approached the job of mayor in an unabashedly businesslike way.
“I really enjoyed the hands-on, day-to-day (business) of being mayor,” she says. “It’s like running a business, and that’s really what it is. And it’s one of the most diverse businesses you can run when you think of all the services the city provides — sewer, trash, the zoo, police, fire, ambulance and others. There are no companies with as many diverse business lines as a city.”
Taylor’s concern about American Airlines possibly closing its huge Tulsa maintenance base prompted her to run for mayor in the first place, and she resigned her post as Gov. Brad Henry’s secretary of commerce and tourism to do so.
“I left a meeting as secretary of commerce incredibly worried that Tulsa would lose jobs that it could never replace,” she says. “That was the big motivator for me.”
On April 4, 2006, Tulsans elected Taylor mayor, ousting incumbent Republican Bill LaFortune by a margin of 51 percent to 47 percent in the highest mayoral voting turnout in city history.
In her first weeks, Taylor and her staff scrambled to fashion a plan to keep American’s 7,000 jobs in town. In the end, a $10 million combination of state Opportunity Fund money and a third-penny sales tax funded a wide-body aircraft maintenance hangar (which opened last September) at Tulsa International Airport, which helped convince the airline to continue its operations here. The airport has also seen $34 million in renovations during Taylor’s time in office.
“All Oklahomans should be very proud of the fact that American Airlines is the only legacy air carrier to not file bankruptcy or off load its pension obligations on the American taxpayer,” says Vic Bird, director of the Oklahoma Aeronautics Commission. “The AA Maintenance Base in Tulsa is the largest commercial aircraft repair facility in the world. Its continuance in Oklahoma and, more importantly, its success, would not have been possible without the leadership of Kathy Taylor, who supported aerospace before it was in style.”
When it came to making decisions, Taylor says she put politics aside.
“I’m really not a politician and I don’t make decisions for political reasons,” she says. “I analyzed the facts and made decisions that were in the best interest of the city. So from that standpoint, I don’t really have an agenda to help Republicans or Democrats. My agenda is the city.”
Bunney says Taylor’s ability to drill down into details distinguished her as mayor.
“She is definitely a quick study,” he says. “She has the ability to absorb a lot of data and make sound decisions.”
Tulsa business leaders, perhaps not surprisingly, extolled Taylor’s business- oriented approach that sought to create public/private partnerships to solve the city’s problems and spur progress.
“The thing that really impressed me about her was her unwillingness to take ‘no’ for an answer,” says David Page, 2009 chairman of the Tulsa Metro Chamber of Commerce. “Her ability to move the business of the city forward was unlike anybody else I’ve ever experienced.”
Chamber President Mike Neal says Taylor’s doggedness also impressed him, especially when it came to promoting downtown revitalization and pushing through projects such as ONEOK Field, an effort that didn’t require any public funding and kept the Tulsa Drillers baseball team in Tulsa.
“She’s quite a good salesperson,” he says. “And her tenacity in forming public and private partnerships was very effective. She understood you can get so much more done that way. Once she becomes passionate about something, she latches on and doesn’t let go.”
Bunney cited the ballpark as the perfect example of Taylor’s refusal to give up in the face of big obstacles.
“That’s what stands out for me,” he says. “I thought it would be too hard to do, but her perseverance to get that done was extraordinary.”
Page and Neal also give Taylor credit for overseeing the successful opening and promotion of the BOK Center (a project pushed through by her predecessor, Bill LaFortune) and for keeping valuable jobs in Tulsa, with American Airlines being a case in point.
“The American base at Kansas City will be closing, and that, frankly, could’ve been us,” Neal says. “That’s 7,000 to 8,000 high-paying jobs that were saved for long-term growth.”
Inspiring renewed pride in Tulsa
Taylor says she believes one of her top accomplishments as mayor was a mentoring program (Mayor’s Mentoring to the Max) that infused at-risk Tulsa Public Schools with 400 new mentors. She also cites the $76 million move of City Hall to One Technology Center, an initiative she proposed in 2007 and which the city council approved by an 8-to-1 vote, a significant achievement. The city acquired the state-of-the-art glass building for $52 million with expectations of earning rental revenue. Although that expectation has yet to pan out, Taylor is adamant that the move was the right thing to do and will be vindicated once the economy turns around.
“I’m confident, long-term, that it was the right financial decision,” she says. “The move also brought together 1,000 city employees in one place and has resulted in better collaboration and teamwork.”
Taylor points to other triumphs, including the new airport hangar and runway renovations and the passage in 2008 of Fix Our Streets, a $450 million road repair package.
Taylor also shepherded the BOK Center to completion.
“The opening of the BOK Center was a real ‘yes!’ moment for me,” she says. “There were 30,000 people there; sunlight was streaming in through the glass. You could hear and feel the pride that people had in this city again. After all the squabbling about whether it was a good idea or not, people were excited about their city and this pride translated into other positive changes.”
Navigating troubled fiscal waters
Taylor admits that her toughest time in office came right at the end, when the recession finally caught up with Tulsa and the city’s sales-tax-revenue stream slowed to a trickle.
Suddenly, she was forced to make massive cuts to the city budget, resulting in decreased city services, mandatory employee furloughs and, until a federal grant was re-purposed, the elimination of 21 police jobs.
“In over 336 months of data, we’ve never seen before what we’ve seen in the last eight months,” Taylor said just before leaving office. “The most difficult moments of my term have been right now — having to sit around the table for hours on end with our management team knowing we’re going to have to terminate team members.
“It’s heart-wrenching. These are people with families, children, mortgages and bills to pay. It’s very difficult.”
Bunney says Taylor never flinched when it came to making tough, if painful, decisions.
“Those are difficult moments,” he says. “But she is a good money manager and a good executive. She studied every report very carefully and made the cuts that needed to be made. She made the tough decisions, and you have to give her credit for that.”
Even so, it may have been the sour economy and budget crisis that torpedoed her ambition to run for mayor for a second term.
In a shock announcement, Taylor withdrew from the race in June, citing a need to give the city’s fiscal crisis her full attention.
“I loved being mayor, but I feel very good about the decision I made,” she says. “Managing the fiscal crisis and campaigning for mayor raised the question of whether I could do both well, and I decided it would be better to focus my energy on the city rather than on campaigning.”
The decision both surprised and disappointed her supporters.
“We were very disappointed — shocked — that she decided not to run again,” Page says. “Our partnership with Kathy will be a tough act to follow.”
A humbling experience
Although she will be a tough act to follow as mayor, Taylor will be taking her tenacity back to the state Capitol as Gov. Henry’s chief of education strategy and innovation until his term expires in 2010. The job, she says, is a good fit for her, and she says some of her most satisfying moments as mayor came when she visited Tulsa classrooms to read to children.
“I’m excited to work with Gov. Henry in his last year,” she says. “It builds on everything I’ve done. We need innovative education and a well-educated workforce. That’s the most important thing to building employment, improving health, decreasing crime and increasing business.”
The new post will be a full-time, cabinet-level position in the executive branch, but Taylor says she will be volunteering her time and will not accept a state salary.
“I’m thrilled that Mayor Taylor has agreed to serve my administration and the state in this new and important role,” the governor says. “As she does with all of her endeavors, Kathy will bring great expertise, high energy and a laser-like focus on the task at hand. I want Oklahoma to enhance its reputation as a national leader in educational innovation, and Kathy Taylor has the skills to help us accomplish that goal.”
Taylor will keep a condo in Oklahoma City and maintain her primary residence in Tulsa.
“That’s where my husband and my dogs are,” she says.
And her advice for her mayoral successor, Dewey Bartlett?
“(The mayor’s job) is a very humbling experience, so cherish every moment,” she says. “Remember, while the mayor is at the helm, it takes a team to run the city, and you’ve got a great team to support you.”
After nearly four years at the helm, does she believe she achieved her aim to “make life better” in Tulsa? As someone who, by nature, is more prone to looking forward than back, Taylor paused for a moment, her tortoise-shell glasses perched toward the end of her nose.
“I would say ‘yes,’” she says. “It’s been a team effort and there’s been a lot of collaboration. But we accomplished a lot — I believe we made the city safer, improved education for kids and were able to keep and bring jobs here. I feel good that we’ve been able to make a difference.”
