Mayor G.T. Bynum makes national TV appearance to pitch Amazon

Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum made a strong case Thursday morning on national television for why Tulsa should attract Amazon’s HQ2 attention.

Bynum appeared on Fox Business’s Mornings with Maria alongside Mayor Mark Boughton of Danbury, Connecticut, to speak about the national “bidding war” for Amazon's second headquarters as Thursday’s deadline for proposals expired.

Bynum pitched Tulsa’s low cost of doing business and high quality of life comparable to metro areas many times Tulsa’s size.

“We think we’re really well placed from a logistical standpoint There’s no city in America that combines our quality of life here in Tulsa with the overall population base,” Bynum said. “We think we can hang with cities a whole lot bigger than us from a population standpoint because of the placement we happen to have and the culture of our city matching Amazon’s very closely.”

Bynum also highlighted Tulsa’s soon-to-open A Gathering Place for Tulsa, the BOK Center and recent acquisition of Bob Dylan’s archives.

“We’re bringing in the greatest public-park gift in America next year, the $400 million Gathering Place,” Bynum said. “We just obtained Bob Dylan’s archive, which the Washington Post has said is going to lead to Tulsa becoming the research center in the world for 20th Century music. We have the arena of the year beating out the Staples Center (Los Angeles) and Madison Square Garden (New York City). So we have all of that and yet we have the ease of a middle American city, and we’re in close proximity to 750,000 people in this region that work, today, in businesses and professions that Amazon will need for this headquarters.”

See the interview on Fox Business's website here.