Close to 1,300 people, a record for a Tulsa Regional Chamber State of the City event, filled a Cox Business Convention Center ballroom on Thursday to pay tribute to Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum. 

In his eighth and final State of the City address, Bynum spent 36 minutes describing his community in innovative, challenging, proud -- and sometimes emotional -- terms.

“Our greatest triumph of the last eight years is that we have renewed a spirit of high expectations,” said Bynum, 47. “Today, we are working together as a metro area, and we are winning. Today, Tulsans don’t just expect us to compete with great cities around the world; they expect us to win.” 

A five-minute video summarizing Bynum’s tenure preceded his walk to the stage. He was introduced by Tulsa World Editor Jason Collington, whose slide show provided a snapshot of Bynum’s more than 19,000 mentions in the newspaper, including his birth announcement on Aug. 31, 1977. 

“George T. Bynum (the) 4th will have lots of tradition going for him if he ever decides on a political career in Tulsa,” read the first sentence of the story, which was headlined “Mayor Gets A Grandson.” 

The mayor at the time was Bynum’s grandfather, the late Robert LaFortune. 

In his address Thursday, Bynum talked about the strides Tulsa has made during his tenure in the areas of public safety, equality of opportunity and the built environment. 

“We recognize that one of the best vehicles for eliminating racial disparities in Tulsa is economic development, and so we’ve worked with the Tulsa Regional Chamber to recruit over a billion dollars of investment into north Tulsa during the last eight years,” he said.

“We also systematized this focus by merging half a dozen city offices and authorities into the Tulsa Authority for Economic Opportunity, our economic development authority that is chartered with the mission of using economic development to create equality of opportunity.” 

Bynum also spoke with pride about leading the charge for gender equality through pay equity and the search for unmarked graves of Tulsa Race Massacre victims, a search that this year identified the remains of World War I veteran C.L. Daniel. 

As for the transformative projects completed during his two terms, Bynum deployed more than 20 slides to illustrate the before-and-after contrast.

“…We turned sand bars into Zink Lake,” he said. “We turned a gravel parking lot into Tulsa’s children’s museum, the Discovery Lab. We turned our riverfront intothe greatest city park in America, the Gathering Place. …We turned an empty field into Amazon, one of the largest new employers in our history…”

As important as the accomplishments was the way in which they were achieved, Bynum said.

“We accomplished all of this by returning to our greatest strength: when we work as a community of neighbors to help one another, rather than allowing the focus of division to distract us,” he said.

“To all of you who were willing to work in that effort as Tulsans rather than as Republicans or Democrats or Independents, you have my thanks. We did it. We made a difference. We showed there is a better way. We renewed that spirit of high expectations. We left things better than we found them.”