Cities wishing to attract the best talent must look through the lens of youth, a veteran local restaurateur told a Tulsa Regional Chamber audience on Tuesday.
“When young people visit a city, they go out and they think to themselves, ‘Can I see myself here, and can I see myself meeting a spouse here?’” said Elliot Nelson, founder of McNellie’s Restaurant Group. “‘Is there enough activity and enough vibrancy going on that when I walk these streets, I’m going to meet people? I’m going to run into people. I’m going to make new friendships.’”
Nelson is part of a group hoping to create such a place through Project Nexus, a roughly $900 million, nine-block development in downtown Tulsa. Before nearly 200 attendees at the Chamber’s Joint Board of Directors & Board of Advisors Meeting, he talked about it Tuesday alongside Debbie Pickle, who works for Williams, the Tulsa-based energy company leading the charge.
“How are we going to be around for the next 100 years if we can’t attract and retain the best talent in Tulsa?” said Pickle, a senior vice president for Williams. “We can’t wait for someone else to solve this problem for us. We can’t solve it alone.
“But we are going to start acting and start doing things, and we’re partnering with people like Elliot and others to help us with this. It’s time to do big, hard things.”
The anchor of the development would be roughly a 10,000-seat, multipurpose stadium designed to house FC Tulsa soccer team, which currently plays in a baseball stadium. The project also would include Class A office space, restaurants and retail, and high-end and workforce multifamily housing.
Nelson envisions the bulk of the initiative being funded through tax increment financing, which captures future property tax increases from a designated area and reinvests that money back into local projects.
“This isn’t just about nine blocks of downtown,” he said. “This is about the future of our city and reversing course on what we’ve seen as a drastic decline in college-educated kids moving here and the kids who grew up here going to college and moving away at alarming rates.
“We have to change that trend if we are going to be economically competitive for the next half century or century.”
Chad Zamarin, Williams president and CEO, has said publicly the Fortune 500 firm wants to stay in Tulsa, but that the city needs to compete harder for companies and employees, investing in areas such as quality of life, public safety and infrastructure. Some questioned Williams’ long-term plans for Tulsa when it purchased a 64-story tower this summer in Houston, where the company employs hundreds of workers.
“We have an opportunity right now for everybody to lean in and try to do some big things and send Tulsa on a trajectory which I think would make us the best midsize city in America, which I think would be a great place to be, Nelson said.
“But if we fumble it and don’t get it done (because of) some of our traditional petty politics and other things that have held other things back, we might see the biggest company in Oklahoma pack up and go to Houston. And that would be a disaster.”
The leadership retreat portion of Tuesday’s meeting featured roundtable discussions on community development, government affairs, regional tourism and economic development.
New Tulsa Police Chief Jonathan Brooks, who took office on Oct. 1, was a special guest at the joint board meeting.
He emphasized the need to focus on public safety and also touched on how the city is making strides on visible homelessness, with the municipality introducing alternate mental health resources and a new low-barrier shelter scheduled to come online in a couple of months.
“In some ways, we are redefining what accountability looks like because the traditional model for policing has always been putting someone in jail,” Brooks said. “...We will modernize the way we respond to things as a police agency. That way we will have different outcomes for those people.”
