Written By: Michael D. McClellan | Everything changed on Wednesday, March 11, 2020.
The week had started with the Golden State Warriors’ decision to host the Brooklyn Nets with no fans at the Chase Center in San Francisco, an unprecedented step aimed and slowing the spread of COVID-19. Asked for his take, LeBron James pushed back against the idea of playing in empty arenas.
“We play games without the fans? Nah, that’s impossible,” James told reporters after the Lakers’ game against the Milwaukee Bucks. “I ain’t playing if I ain’t got the fans in the crowd. That’s who I play for. I play for my teammates, and I play for the fans. That’s what it’s all about. So if I show up to an arena and there ain’t no fans in there, I ain’t playing. They can do what they want to do.”
James’ statement sounds wildly out of touch now, given where we are with the entire nation on lock down, social distancing forever a part of our lexicon, and a pandemic threatening global economies and pushing healthcare systems to the breaking point. The idea of playing games with no fans? As alien as that concept seemed on the morning of March 11, today it’s but a speed bump on the way to not only the NBA cancelling games and suspending its season, but virtually the entire sporting world grinding to a complete halt. March Madness? Scrapped. The Masters? Postponed. Major League Baseball? Delayed until who knows when. The Olympics? On life support.
By noon on Wednesday all appeared normal in Oklahoma City, where the Utah Jazz were scheduled to play the Thunder. Unbeknownst to the rest of the league, the Jazz had contacted local health officials in OKC that morning to request assistance with a player – later identified as center Rudy Gobert – who was showing symptoms consistent with COVID-19. Gobert had already tested negative for influenza, an upper respiratory infection, and strep throat.
Mayor David Holt, along with his wife, Rachel Canuso, and their two young children
Gobert remained at the 21c Museum Hotel as players headed to Chesapeake Energy Arena, while Jazz and league officials awaited the results. HIPAA privacy laws prevented anyone from sharing details of his condition. Only a small group – the Jazz training staff and front office, Gobert, NBA officials and Oklahoma City public health officials – knew of the situation.
We all know what happened next. Fans slowly found their seats while players got off shots during warmups, but, just minutes before tipoff, Jazz general manager Dennis Lindsey got the call. Gobert had tested positive for the coronavirus, and commissioner Adam Silver suspended the NBA season indefinitely. What was unimaginable a month ago had become merely unthinkable, and then, in the course of a single day, inevitable – and still, when the news arrived, it was a shock.
All of which brings us to Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt. Energetic and on-point, you’d be hard-pressed to find another mayor who cares as much about his or her city as Holt. Elected in 2018, Holt became the youngest mayor of a U.S. city over 500,000 and the youngest mayor of Oklahoma City since 1923. In many ways, he is reflective of the city he serves – optimistic, forward-thinking, and genuine. One of the nation’s most active mayors on social media, Holt uses the platform to evangelize OKC’s exponential growth, much of it made possible by MAPS, the debt-free public improvement program conceived in the early ‘90s by then-mayor Ron Norick. His political career has taken him to D.C. and back. In 2006 he was appointed as Mayor Mick Cornett’s Chief of Staff, next serving as a state senator, and then, on April 10, 2018, as Mayor of Oklahoma City. He’s had a hand in some of the most important initiatives in the city’s history, including the revitalization of downtown, and he continues to act as its greatest ambassador. For Holt, serving as Mayor of Oklahoma City is his dream job.
Home to one of the largest collections of Chihuly glass in the world
“Serving the residents of Oklahoma City is a privilege,” he says. “I’m very passionate about public service, and to be able to serve as the mayor of my hometown is a dream come true.”
While many outsiders still lean on outdated stereotypes when conjuring visions of Oklahoma City, Mayor Holt smiles through the misplaced digs because he knows that it only takes one visit to change outdated misperceptions. Besides, he’s too busy touting the city’s cultural and social gems to dwell on the negative, like the Rand Elliott-designed Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center, or 70-acre Scissortail Park, which extends from the core of downtown Oklahoma City to the shore of the Oklahoma River. How many cities host an Henri Matisse exhibit? Who hasn’t walked away from a performance by the Oklahoma City Philharmonic completely spellbound? Where else can you ride a hot pink streetcar from Myriad Gardens to Automobile Alley to Midtown and back again? That’s not to say that OKC has forgotten its roots. The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum is a must see. The Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum is sacred ground. It’s all there in a city unlike any other, a hidden gem covering 620 square miles and populated with some of the most amazing people you’ll find anywhere on earth.
Today, Mayor Holt’s leadership is being tested by an invisible enemy, one that has turned major cities into ghost towns and sent millions to the unemployment line. This is a global pandemic, and drastic measures are being taken in countries around the world. Hard decisions must be made to defeat the COVID-19 threat, and Holt does not enter into this struggle lightly. Lives hang in the balance. Livelihoods, too. Like many of his peers around the country, Holt has had to declare a state of emergency. He’s had to sign an unpopular order closing bars and other entertainment venues, turning the city’s vibrant restaurant scene into takeout-only. These decisions are not for the faint of heart, but Mayor Holt understands what’s at stake. He also knows the people of Oklahoma City are up to the challenge. There have been other tests of fortitude – oil busts, banking crises, a bombing of unimaginable evil. Each and every time, the citizens of Oklahoma City have risen up and met the challenge head on. COVID-19 is no different. Mayor Holt knows that the battle won’t be easily won, but he knows that his city has something that COVID-19 does not.
The Oklahoma Standard.
“The people of Oklahoma City banded together in a community-wide display of spontaneous altruism,” Holt says when asked about the bombing that claimed 168 lives and changed the city forever. “Call it the Oklahoma Standard, call in One OK, call it love, call it empathy, call it whatever you want. But we know better than most Americans what happens when it is lost. That is the wisdom that each of us possesses for living here at any time in the last 25 years. We understand what it is to carry the load.”
You were born and raised in Oklahoma City. A lot has changed in a short amount of time. Please tell me a little about your childhood, and what OKC was like back in the day.
I was born and raised in Northwest Oklahoma City, and I went to Putnam City Schools all the way through high school. My dad was a high school English teacher in Putnam City Schools. My mom had been a social worker until I came along, and then she was a stay-at-home mom. I had a great education and a great upbringing. I think Oklahoma City was a very lovely place to be in the 1980s and 1990s, but, having said that, I can look back now and I can see the deficiencies that Oklahoma City had in some respects. Now I realize that we were oftentimes in an alternate universe outside of what was going on in the rest of United States, and a lot of our effort in the last 20 years have been to be more connected to the greater country at large. I think that we have been successful. Most of that was lost on a child, of course, because you aren’t thinking in those terms. For me, Oklahoma City back then meant a very nice, suburban lifestyle, with a good education system that was very supportive.
From what I’ve read, you learned to deal with adversity at a young age.
I had some challenges. My mother passed away when I was a freshman in high school. By that point my parents were divorced. I was an only child living with her, so my dad stepped in and, along with my mother’s father, helped me stay stabilized. Unfortunately, you grow up pretty fast under those circumstances. Thankfully, I also had a lot of support from my high school, Putnam City North, during that whole transition.
What attracted you to public service?
I would say that none of my parents or grandparents were ever elected officials or anything of that nature, but there was certainly a service-oriented bent to their professions and to their attitudes. With my dad being a teacher, my mom being a social worker, and my mother’s father being career Army, you know they were always just very civic minded and involved. As I grew up, I took a queue from the examples that they set. I was student council president in the sixth grade, class president in my sophomore year of high school, and student council spirit vice president my junior year. I was always very involved in whatever group of people it was that was part of the decision-making process for the community that I was in. During my senior year of high school I was voted “Most Likely to Become President,” so I was always on this path toward public service. Ultimately, I chose a university that dovetailed with that.
You went to college in our nation’s capital.
Yes, I went to The George Washington University in D.C. in the fall of 1997, and ultimately became a political science major. I interned for a couple of Oklahoma congressmen during that time period. My first real job was working for the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and then for President Bush in the White House, until I came back home and worked as the Chief of Staff to my predecessor, Mayor Cornett, in City Hall. I did that for five years until I was elected to the Oklahoma Senate, and from there, after eight years, I was elected Mayor of Oklahoma City. For me, I’ve always been public service oriented, and I have been around that as a profession my whole adult life.
OKC’s future Mayor and the Commander in Chief
The average person outside of Oklahoma doesn’t grasp the geographic largeness that is Oklahoma City.
That’s very true. This is also something that even our locals don’t often realize. We are 620 square miles in size. To put that into perspective, you could fit Boston, Miami, Manhattan, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. all simultaneously within the city limits of Oklahoma City. So we are very spread out, which gives the mayor a challenge in terms of really even knowing his own city. You could take a lifetime trying to physically journey to all of the 620 square miles of the city.
Oklahoma City is also very diverse. Under the age of 18, Oklahoma City is 60% nonwhite. We are also undergoing a demographic shift, so there are lots of different kinds of cultures and communities within our city. I would say that these two things combine to create a lot of segregation. Because our city is so large, people have physically segregated themselves into groups that reflect their demography or their socioeconomic status. I think it’s incumbent upon the mayor to get out and try to break down these barriers, and to try to ensure that we all have empathy for each other.
Most Friday mornings you visit OKC elementary schools and read “Goodnight, OKC.” Please tell me about this initiative, and why it is so important to you.
Getting out every Friday morning to read to kindergartners, as benign as it may seem, really is something that operates on multiple levels. It’s certainly an effort to show support for public education. In our system of government mayors don’t operate the schools, but it is arguably the most important function of local government, so it’s important that the mayor be connected with it. And it’s certainly an effort by the mayor to demonstrate the importance of reading, if to no one else, then at least those kids. But I always say that there’s something else at work, too; it’s an effort by me to make sure that I get to all of the neighborhoods around our city. There’s really no better way to do that than to visit the elementary schools, because they are typically fairly equitably placed all around the city to serve a finite geographic area. There are about 100 elementary schools in the city limits of Oklahoma City, across 24 different school districts. And that exercise will eventually, over the course of four or five years, take me to every corner of the city. This is an opportunity to see how everybody else lives, to see neighborhoods and constituencies that, in the normal course of things, I don’t have the opportunity to visit every day. We all live in bubbles, whether we consciously think about it or not. We as people tend to get into our own little routines, and don’t see all of the city that we live in, so you’ve got to come up with a reason to force yourself to get out and about, and break out of your own little bubble. As mayor, I have to work on that, and reading on Friday helps me avoid getting completely sucked into my work in City Hall.
Under your tenure, OKC’s new streetcar system has gone online, construction has started on a new convention center, and the new Scissortail Park has taken shape, all thanks to MAPS.
We have been on a 25-year run where our voters have endorsed these one cent temporary sales taxes to build the stuff that we need. In 2009, they passed MAPS3, which includes Scissortail Park, the convention center and the streetcar system, as well as several other projects. The three that you mention have been coming to fruition in the last year and in the year ahead. That’s very exciting for our city.
Please tell me about OKC Streetcar.
The streetcar system just celebrated its 500,000 rider in just about 13 months of operation, which we think is very successful. All transit operations are subsidized, but you don’t measure success by whether it pays for itself, you measure success by whether people are using it. We think 500,000 riders speaks for itself, so that’s been great. We’re very proud of our new streetcar system.
Scissortail Park has quickly become an Oklahoma City jewel.
People love the park. It’s right downtown, it’s adjacent to our arena. It’s also adjacent to our future convention center, which will open at the end of this year. The opening of the park was spectacular. The Kings of Leon came, and we had them perform a free concert. Twenty-eight thousand people came out on a Friday night in late September for what was ultimately the largest crowd to ever watch a concert in the city limits of Oklahoma City.
By all measures, MAPS3 has been a resounding success for OKC. And now you have MAPS4.
I get to go out and cut all of these ribbons associated with MAPS3 initiatives, which is obviously a great honor, but the groundwork was laid long before I become mayor. While I wasn’t the mayor when MAPS3 passed, I was serving as Mayor Cornett’s Chief of Staff at the time, so I feel a little less guilty about attending the ribbon cutting ceremonies [laughs]. It does serve as a reminder that these are long initiatives to implement. I know that it probably won’t be me that will cut a lot of MAPS4 ribbons, but it was incumbent upon me to continue to plant those trees at Scissortail Park so that our grandchildren will have shade.
Yo-Yo Ma performs with the OKC Philharmonic
You were instrumental in the passing on MAPS4. That’s exciting stuff.
My first 18 months or so were really consumed with the development and passage of MAPS4, which we completed in December, 2019 with a record 72% approval from the voters. So I did my part to pay it forward. I get to cut some ribbons on some projects that were approved when my predecessor was mayor, but I did my part to leave some things to look forward to for the future as well.
MAPS has transformed Downtown OKC.
Our downtown was dead 25 years ago. The original impetus for MAPS was to build some stuff that would bring life back to our downtown. We didn’t have a decent sports arena, we didn’t have a downtown ballpark, we didn’t have a decent entertainment district, so we passed MAPS and started building all of these things that would establish that.
Bricktown Canal
The 605-room Omni Hotel is on track to open early 2021. In 2012, there were 1,250 rooms available downtown. In 2021, there will be 5,000 rooms available.
Your hotel illustration is a good one. I’ll see that and raise you by pointing out that 20 years ago there was one downtown hotel, and now there are over 20, I’ve lost count of the actual number. As you’ve said, we’ve got thousands of rooms, and we are well on our way to being able to host some pretty serious conventions. We’re not Las Vegas necessarily, but we certainly are going to be punching more in our weight class with the opening of the Omni. We will have a very special venue for conventions. I encourage anybody that doesn’t know what I’m talking about to Google Scissortail Park and get a feel for that whole area. We relocated our interstate highway, which opened up this whole area for development. We’ve built a 70-acre world-class park, we’re building a convention center on the east edge of it, and the Omni Hotel is coming in as well. Then, on the northeast corner, you’ve got Chesapeake Energy Arena, and then you’ve got a streetcar stop across the street that links it all together. It’s just a spectacular new part of our central business district that we were able to do without really displacing anyone or anything because it was all kind of on the wrong side of the old highway, and now it’s right there adjacent to downtown. We were able to build this spectacular venue, and it’s a great symbol for how far we’ve come. Twenty-five years ago, nobody would have wanted to come here. Now we have all kinds of visitor attractions and amenities, and now we have the venues to host them. We are very bullish on our future as a convention destination, and as a visitor destination.
The OKC National Memorial is sacred ground. Please take me back to the bombing, which I’m sure is frozen in time for you, and share how the city and state has responded to that horrible tragedy.
Obviously, the bombing was a horrible experience, but we’ve always been proud of how we responded to it. We call that the Oklahoma Standard. We wrapped our arms around the victims and survivors, and especially the first responders who came from all around the country and helped us to recover. And so it’s always a part of our story. Every year we have the opportunity to pause and reflect, to pay our respects, and to recognize how we responded, which we believe is admirable.
The bombing didn’t just destroy the federal building. It’s important to note that we also rebuilt our city. We just didn’t put it back the way it was, we made it an even better place. A lot of people maybe who not be from here don’t realize that it also caused the demolition of hundreds of other buildings downtown. Ultimately, they didn’t all fall down that day, but they were heavily damaged and had to be demolished. And all of that came on the heels of a terrible decade – an oil bust, a banking crisis, and just one thing after another. A bombing on top of it all could have very likely…I don’t think we would have shut the town down, but we certainly could’ve been in a much more desperate situation, and in turn became a decaying and dying town. Instead, we are really greater than we’ve ever been. So we’re very proud of our story of renaissance that came out of that horrible experience.
Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum
The OKC Memorial Marathon honors the victims and survivors, and has become one of the biggest annual events in the city. Please tell me about the Run to Remember.
A few years after the bombing, a small group of running enthusiasts started to organize this marathon. It’s not the most obvious response to a domestic terrorism attack, but even though it’s not in the playbook we had these folks who thought, “We love running, and here’s a great way we can honor the victims and maybe raise some money to help support the Memorial.” It has just grown so much in the two decades since, to the point where the resources raised is actually a significant part of the Memorial’s operating budget.
The Run to Remember is really such a great celebration of life. I haven’t attended other marathons, but I assume that each of them are celebratory occasions in their own ways. But to have this kind of extra meaning makes the OKC Memorial Marathon unique and very special. I think people who run in it – and we host people from all around the country – I think when they leave, they get that impression that this isn’t just another marathon. It’s become a real institution here in Oklahoma City.
Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon
Let’s talk hoops. What did it mean for Oklahoma City to land the Thunder?
In America, the closest thing that we have to a blue ribbon to bestow on our top cities is a professional sports team. It’s sort of a shorthand way of communicating that you have the population, corporate presence, and the general wherewithal to host some of the world’s greatest brands. And those brands are the NBA, NFL, NHL, and Major League Baseball. Oklahoma City had just never been invited into that fraternity. It didn’t seem to matter that we were a lot bigger than some other smaller or midsize cities, because, from the outside looking in, you couldn’t tell the difference if you didn’t have a professional sports team. It just is what it is. Through MAPS we built an arena, which put us in position to have the option should the opportunity arise. Unfortunately, through tragedy we got our opportunity to audition, which was when Hurricane Katrina forced the New Orleans Hornets to have to relocate for a couple of years. We hosted them, and we blew it out of the water. People had never really taken us seriously, and suddenly they saw us coming to the table with 20,000 fans and great sponsorships, and we were able to more than adequately sustain the operations of that team. So that gave us the chance to really be considered for a permanent team, and ultimately, a group of our business owners here in town bought the Seattle Supersonics and ultimately relocated them here. It has changed the way that we see ourselves, and the way that the world sees us. It’s just impossible to overstate what the Thunder means to Oklahoma City. It’s completely altered the perception that people have of Oklahoma City by the fact that we are finally part of this integral aspect of American pop culture.
Please tell me about your 2012 book, Big League City: Oklahoma City’s Rise to the NBA.
I was Mayor Cornett’s Chief of Staff when all of this happened. I had kept pretty good notes. Then I was elected to the Senate, and around 2011 I started to think that somebody ought to write all this down because it was such an incredible story. The fact that we got the team required about 500 things to go just right, and it shouldn’t be lost to history, so I sat down and wrote a book. We have an independent bookseller here in town called Full Circle Books, who had published a few other local histories of this nature, and they thought it was a great idea. We worked together to publish Big League City in 2012. I now feel comfortable that this history hasn’t been lost. We will always have that story, because it was such a major transition in our city’s history to go from what we had been to being a big league city. It’s important, I think, for people to remember what that was like and what it took to get there. So, it’s a political story, a sports story, and a city story all rolled into one.
Mayor David Holt with NBA Commissioner Adam Silver
There are some amazing businesses headquartered in OKC, like Love’s and Sonic.
We think that we are a community that has a great atmosphere for starting a business. We appear on, and sometimes at the very top of, lists like that. I think it’s because our regulatory and tax environment is positive. I think that we’ve got a great quality of life, which hasn’t always been true. With the MAPS investments we now feel like that you can live here at a low cost of living, without traffic, with clean air and water, but still have all of the modern amenities and attractions of a great American city. We are very pro-business. We have a great relationship between City Hall and the Chamber of Commerce, and we think we have a great workforce. We can always work at that, and we certainly want to continue to make sure that we have a workforce that is keeping up with the modern economy. But it has been, traditionally, a great place to start a business, and we just want to continue those trends.
Twenty-five years ago it was still a great place to live in a sense, but you weren’t going to have professional sports, you weren’t going to have great art, you weren’t going to have great restaurants, or the kind of the extras that make life worth living. We have addressed that now. We really feel like we present a unique situation to people, which is a great American city without the hassles. And that can be very attractive to job creators. You’ve just got to get them here sometimes. Sometimes they just don’t know about Oklahoma City. If we can get people here, then literally, once we get them off the plane, they get it within an hour. But sometimes we have to overcome their lack of knowledge or perception. That’s just life. It’s our job is to make sure that they think about us. We always exceed people’s expectations tremendously.
