Amazon Headquarters: Oklahoma City, Tulsa Try To Lure CEO Jeff Bezos

OKLAHOMA CITY, OK — Amazon is searching for a home for its second headquarters in North America — an enormous $5 billion project that will eventually include up to 50,000 high-paying jobs — and officials in Oklahoma City and Tulsa are putting their best foot forward to attract the online retail giant, showcasing their cultural, recreational and quality-of-life attractions.

Amazon needs tech-savvy talent and will probably seek both state and local subsidies. Officials in Oklahoma are hoping to stand out from the crowd by highlighting other amenities to draw CEO Jeff Bezos to the Sooner State.

"We've created a great city to live in," said Cynthia Reid, vice president of marketing and communications for the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber. "We think this is a place where a company can grow." (For more information on Amazon's search and other Oklahoma City stories, subscribe to Patch to receive daily newsletters and breaking news alerts. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

Oklahoma City officials said the state's largest city was transformed over the past two decades by the success of the Metropolitan Area Projects, a comprehensive capital improvement program, approved by voters in 1993 and backed a one-cent sale tax, to reinforce the city's position as a hub for sports, recreation, learning, cultural and convention facilities.

"MAPS changed everything," said Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett, a Republican candidate for governor next year. "All three of the MAPS initiatives are adding to Oklahoma City's quality of life and what we would offer."

The initiative has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to fund such projects as: renovation of the Civic Center Music Hall, home of the Oklahoma City Philharmonic and other professional arts organizations; riverfront development along the Oklahoma river and the Boathouse District, headquarters of USA Canoe/Kayak and a training center for USRowing; and construction of the Chesapeake Energy Arena, home of the NBA's Oklahoma City Thunder.

Projects under development include a new downtown convention center, public park, a streetcar and transit system and expansion of a trails system that already stretches more than 80 miles and can take hikers and bikers to almost every point in the city.

"The best is still yet to come, Cornett said. "What the city did and what the private sector has put together, I think it's exceeded everyone's expectations."

Tulsa has also benefited from a sales-tax financed capital improvement program known as Vision Tulsa that Mayor G.T. Bynum said promises to "transform the face of the city."

"We have the bones in place for substantial growth," Bynum said.

An example of that growth is what Bynum described as "the greatest public park gift in American history," a $400 million development called A Gathering Place made possible by the George Kaiser Family foundation and a group of private investors.

The park, scheduled to open next year, will be located along the eastern shore of the Arkansas River and will include a low-water dam and three-mile-long lake.

Already boasting more than 80 miles of hiking and biking trails, USA BMX has decided to relocate national headquarters and Olympic training facility for the off-road cycling sport to Tulsa, a venue that's expected to attract more than 100,000 visitors in the first five years of operation, including the Olympic trials in 2020.

"Cycling culture has really taken route here organically in the last decade," Bynum said.

And a group that acquired the once secret, 6,000-piece archive of music icon Bob Dylan plans to make the material, including thousands of hours of studio sessions, film reels and caches of unpublished lyrics, available to researchers and the public alike when the Bob Dylan Center opens in the city's downtown Brady Arts District in about two years.

The center will be in a building that already houses a museum devoted to Oklahoma-born Woody Guthrie, one of Dylan's major influences.

"Something special is happening here," Bynum said. "What we offer today is tremendous quality of life."

By TIM TALLEY, Associated Press

Photo credit: Brynn Anderson/Associated Press