Interview with David Holt, Mayor of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Michael Bailey:
I’m thrilled to be joined by our guest today Mayor David Holt. Thank you so much for joining me and for participating in this interview.
Before we dive in, I just want to give folks watching an overview of your background. You are the 38th mayor of Oklahoma City. You were elected in 2018. First Native American mayor for the city, one of the youngest in its history, and the youngest mayor to serve a U.S. city with a population of over a half a million residents. Prior to that, you were working serving in the Oklahoma State Senate. And then Chief of Staff to your predecessor.
And you currently serve as the president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
So, just thank you again for doing this, and I want to dive into our topic, which is around public service. You have dedicated your entire life and career to service to others and to public service. And so would love just to hear what field you’re calling.
David Holt:
Yeah. I should say I feel like you left out for this purpose, the most important part of my biography, which was I was spent two years in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs under President George W. Bush. Which certainly is part of my story of public service.
I grew up in Oklahoma City, always the guy run for student council president and that kind of thing. And so, I went out to DC to go to George Washington, where I got a political science degree. And I guess I would say that I’ve always been attracted to roles where I can help people, where I can leave the world better than I found it. Where I can, be one of those people in the community that are influencing the future direction of whatever community it is that I’m a part of.
And so, whether it was student council or working in the White House, all of that is essentially the same ethos throughout my life. I’ve never necessarily been motivated for financial purposes, none of these things pay well, but I have always believed that the greatest satisfaction comes from that kind of work, from service and the legacy that you leave there. So, I’ve always enjoyed that and that’s essentially what I’ve done my entire adult life. And you covered most of it there.
I should add that I came back after working in the White House for two years, which followed my education in Washington. I came back to Oklahoma City and then began that journey of mayor chief of staff, state senate, and then finally service as mayor myself.
And I’ve also in our forms of government, in this part of the country, it’s true in Texas as it is in Oklahoma, you often have another job. Because you do need to have some motivation for financial purposes so you can feed and clothe yourself. And I’m also dean of a law school in Oklahoma City as well, but I view that as very similar in a sense that I am serving the rule of law, which I think is critical to the furtherance of our democracy.
Michael Bailey:
Absolutely. We believe that public service is a cornerstone to American democracy, and I think it’s important for all of us to figure out where our niche is in that space.
What advice might you give to someone who is maybe early in their career, considering going into public service, or maybe midway and trying to figure out how they find their niche?
David Holt:
I think the first thing I would say is there’s a niche for everybody. It’s easy to get caught up when you’re listening to a mayor talk think he’s telling me to run for mayor. That’s all he, that’s the only advice he has, and of course not everybody can or should run for public office. But every single American has a part to play in preserving and sustaining the American experiment.
And I feel like I’m often saying this to young people because maybe people as old as me – It’s nice that you mentioned all those, “young mayor this” and “young mayor that,” which was true when I got elected. That was eight years ago. That stuff slips away pretty fast. But I’m often talking to a group of students, whose father I could be at this point. And I feel empowered that I can preach to them a little bit and I’ll say, look, whatever your future holds, there will always be a place in your life for being aware of the news, voting, and that’s a baseline. It’s just being civically aware. But the next level would be volunteering.
As the mayor of Oklahoma City, I appoint over 500 people to volunteer boards and commissions that are just parts of the city. I’m not talking about non-profit boards. I’m talking about the planning commission and the oversight boards for our different initiatives.
That’s a great way to serve as well. But whatever the case, do that. Carve out a slice of your pie. Because you’re going to have a lot of time spent on your career, you need to have a lot of time spent on your family and your personal life, but there needs to be like this third slice, no matter what you do, and that is service. That is being a part of something bigger than yourself and serving your community and making yourself available to mayors who might want to appoint you to something or a nonprofit board where you can do good.
I remember when I was a Teenager, probably, into my twenties, I didn’t really understand that every single entity I’d ever heard of had a board. The ballet you go to has a board. The Boy Scouts have a board. Everything has a board, and that’s a great way to serve as well. The world needs those volunteers.
I think that’s my first message. Obviously, if you want to take it to this level, and you want to run for things, we need to talk. There’s a lot of strategy that goes into this. You want to run at the right time. But these types of roles are really great. They are really important. And we need good people. It’s no secret that there’s unfortunately a lot of bad actors in this business these days. And so, we need good people to put themselves out there, even though there will be some days where they’ll question that decision. But we need you.
I think that’s a different conversation and probably a much longer one, but certainly we need good people willing to make what is oftentimes a financial family and time sacrifice. But it is necessary to the endurance of this thing I like to call the American experiment. And I like to use that phrase because it reminds us that this is still an outlier.
What we have in America is still an outlier, in the grand sweep of human history, and therefore we’ve got to be intentional about it, and we’ve got to cultivate it.
Michael Bailey:
Absolutely. I would love to, to stick on the topic of your leadership as mayor and highlight a little bit, talk a little bit, around the notion of trust.
This is something we think a lot about here at the Bush Institute, rebuilding trust in each other, in our institutions, in our communities. So how do you think about this as mayor with working with within the local community, building that trust within each other, and then that trust in the local government as well?
David Holt:
I think there’s a few elements to it. You need to tell the truth or at least try really hard to tell the truth. Sometimes you’ll be mistaken, but that’s an honest mistake. But you cannot build trust if you’re not being intentional with the truth.
Hand in hand with that is transparency, as transparent as you can be. Sometimes you’re working on something that’s not ready for primetime yet, but you always have to know, like at some point, I’m going to share this transparently with the people that I serve. You need to listen. You need to be visible. You need to be, like, this is a collaborative effort between you and the people that you serve.
And you can’t, lock yourself up in your office. Time consuming as it can be sometimes, and grueling as it can be sometimes, you got to be out in the community. You got to be visible. You got to be talking to people.
And of course, also we now have – It can be a blessing and a curse – but we now have a technology that also allows that interplay to happen 24/7. And that’s social media. And again, sometimes social media can be a cesspool, but it can also be a place to share information, and I use it very actively, and I do it myself. I’m the only person with the passwords to my social media accounts. But I have found over time that it’s a great resource for sharing what’s important to me and what I think is important to Oklahoma City in my case.
I think also building trust requires you to say what you mean what you say. Follow through, keep your word. Sometimes I think people might say things for effect that they don’t really mean or they don’t plan to follow through on. And that may serve them well in the moment, but it’s going to probably break trust long-term.
So, I think in Oklahoma City our great success story is investing in ourselves and investing in ourselves over the last 30 years has required us to pass 15 initiatives, 15 tax initiatives through the voters of Oklahoma City. Every single one of them was generally a finite list of projects, a finite timeframe for collection of the tax, and always had a sunset. And so, every one of those required a set of promises and a set of promises that were then capped or else we wouldn’t have gotten to 15. At some point people don’t trust you anymore. But we’ve built up trust by keeping our word meaning, and saying what we mean what we say, following through, keeping our word.
And ultimately that takes time. And one of the things that everybody has today is impatience. But what they need is patience and persistence and recognizing that great change is made over many years. And Oklahoma City’s story is certainly an example of that. To some people, the success we now enjoy might seem like an overnight success, but for us it really was a journey of 30 years of building trust and following through.
Michael Bailey:
Wow. That leads greatly to my final question, which is the topic of this series that we’re doing, we call it Democracy Is a Verb. Now we recognize that democracy is not technically a verb, but at the Bush Institute, we believe really strongly –
David Holt:
I wasn’t gonna correct your grammar.
Michael Bailey:
We, we believe so strongly that in order for us to have a thriving democracy, citizens need to show up and be engaged. So, when you hear the words, “democracy is a verb,” what does that mean to you? What resonates and how can all of us better put that into practice?
David Holt:
It probably in some degree, hearkens back to what I said earlier, which is every single one of us has a role to play. And at the very least, it’s civic awareness and voting. And obviously half of us aren’t even doing that, right? So, we’ll work on that baseline. And then you got to, hopefully, get even more engaged in this democracy.
And I guess I would say that the motivation to do so is, again, most human beings in the history of our world have lived in some form of autocracy, not democracy. And actually, as it is today, less than half of humans on this planet live in a form of government that would even claim to be any kind of democracy. So, the personal freedoms we enjoy and the collective freedom we enjoy, through elections and through advocacy change and alter the direction of things, is not a given at all.
And the quickest way to lose that is apathy and treating democracy as a noun. Is that the opposite of treating it like a verb? Treating it like a historical relic of which you are not a part. And it actually requires active participation, current participation, or else you will not like the ultimate outcome of that.
We’ve done it now for 250 years. Maybe that gives us a sense of complacency, but it is still 250 years more than most people enjoy in this world. So, we got to get on it, and we’ve got to embrace this obligation. We owe it to ourselves, but we also owe it to our kids and future generations to pass this American experiment on to the future.
Michael Bailey:
Mayor Holt, thank you again for participating in this interview. Thank you for your leadership to the citizens of Oklahoma City, and to all of us as a leader in our nation. Thank you.
