When I traveled to Oklahoma City for the first time a few years ago I was shocked to discover that in the civic narrative of the city's transformation - it's origin story if you will - the triggering event for change was losing a competition for a United Airlines maintenance facility in 1991 to Indianapolis. This United Airlines maintenance base was like a Foxconn or HQ2 of its era. It was a big deal because the thousands of jobs would be very high paying union mechanics and there were going to be a lot of them. It was anticipated that many … [Read more...]