AirGas Expansion Means 130 New Jobs In Downtown Tulsa

Around 130 new jobs are coming to Tulsa. AirGas announced Monday it will lease a building downtown and expand its payroll.

AirGas currently employs a little more than a hundred people here in Tulsa. It says it needed a place to expand that will service its central division.

AirGas is leasing 58,000 square feet of office space on 3 1/2 floors of the 28-story building at 110 West 7th Street

It'll be home to its new Business Support Center and provide accounting and administrative service for the company's central division. Around 130 new employees will be hired to help fill the center.

"Anytime you add jobs in any part of the region there are vendors and suppliers and support industries that go along with that," said Tulsa Chamber member Jim Fram.

Jim Fram is the economic development director for the Tulsa Metro Area Chamber of Commerce. He says AirGas' commitment to Tulsa means big money for our economy.

The chamber calculates that the new jobs will support the production of more than $19-million in goods and services locally and those 130 new jobs will help support another 110 jobs across Tulsa.

This is all part of a chamber campaign to bring quality jobs to Tulsa. They're goal is to add 10,000 new jobs that pay at least $50,000 a year between now at 2015. One year into the campaign and they're already halfway there.

Last year, the chamber says, 4000 of the 10,000 new jobs added in the Tulsa area paid more than $50,000 a year. An excellent sign, Fram says.

"We have had a very good year in 2011 and beginning to crawl out of this recession that we've been in," Fram says.

A lot of that growth has been downtown. Fram says the flare of new jobs and new opportunities downtown are very attractive to businesses.

"I think it says a lot of what we've been able to accomplish downtown in the last 8 to 10 years with the construction of new facilities, with new hotels, new restaurants. There's more things to do downtown and it's really becoming a focal point of activity for northeast Oklahoma," he said.

AirGas is currently recruiting for the new positions. It says business support center is scheduled to open in March of this year.