Cox’s Corner
by State Representative Doug Cox, M.D.
Recently (well not too recent), a storm moved through the Spavinaw area blowing down many large trees, which destroyed the picnic shelter, damaged a restroom, and broke some picnic tables. The park staff cleaned up what they could in order to get part of the park reopened. They did not have the size of equipment needed to do the majority of the work, and the most often-used part of the park (closest to the spillway) remained closed for an unreasonably long time. Why is that?
Local folks volunteered to cut up the trees for firewood to use personally or resale. The damaged picnic shelter could have easily been salvaged by local people to use or sell the materials. Perhaps Mayes County inmates could have been used to clean up any remaining debris. In short, this would have enabled the park to be reopened in a reasonable amount of time instead of losing the entire summer season. Why wasn’t this done?
The Oklahoma Department of Tourism, their lawyers and their insurance company were worried about the liability of letting local people cut the timber and salvage the shelter. Why couldn’t they just stop by the park’s host and sign a release of liability? Not to mention, the state is pretty well protected by state statutes against significant losses from lawsuits of that nature.
The Tourism Department’s insurance carrier, as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which provided some clean-up funding, required that all environmental requirements be met. Really? You have to joking. We are talking about using a chain saw to cut up trees and a truck to haul off some pipe and roofing from a picnic shelter. In addition, they required that the Tourism Department get multiple bids for the jobs under the time consuming bid process.
All of these ridiculous requirements for a relatively small job only served to delay the reopening of the park for use by Oklahoma citizens, and I would be willing to bet it cost the Tourism Department more money than any of us could have had it done for by donating the wood and salvage scrap in exchange for hauling it off and uby sing inmate labor for final clean up.
Is there anything we can do to fix this excessive government red tape that costs taxpayers way too much money and handicaps our agencies? Well, the FEMA part comes from Washington, D.C., so we need the help of our U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives. On the state level, we need directors of our agencies, such as State Parks and Tourism, who have the courage to take common sense action for the benefit of our citizens. When they do so, they should expect to have the backing of our U.S. and state legislators. They will certainly have mine.
Thank you for allowing me to serve as your state representative. I can be reached at dougcox@okhouse.gov or 405-557-7415.
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