The OTA Wants Your Input—As Long As It Doesn’t Change Anything
Behind the façade of public outreach lies a continued calculated effort to sideline real community voices while fast-tracking projects for powerful interests.
How can public engagement be effectively undermined? One proven method is to schedule meetings at times when working families and concerned residents are least likely to attend—ensuring that those with the most at stake have the least opportunity to prepare, while well-resourced developers and vested interests face no such barriers.
You schedule events when the community is already maxed out with family obligations and celebrations including school graduations, band and choral concerts, competitive soccer tryouts and tournaments, the extended Memorial Day weekend family events and all the other last-week-of-school and end-of-school-year shenanigans.
Do you think it’s on PURPOSE?
I do.
But it doesn’t matter because the OTA and their well-paid consultant minions won’t tell you the truth anyway.
These “olive-branch” public meetings where OTA is “seeking input from residents, property owners and business owners, especially those who may not have had the opportunity to provide input yet,” are a publicity stunt.
That’s their politically correct way of saying they don’t want to hear from PIKE OFF OTA’s community. You know.. the ANTI-TURNPIKE crowd.
They will nod politely as you “share ideas,” and then completely ignore “the comments, information and input [you provide].”
The only idea you should be sharing is
You need to stand fast on this point.
These meetings will NOT be used to “help [their] engineers working on the route alignment study and ultimately guide the OTA’s decision making for the South Extension.”
Their “public meetings” back in April/May of 2022 were a sham. They told us they would not move the route, that they had all the necessary permissions, that their impact and environmental studies and all required permits would be completed prior to eminent domaining any land and that there was nothing we could do.
None of it was true.
That’s bad transportation policy.
Reverse engineering is completely unethical.
These turnpikes had nothing to do with transportation.
They did not, and still do not, have legislative permission to build these turnpikes.
So then, why should you attend these public meetings? Why should you call (1-844-562-2237) and write (info@accessoklahoma.com) the OTA and leave them a message about how much you oppose the turnpikes?
We need to contact them PRIOR to the meeting and let them know how much we oppose the turnpikes.
Then, we need to show up in force at the meetings and tell them in person, in front of the media, in front of the developers, in front of their financiers and bond holders, in front of their well-paid consultant minions, that this turnpike project is terrible.
And that their treatment of the public is unconscionable. That their flippant use of eminent domain to build an unjustified and unwanted toll road is unconstitutional. That they are in direct violation of their trust agreement. One violation is that these three new alignments have not been proven to be financially viable - which is what the trust requires them to prove prior to entering the bond market.
You know who is supposed to check that out? The Council of Bond Oversight (COBO). You know who else? The Attorney General. But that’s another deep rabbit hole for a different day.
You need to show up and ask the hard questions and RECORD THEIR ANSWERS.
What’s one major lie they will tell you next week? They will tell you that their turnpikes will alleviate the traffic on I-35.
Baloney - in fact, I can prove that the East-West Connector traffic from Newcastle will EXACERBATE the rush hour traffic on I-35 and there is no way that the southern extension will be used for commuting to OKC because it dumps you 18 miles east of the city.
Remember, they like to create problems and then propose solutions ad nauseum.
Are you ready for this rabbit hole? Follow me.
Next week, they won’t tell you that their turnpike traffic justifications made up by EST are bunk.
I said “made up” and that is exactly what they were. Don’t believe me?
We recently received a few thousand pages of open record requests from both ODOT and the OTA… ORR’s that we had been waiting on in some cases for EIGHT MONTHS. We still haven’t gone through all of the pages, but we have found some interesting information you need to know about.
This is a meeting agenda from Wednesday March 1, 2022, just SEVEN days after the OTA announced their ACCESS Oklahoma Program.
The OTA wants to “ensure that ODOT and OTA are using consistent traffic numbers, particularly in the vicinity of the I-35 mainline and proposed East-West Connector of the OTA ACCESS program.”
Six days after the ACCESS program announcement, they were already CONSPIRING to get those numbers right.
Then OTA mentioned that TEC will use baseline numbers to develop preliminary estimates of traffic volumes for the east-west connector and give those traffic volumes to TEIM who will write the Access Justification Report (AJR). Then those traffic estimates on the east-west connector will be given to EST to incorporate in their model for the three alternatives in their Moore/Norman study.
You know… the “state tax-payer funded” study that was supposed to help ODOT design a new interchange at Indian Hills where they had bought EIGHT properties to the tune of $16 million dollars in 2021…. $16 million dollars that was NOT in their 8 year construction plan budget.
Who greenlighted these purchases under emergency authorization? Tim Gatz.
Director of ODOT, and simultaneously the
Director of OTA, who was also the
Secretary of Transportation.
Hmmmmmm……
If you are new to this debacle, you probably think I’m all over the place. The rabbit holes are so deep and twisted, it’s hard to have a linear conversation about the hydra of problems with how the OTA does business. Their tentacles are everywhere because they pay exceptionally well.
That’s why it costs so much more to build a tollroad with the OTA than it does a tax-supported road with ODOT.
They pay for compliance… for reward in carrying out their bidding…. for lobbying our legislators to thwart bills that would add oversight to their shoddy business model.
You need to understand that POE and ASSOCIATES and Garver Engineering, two of the consulting firms you will be meeting with next week, will make HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS through the ACCESS program. They get paid to comply and cover up all the bad stuff.
You have to go prepared.
Back to TEIM/EST and the traffic study.
Do those company names sound familiar? They should.
All these players are making BOATLOADS off the ACCESS program. TEIM has a utility managment AND a design contract totalling $63.5 million, EST has a design contract totalling almost $18 million.
SO WHY ARE THESE SAME COMPANIES BEING PAID TO CREATE THE JUSTIFICATION STUDIES FOR THE PROJECT THAT THEY WILL GET PAID TO DESIGN?????
Kind of like the conflict of interest found with MacArthur and the OTA’s spokesperson, Terri Angier. The same Terri Angier that owns Tacktics Enterprises, LLC, an entity created in 2016 and used to buy distressed properties.
Trivia Question: What Oklahoma transportation project started in 2016 where lots of insiders got to out-bid the original owners on property no longer needed by the OTA?
Answer: Driving Forward and specifically, the Kickapoo Turnpike.
Bonus Trivia Question: What Oklahoma family has a legacy name in both OTA and ODOT that routinely buys land in advance of a future transportation or economic development project or bids on excess land flanking recently built transportation corridors, including these Kickapoo Projects?
Answer: The Laforge Family. Stephen, the father and now deceased, was an OTA board member from 1995-2003 and Oklahoma Transportation Commission member from 2023 to his death in 2025. He was very involved in “economic development” projects in Chickasha. His son, Rusty, currently a lawyer for Stride Bank, is the owner of several large land parcels surrounding the Kickapoo.
Why do the same names keep surfacing around the largest public-private partnership in Oklahoma? These individuals are operating in the shadows—profiting at the intersection of government-sanctioned eminent domain and unchecked private business interests. It’s a revolving door of influence and grift, with no oversight and no accountability.
Who is going to put an end to it?
Let's get back to the first issue I brought up about the conflicts of interest between the firms hired to complete the justification studies and those hired to complete the design, because that is the foundation for OTA’s propaganda about how the turnpikes will alleviate traffic on I-35.
The same firm is hired to justify a project and then paid to design it—without any independent review to verify the science behind their justification.
What benefit does their company see if they intellectually honestly perform the traffic study and say… “Hey.. you know what…. the capacity is actually not the problem. We understand induced demand and more lanes are not necessary. The highway geometry is really outdated, which causes all those slowdowns and increase in minor fenderbenders during rush hour near the interchanges. Let’s focus on the redesign of some of those interchanges and service road traffic light situations to improve traffic flow.”
Exactly. Those boys would be out tens…..no hundreds….. of millions of dollars in design work on new alignments if they actually presented the real data.
PIKE OFF OTA and Oklahomans for Responsible Transportation spent the last three legislative sessions pushing bills that would’ve forced the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority (OTA) to follow basic accountability:
Hire separate firms for impact studies and design contracts
Require independent reviews of the justification and environmental studies before any road moves forward
It’s common sense. Oklahomans deserve a clear line between who’s studying the road and who’s getting paid to build it. Right now, it’s the same cozy circle cashing in at every step — no checks, no balance.
So what happened?
Legislative leadership buried the bills in committee — fast.
They didn’t want sunlight. They didn’t want reform.
They protected the OTA instead of protecting you.
Why?
Do you remember when this figure was all over the news in early summer 2022?
I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how they got this graph that didn’t include ANY NUMBERS or sources. How did they come up with these numbers?
When I presented a report to the Oklahoma Transportation Commission in June 2022 — with this graphic included — the commissioners asked ODOT Chief Engineer Bryan Taylor how the graphic was put together.
He said he’d get back to them.
Was this traffic justification fear mongering ALL RED “stop-and-go-flow” figure based in reality?
Turns out… NOPE.
Check out this email from June 2022 that shows how traffic studies can be manipulated.
Um…. why would we want to show “more impact” to the future years?
How does that straight line growth work out? It’s always BEEN WRONG.
Here is an article from the February 14, 1999 Sunday Oklahoman that details the STOP of east-loop through Norman as well as failed traffic projections. ODOT engineers said traffic would “double to 180,000 in twenty years.” They were WRONG… by ALOT.
Tell me who the spokesperson was for ODOT back in 1999.
Tell me who reported ODOT’s terrible traffic projections as “justification” to why Norman needed the Outer Loop.
Terri Angier.
You know. The same person that is being paraded back out by the OTA in 2025 to try and sweet talk you out of your land.
Moving on.
Can we please get back to the data, science and real traffic projections based on more nuanced, behavioral based information and the possibility that we may not even be traveling by roadway in the future?
Can Oklahoma stop paving over everything?
Just for kicks, assume that we still continue to travel on roads as we have been and the mild increase in traffic continues indefinitely (high unlikely).
If we fit the average annual daily traffic over the Study Zone (Purcell to I-40) with a trendline (shown with the blue dotted line), we won’t hit 180,000 vehicles per day until 2096 (71 years from now), when transportation needs will be much different than they are today. No more new roads!
BUT!!!! If I use EST’s proposed 3% growth over the 2020 numbers (orange line in the graph) like they told ODOT in that email, 180,000 vehicles per day would be reached by 2038.
But it has NO BASIS IN REALITY.
It is just used to FEAR MONGER the public and our very shallow-thinking legislators into thinking we need the road. This is how the chart was created. By using an arbitrary year-on-year increase in traffic that doesn’t follow historic trends.
Here…. because I know there are people that read this blog that don’t believe I word I say and may think that averages can be skewed.
I plotted REAL DATA from each interchange counter along I35. Most of the traffic counters at every intersection have remained relatively stable for the past twelve years. Some interchange counts have increased like Route 9 and 4th street, but some have decreased like SE 89th and 27th street. We are no where near capacity on I35 and a turnpike isn’t going to solve this local commuting traffic - the east-west connector will MAKE IT WORSE at Indian Hills!
All my traffic data came from here: https://spotlight-okdot.hub.arcgis.com/datasets/okdot::aadt-traffic-counts/explore?location=35.303878%2C-98.687645%2C7.95
Do you believe that the proposed turnpikes have nothing to do with transportation yet?
This traffic data doesn’t even cover the very real phenomenon of induced demand, which I’ll talk about in a subsequent blog.
The moral of this long and rambling story about the OTA’s upcoming townhalls is to prepare you for the fact that that nothing they tell you is the truth. They will gaslight you, make you feel stupid for asking, make you think you are crazy for showing them the data that CLEARLY shows the opposite of what they are saying and they will absolutely not complete any of the studies they say the will complete before construction.
They don’t give a rip about wetlands; they can build really long bridges that will make the bridge builders rich beyond their wildest dreams. And they can buy wetland credits in other states to make up for destroying ours.
They don’t give a rip about splitting your property in half and not giving you access underneath the turnpike.
They don’t give a rip about the noise, light, air, water and vibrational pollution they will cause. They will not complete the environmental impact studies they promised Norman they would complete.
In 70 years, they have never done them and no one has been able to find any one in power to call them on it. Why start now?
They won’t offer a dime to the families forced to live in the shadow of this concrete hellscape. If this thing gets built, it’s almost kinder to be bought out completely than be left behind to suffer the noise, pollution, and destruction of community. No one should have to live like that — and no responsible government should force them to.
They will NEVER compensate you fully — not for your home, not for your land, and certainly not for the theft of your peace, your generational wealth, your solitude, your property's unique value, your relocation burden, or the pain and suffering they’re dumping on your doorstep.
So I’m begging you: do not comply.
Stand your ground. Lock arms with your neighbors. Delay them. Stall them. Block them — until we stop them.
Make the pledge:
👉 Do not sell.
👉 If they come for your land, take them to court.
👉 Do not capitulate.
This is a marathon. And we need you in it — all the way.
Show up Monday. Show up Wednesday.
Know what’s happening. Ask the hard questions. Don’t accept vague answers. Follow up until the truth comes out — and record everything they say. Let the public hear it.
We fight smarter, louder, and longer — together.
