The Truth Hurts: Why OTA Is Desperate to Discredit Us

A grassroots movement exposing lies, corruption, and concrete politics—and the smear campaign that proves we’re winning.

Jun 22, 2025

So let me get this straight.

A state agency steamrolls through homes, farms, and ecosystems with secret maps, rigged data, and zero public accountability—and we’re the ones accused of shady lobbying?

The latest carefully crafted piece of OTA propaganda on the front page of the Norman Transcript yesterday twists grassroots, community-led resistance into some kind of political smear, conveniently ignoring years of public records, packed town halls, environmental concerns, and community-led alternatives. But here’s the truth: PIKE OFF OTA isn’t lobbying to move the turnpike—we are fighting to stop it from destroying lives.

If there’s one silver lining in this latest smear, it’s this: ad hominem attacks are the last resort of a side that’s losing. When facts no longer work in your favor, when public support is slipping, and when scrutiny is closing in—personal attacks become the weapon of choice.

So why now? Why this desperate hit on Randy, the PIKE OFF OTA and Oklahomans for Responsible Transportation Director of Strategic Communication?

Maybe it’s because our documentary is making NATIONAL waves in TWO film festivals (so far) this summer!

Maybe it’s the Liberty Conference coming this fall.

Maybe it’s the growing pressure from the lawsuit (Case No. PR-123179) challenging Senate Bill 1027—the newly signed law that limits citizen participation in the initiative petition process.

Or the growing awareness of the environmental destruction looming over East Norman.

Or maybe it’s because alternative media outlets are finally exposing what mainstream ones have ignored for too long.

Or maybe the OTA is gearing up to announce a new Southern Extension route—and they need a distraction. By staging a PR stunt now, they’re hoping to turn newly affected families against PIKE OFF OTA instead of where the blame truly belongs: with the OTA itself. It's classic misdirection—divide the opposition before the next wave of destruction hits.

Whatever the reason, one thing is clear:

Mr. Joe Echelle, OTA Executive Director, just showed the OTA’s poker hand. And it’s a flop.

But we’re not folding. We’ve been calling their bluff since day one—and we’re not about to stop now.

The real story here is being buried beneath a pile of agency spin. So let’s unpack the propaganda—and remind folks what OTA hopes you’ll forget.

Read the full article here. Snippets from the article are included below (set off by pink lines) for reference.

OTA DECEPTIONS

From the Transcript:

Route must move out of BoR Fee Title Lands

In December 2022, after the OTA had already spent close to $20 million dollars designing unauthorized turnpike routes, the BoR DENIED the OTA application to cross federal land stating that

"Reclamation has determined that the Proposed Project is not compatible with use of fee title lands acquired for the authorized purposes of the Norman Project, and is therefore not compatible with the public and the United States' interests in the Norman Project."

This denial meant that the OTA had to move the route WEST out of the fee-title lands - and because they typically take section lines, that means moving the alignment west at least to between 60th and 72nd or even further to between 48th and 60th to avoid flowage easements.

However, it wasn’t until more than two years later, on March 4th, 2025, that the OTA announced it would shift the Southern Extension west of its original route because of the Bureau of Reclamation (BoR) denial to cross their lands.

In fact, Mr. Joe Echelle sent an email to “Stakeholders” that same day and said.

“It has been determined that the preliminary alignment has to be adjusted to comply with the Bureau of Reclamation land at Lake Thunderbird.”
“We will use a team of professionals to revisit the SET for opportunities to modify the alignment, likely to the west that does not cross the Bureau of Reclamation fee title land.” ~Joe Echelle

PIKE OFF OTA put out this map alerting an entirely new set of people to the possibility that the turnpikes could affect them. The organization used this map to generate a new set of home and property owners’ addresses in order to send them postcards and invite them to informational townhalls so they could learn more.

I think it’s pretty clear what the intent was…. NO MORE TURNPIKES… NOT ANYWHERE.

The OTA said they would move it west because they had already REFUSED to consider moving the route east of the Lake even though in the 90s, they had proposed that east route AND the City of Norman had refused any routes proposed west of the Lake.

HISTORY LESSON

Remember in the nineties, there was a study released that showed various routes from 48th all the way out and around the Lake.

LEGISLATURE, CITY of NORMAN and SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION DENIED OTA their route

But when the OTA tried to get permission from the Legislators to build it in 1999, they were denied! They tried to change the authorization statutes with language that would allow them to build it to Purcell.

In the 90s, the OTA were trying to modify the current Title 69, Section 1705e authorization #20, which is the authorization for the east-west outer loop. They left the HE Bailey Spur authorization (currently #28 and previously #29) alone.

You know.. the one they are using TWICE (ILLEGALLY) to define both the HE Bailey Spur AND the Southern Extension?

But we all know the Supreme Court got it wrong.

By the way, the Norman City Council also voted the east-Norman bypass down.

AND!!!!! Drum roll……. Neal McCaleb, then Secretary of Transportation, Director of ODOT and Director of OTA (all at the same time) eventually said they would not build it after the legislature didn’t give him permission.

Give the guy some credit. At least he followed the law and will of the people.

AND …. that was after he acknowledged that building it to the west of the lake was stupid (my words) and that east of the lake would make the most sense.

But wait!!! PIKE OFF OTA ALSO OPPOSED the movement of the turnpike to EAST OF THE LAKE in 2025 when Senator Standridge ran an OTA inspired bill to rewrite the authorization.

PIKE OFF OTA DOESN’T WANT THE TURNPIKES ANYWHERE.

Back to the Norman Transcript article……

Two points.

1. If they were “Still considering challenging the federal government over the route because it would require acquisition of fewer properties,” why didn’t they resubmit an application to the BoR and why did they send up a survey plane on Monday March 31, 2025, to survey WEST OF THE LAKE, between 24th and 84th?

2. The OTA has refused to publish the number of homes they will pave over on any of the new alignments, yet continue to say that the original route is preferred because it “would require acquisition of fewer properties.”

This is just one of many lies the OTA keeps recycling—hoping that if they repeat it enough, the public will eventually take it as truth.

It burns me that agencies like the OTA are allowed to print lies so blatantly without anyone trying to corroborate their story. It ESPECIALLY burns me when the fact check is easy… like this one;

What are the number of homes to be paved over on the originally proposed route versus any number of alternative routes along half section lines to the west AND east?

Real transportation planners do these sorts of studies.

Since the OTA refused to play ball, PIKE OFF OTA conducted a house count along several alternative routes in March 2022 and presented the findings to the OTA—directly refuting their claim about impacting the fewest homes.

But before we get to the alternative route house-counting research—the very data Mr. Echelle claims Randy used to “lobby” the OTA—ask yourself this:

How can OTA’s favorite propaganda line be “Eminent domain is the most serious thing we do” when they won’t even tell the public how many families they plan to force off their land?

If they truly took it seriously, they’d start with honesty. But instead, they hide the numbers and hope no one asks.

Watch Ms. Jessica Brown, OTA’s first failed spokesperson, tell the news outlets they don’t yet know the number of homes destroyed and then if you have time, watch the entire montage of news clips up through the end of 2022 (Ms. Jessica Brown at 0:30 and again at 17:45).

What makes this arrogant, unethical, and completely backwards from how a properly designed roadway project should work is this: acquiring right-of-way costs money. So if the OTA is setting a right-of-way budget, that means they’ve already estimated how many homes are in the path of these urban turnpikes. And they should have needed the right-of-way budget before they went to the Council for Bond Oversight (COBO) for permission to sell bonds.

And yet somehow, Mr. Joe Echelle claims with certainty that the original Southern Extension route would have taken fewer homes? How can he make that comparison if he doesn’t actually know how many homes will be taken—and hasn’t seriously evaluated other routes?

Either he’s guessing—or he’s lying.

They lied about the safety data.

They lied about the traffic justification and even Mr. Echelle is on RECORD from 2022 saying that these turnpikes will not alleviate traffic.

They lie about and ignore the environmental impacts of living near a highway.

If OTA were concerned about a reliever route, they would have routed the South Extension outside of the Thunderbird Watershed on a more natural path to connect to the Kickapoo.

Like what Secretary of Transportation, ODOT and OTA DIRECTOR Neal McCaleb and the ACOG/ODOT folks recommended in the 1990s.

Even though that “solution” STILL doesn’t make any sense.

AND don’t take this statement to think that moving the turnpike is ok.

I’m just making the argument, and I have been making the argument since March 2022, that the current alignment MAKES NO SENSE if the OTA is building the southern extension as a “reliever route.”

… because the REAL REASON for these turnpikes has nothing to do with transportation…. but has EVERYTHING to do with spurring suburban sprawl and economic development.

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT and SUBURBAN SPRAWL

The OTA has admitted within city and municipal “cooperation” resolutions that their turnpikes are for ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT…. which is technically ILLEGAL in the state of Oklahoma…. So…. there’s that.

They only say “ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT” five times in the City of Moore resolution… and then use the phrase “the EWC would be the LIFEBLOOD of commerce for the City of Moore.”

So these turnpikes are for ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND URBAN SPRAWL.

That’s why they don’t want to build it EAST of the Lake. They want it to stay WEST of the lake.

The OTA refuses to route the turnpike east of Lake Thunderbird because they know exactly what that would mean: the City of Norman could enforce watershed protections and block high-density development. And they can't stand that. Routing near 48th Avenue wouldn't work for them either—it doesn’t carve out enough space for their developer allies to exploit. So instead, they chose 80th—giving them an extra 2.5 miles of prime real estate east of 48th to shred zoning laws, poison our watershed, and unleash a flood of high-density sprawl.

This turnpike isn’t a transportation solution—it’s a land grab disguised in concrete.

And yes, I told the OTA board all of this—face to face—in March 2022. They knew. They just didn’t care.

Norman Transcript Article Continued…..

The map Mr. Echelle references in his smear piece (featured in the Transcript article) must have been one of the iterations that came out of the larger PIKE OFF OTA research effort started in 2022.

Since the OTA refused to tell the public how many homes their turnpike would destroy, a few citizen volunteers began meticulously counting houses along different alignments—because OTA never did a human impact study.

Our research made one thing clear: the route they chose cut through hundreds of homes, hugging the lake in a way that just happened to benefit developers. We based likely alternative route choices on OTA’s past behavior and historical data, but they were still just educated guesses—because OTA kept everything secret.

These alternative route studies weren’t created to “lobby” anyone. They were built to expose OTA’s lies—especially the claim that this route would impact the fewest homes or act as a meaningful reliever route.

The blue line shown in the map published by the Transcript is the 1990s OTA route—with far fewer homes in its path. They have consistently failed to acknowledge that the proposed route would take significantly more homes then their original route in the 1990s. Why? Because this has never been about minimizing harm. It’s been about maximizing sprawl and profit.

PIKE OFF OTA didn’t lobby to move the route. Randy didn’t lobby to move the route. The OTA was FORCED to move the route by the BoR.

And our research forced OTA to confront the truth: either they had already counted the homes and lied about it—or they never counted them at all and made the numbers up.

Norman Transcript Article Continued…..

If “Carter and several other PIKE OFF organizers [are] just trying to save their own homes,” then why are those same organizers still fighting—even after the Bureau of Reclamation denied OTA permission to cross their land and the Mayor of Norman said he was working to move the route west, between 48th and 60th?

Didn’t the BoR most likely save their homes? (I say most likely because I’m still not 100% certain the OTA won’t try and blow down 80th)

Let’s be clear: the BoR denied access, the OTA hasn’t appealed, and Mayor Heikkila has been pushing for a route west of 60th since mid-2022.

Still think this is about NIMBYism?

Watch this clip from July 14, 2022. Yes, it’s a recording of a TV screen—because somehow, the original footage disappeared from the internet. Strange, right?

Protecting Norman isn’t NIMBYism. It’s civic stewardship—rooted in facts, expertise, and a deep sense of responsibility to our land and our neighbors.

And let’s get something straight: the idea that PIKE OFF organizers are just trying to “save their own backyards” is a lazy, dishonest narrative. Many of our homes are outside the current path—but not one of us has stopped fighting.

Why?

Because we know what’s coming.

This turnpike won’t just bulldoze homes—it will bulldoze peace, silence, clean air, safe water, and any chance at a livable future in East Norman. Whether your house gets flattened or not, we will all be forced to live next to it, hear it, smell it, taste it, see it, and feel it—every single day until we die.

Watch this video I took along SH-74 on a Friday morning while trying to take a “peaceful” walk around Lake Hefner. Now imagine being trapped next to that sound forever—unable to move, unable to sleep—because you can’t afford to move for the pennies you were offered for your now damaged home and property.

This isn’t progress. It’s punishment. And we won’t stand for it.

What kind and how many miles of sound barriers will the OTA agree to build to save east Norman from this devastation? And will they be adequate to protect the adjacent citizens? Because there are ALOT of HOUSES AND PEOPLE within 1/4 mile of the proposed turnpike. What happens to all the people left behind?

Still think this is just about a road?

This was never just about a road.

It’s about power.

It’s about a state agency colluding with developers to bulldoze communities, ignore environmental safeguards, and silence anyone who dares to speak up.

PIKE OFF OTA didn’t bend the process—we exposed it.

We showed the public what OTA tried to hide:
Falsified traffic and safety justification studies.
No environmental impact studies.
No human impact studies.
Financial conflicts of interest.
Co-mingling of ODOT and OTA monies.
No permitting plan. No mitigation strategy through sensitive ecosystems.

And the list goes on.

So if you're angry, good. You should be. But don’t stop there.

Join us. Share this. Show up. Speak out. Because if they get away with this here—no watershed, no neighborhood, no property line in Oklahoma is safe.

Let’s be honest—this hit piece wasn’t written out of journalistic curiosity. It was damage control. A desperate attempt to divide our movement and discredit our voices. Because we’re finally being heard. Because the truth is hitting too close to the mark.

If we weren’t making an impact, they’d still be ignoring us.

We’re not backing down. We’re just getting started.

See you at Royal Bavaria. It’s time to celebrate how far we’ve come—and gear up for the fight ahead.