Who is the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority? - Part 3
Why is eminent domain still being used in Oklahoma to create new transportation alignments that are unnecessary, unwanted and wantonly destructive when the rest of the country is removing highways?
Now that you have a historical working knowledge of the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority (OTA) (Part 1 and Part 2), we need to talk about why they are still utilizing 1950s engineering ideals to create unnecessary new alignments - a hint… it has nothing to do with engineering.
Historical Impacts of City Planning and Road Building
The American era of highway building created sprawling freeways that cut wide paths through our cities. Too often, past transportation investments divided vibrant, diverse and functioning communities. As many urban freeways reach the end of their lifespans, their continuing purpose and worth is being questioned. The Highway to Boulevards and Connecting Communities movement helps communities to repair, rebuild and reknit by replacing aging highways that damage communities with city streets, housing and green space. These highway conversions increase access to jobs and services, and allow for the creation of neighborhood driven, well-functioning urban space. To date, more than thirty American Cities have either removed, covered or committed to transform urban highway corridors. This movement is being helped with $20 billion dollars allocated to reconnect communities in the recently passed $1.9 trillion infrastructure bill. These infrastructure funds have inspired fresh hope for undoing the ill effects of 1960s-era urban thoroughfares.
Until recently, “federal and state funds have historically gone to building highways, not removing them,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg acknowledges. The momentum to remove ill-conceived and destructive highways, however, is growing. The current big rethink around highways is an opportunity to challenge assumptions and find creative ways to repair the damage without sacrificing mobility. Around the country, cities are looking at ways to replace elevated freeways with boulevards, for example, and reduce the number of on and off ramps to increase land available for other uses while maintaining flow of traffic.
An example of this type of project is occurring in Albany, NY with the removal of the 6-lane I-787 from downtown Albany, creating more than 92 acres of residential and commercial development and open common space (Figure 10). The highway has been a controversial part of the city since it was built in the early 1970s and its existence cuts off the city from its Hudson River waterfront. One fiscal impact analysis estimated the removal of this highway would create 3,100 construction jobs and generate more than $300 million in sales and property tax revenue over two decades. The project would result in scrapping 73,500 tons of concrete while planting 6,500 trees.
Figure 10. Re-imagining, reclaiming and revitalizing Albany, NY waterfront with removing Interstate 787.
Oklahoma has its own highway removal request in Tulsa’s historic Greenwood District with SH244, an elevated highway that acts as a physical barrier between predominantly black north Tulsa and historic Greenwood Avenue and downtown to the south (Congress for New Urbanism 2022). In 1942, Greenwood was home to 242 Black-owned businesses spread over 35 square blocks. People in this area did not have to go anywhere else to find anything they needed or wanted. They had it all here. A dollar would turn over more than seven times before it left this area. This is the definition of building and maintaining community wealth.
But, when State Highway 244, the Crosstown Expressway was built in 1967, the number of businesses dropped to a handful constrained to the 100 block of Greenwood Ave. and the community was devastated and has never recovered. In addition, ring-roads are a terrible civil engineering design that need to be retired. If you want to create wealth, you make it easy to get downtown to a city’s center; not drive around it.
Now local advocates think removing a one-mile section of SH244 would revitalize Greenwood (Figure 11). The local government wants to use monies from the $1.9 trillion federal infrastructure plan focused on “reconnecting neighborhoods cut off by historic investments” to revitalize their neighborhood and rediscover the value of community and place.
Figure 11. Tulsa, Oklahoma SH 244, the “Crosstown Expressway” built in 1967 slated for removal.
While the rest of the United States are removing highways to revitalize downtown business and recreational spaces and reconnect communities, why is the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority still building new massive toll roads dividing neighborhoods and destroying water supplies?
Current Turnpike Fiasco
Prior to the December 2021 monthly OTA board meeting, certain public officials including county commissioners, engineering consultants and contractors were alerted to the possibility of an upcoming “large, long-range plan” with the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority and asked to attend a monthly meeting. No specifics were given about this long-range plan in any public meeting and there was nothing in the agenda of the OTA’s monthly meetings to alert the public of the location of any new project that may have been imminent. However, the meeting room was unusually packed with engineering design consultants and public officials as can be viewed in the recorded livestream of the meeting and it was noted in the agenda on page 5 that the “Secretary of Transportation, Tim Gatz, [was] to announce that the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority is seeking to develop its most robust long-range plan in history. This includes the gathering of details needed to determine viability of projects, conceptual designs, and funding options including the potential for bond funding.”
Mr. Gatz, a landscape architect, serves not only as the State of Oklahoma’s Secretary of Transportation, but as the Director of the Oklahoma Department of Transportation AND the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority; two agencies that have wildly different funding mechanisms and oversight requirements. As you ask yourself how many conflicts of interest exist when one person oversees all state transportation decisions and has access to billions of dollars in federal, state and bond funds, listen to Mr. Gatz make some purposely vague comments about a secretive long-range plan starting at 1:57 of the recording (Gatz 2021, https://video.ibm.com/recorded/131199756)
He mentions seven projects in his report to the OTA Board; five by name and location and two more vaguely. He mentions work on the Will Rogers, the Gilcrease, the Turner, the Kilpatrick and the Creek, which are existing, older turnpikes, and then additional access points along existing turnpikes in general. Then, the vagueness starts.
“We have to introduce new transportation access that is an east-west connector in south OKC. We have got to figure out how to go south from the Kilpatrick, get through south OKC and reconnect on the east to the Kickapoo. We have to solve that problem. I can’t talk in great detail about what exactly that looks like right now because we need to visit with the board before we begin to engage the professionals that are going to be necessary to really help us refine the alignment and do the work that’s going to be needed to get that started. It’s overdue. It is time for us to get about the business of figuring out how we are going to move traffic around the OKC metropolitan area on the south side. Last piece of that, we have to get a connection south across the South Canadian river, to reconnect to I35, somewhere south, probably around Purcell, we have got to make that connection. It is critically important that we begin to build the last components of that system. That is going to carry I35 traffic and catch it.”
Then, to the delight of the packed room full of contractors and engineers, he says,
“At the highest, highest level, we think the plan has a value around $5 billion in today’s dollars.”
Fast forward to January 2024, according to the OTA, this project is now projected to balloon to more than $7 billion.
On the same day as the December 2021 meeting, a Letter of Interest was posted for consultants interested in providing program management services for a long-range turnpike improvement and expansion program across the turnpike network.
Then in the January 25, 2022 meeting, consent docket agenda item 894 asks the board to approve Poe and Associates to serve as extensions of the OTA staff in providing Program Management Services for an undisclosed long-range turnpike improvement and expansion program under a project description SP-65. An interesting point about this Corridor Manager selection is that the President of Poe and Associates, Mr. David Streb, was a former Oklahoma Department of Transportation (ODOT) employee and was the lead engineer on the failed routes through Norman in the 1990’s. This professional engineer tried for almost a decade to push highways through Norman more than twenty years ago, failed, retired from ODOT in 2013 and went to work for Poe and Associates who made, as a company, over $75 million on the OTA’s significantly over budget Driving Forward Program and is slated to make over $275 million (in today’s dollars) in just management fees on the new ACCESS program.
During depositions in the Open Meetings Violation lawsuit, the Director of OTA, Mr. Joe Echelle, admitted that Poe and Associates gave the OTA the specific routes in October 2021 and open record requests revealed undated planning documents with alternative routes and costs purportedly compiled prior to October 2021. Therefore, if the Letter of Interest for the Corridor Manager job was posted on December 7, 2021, but Poe and Associates gave the OTA the designed routes in October 2021 (or before), was the request for proposals simply political theater? Is the tail wagging the dog?
Oklahoma’s Public Competitive Bidding Act conveniently excludes the OTA, so the public had no knowledge what the contract pertained to. On January 27, the LOI for Professional Design Services for a long-range turnpike improvement and expansion program across the turnpike network was posted and shortlisted consultants were selected February 2, 2022 (OTA 2022x). These consultants had been provided a RFP dated February 1 that stated in big red letters in the Scope of Work, “Project information below is confidential and is to be used solely for the purpose of developing your proposal,” and then specific location details were provided for each turnpike in the ACCESS program (Figure 12).
Figure 12. February 1 RFP sent to twelve selected engineering consultants with a proposal deadline receipt of February 14, 2022 and Award Consideration by February 22, 2022.
The February 22, 2022 meeting officially announced (OTA 2022) the ACCESS Program to the public, including the unveiling of the new alignment routes on their website (ACCESS 2022). This was when thousands of Oklahomans found out that their homes might be destroyed, and properties ravaged with new turnpike alignments (Figure 13).
Figure 13. Proposed ACCESS Routes through Oklahoma, Cleveland and McClain Counties in Central Oklahoma.
On the consent docket, agenda item 906 asks the board to approve twelve (12) firms to provide engineering services for the Program for Not to Exceed (NTE) $60 million. On the July 26th consent docket, Agenda Item 973, these twelve firms were awarded an additional $74.9 million in change orders for a total of $134.9 million for the designs of 5-mile sections of new alignments. The OTA historically has never understood the meaning of NTE, as their contracts for services often run 150-175% over budget; budget doesn’t matter when another credit card can be easily opened (revenue bond sales) to pay off existing debt. These engineering fees are much higher than those typically awarded for similar work performed by the Oklahoma Department of Transportation (ODOT), as was detailed in this great construction cost discrepancy article.
Curiously, the three new alignments the OTA chose to plan and reveal without any local municipality or citizen input, were not legislatively authorized. In fact, ODOT and OTA had tried to build similar routes to these in the mid-90s and were shut down by the citizens of Norman and the legislature in 1999 (Figure 14).
Figure 14. Citizens stop the eastern loop in 1999 through Norman.
Regardless of the illegality and municipality pushback, these three new alignment routes were divided up among the twelve contractors in 5-mile segments and the companies were told to turn in 60% complete designs by October 1, 2022; only seven months after the projects were announced. Seven months into a fifteen-year “long-range” project where officials kept repeating the narrative that these routes were at the “very end” of the ACCESS program. There was something that didn’t feel right about that timeline. The citizens were told that at the completion of the 60% design phase, they would be able to determine which properties, and how much of each property, would be subjected to eminent domain takings.
In addition to the routes not being authorized in statute, it was strange to see only one 1200-foot wide corridor option provided without any studies reporting on the impacts in the area or supporting the choice of routes.
Civil engineers don’t usually choose sites for large-scale, destructive infrastructure projects without first doing any environmental or impact assessments, but because of how the OTA was enabled by the legislature, and how they are funded through revenue bonds, the OTA is not required to do any environmental assessments or human impact studies prior to route selection. In fact, they don’t even have to do traffic justification or economic development studies; they can simply build in the “vicinity” of the locations in the authorization statute. The only time they are required to follow the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) guidelines is when their turnpike intersects with an Interstate Highway or federally owned lands, like the Lake Thunderbird watershed.
How has the OTA been allowed to do business like this in Oklahoma for 77 years?
*********************Want to learn more? Stay tuned for Part 4 of this introduction to the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority.
Are you interested in learning more and helping hold a rogue "state instrumentality” accountable to the people? In response to the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority’s legacy of unethical and downright illegal business practices, two Oklahoma non-profits were created to protect Oklahoma Citizens’ private property rights, educate the state on proper transportation planning policy and enlighten lawmakers and other elected officials about the poor business and financial practices that the OTA continues to engage in. PIKE OFF OTA (501 c4) and Oklahomans for Responsible Transportation, Foundation (501 c3) are leading the charge in legal injunctive avenues and legislative reform and they could use your help. They are trying to dismantle a corrupt Goliath within our state and are doing a great job. Be part of the solution!
www.pikeoffota.com
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