CHICKASHA — The Chickasha Industrial Authority and the Economic Development Council of Chickasha renewed their annual contract on June 29 for another year, but made a couple of substantive changes.
At the suggestion of CIA member Tim Elliott, the organization voted to expand its reach to include the city’s “economic impact zone.”
“Realistically, the entire county is our economic impact zone,” Chickasha City Manager Keith Johnson told Southwest Ledger. Chickasha is the seat of Grady County; the town has a Walmart Supercenter that attracts shoppers from a wide area, “and we’re going to grow,” he said.
When Cimarron Trailers expanded its operations east of town in 2021, the company employed 132 Oklahomans and announced plans to add 40 more. Nevertheless, “We couldn’t do anything to help them” because of the CIA’s rules in existence at that time, EDC President Jim Cowan recalled.
But when HSI Sensing, a family-owned company in Chickasha, announced plans to construct a 25,000 square-foot warehouse with office space, “We were able to offer them a business expansion grant for their infrastructure,” Cowan said.
The other significant change is that in the future, start-up grants for new businesses will be awarded by the CIA rather than by the EDC. Start-up grants of up to $5,000 are given to new companies as a means to stimulate businesses that create jobs and produce sales taxes.
At least in part because of recent closed-door executive sessions of the CIA and of the Chickasha City Council, the CIA spent quite a bit of time last Thursday discussing the question of whether it is a public or private entity.
Public or private? Answer still murky
Member Jim Allen asked whether the CIA is “a public body subject to the Open Meetings Act, or is it a private organization?”
“This argument is a gray area,” member Weston DeHart said.
The new agreement “does not clarify that question,” Johnson said. “Until litigation of that question, we don’t think we will have a definitive answer.”
In a 1987 opinion, the Oklahoma Attorney General’s office wrote that a “public body” does not include private organizations that contract to provide goods or services to the public on behalf of a governmental agency and receive payment from public funds merely as reimbursement for goods or services provided.
The six-page CIA/EDC contract stipulates that the CIA will pay the EDC a maximum $365,000 for services it performs during the next 12 months. The funds to finance those services “are to come solely from an 8% hotel/motel excise tax” that the City Council first authorized 26 years ago, in 1997.
A paragraph in the new agreement provides that the “books and records” of the EDC are available for public inspection and review by the CIA. However, exceptions are “lawful non-disclosure agreements or privacy protections with potential or active economic development opportunities” in which premature disclosure might jeopardize negotiations.
Responding to a question from Allen, Cowan said the EDC is a 501(c)6 nonprofit organization.
The CIA is a public trust authority “whose sole beneficiary is the City of Chickasha,” the CIA/EDC agreement states. Just last month the CIA approved a $30,000 contract for services with the local Chamber of Commerce and the Chickasha Festival of Light, which attracts throngs of visitors each year during the Christmas holiday.
“[I]t is in the best interest of the citizens” of Chickasha for the CIA to contract with the EDC to provide services that entail “planning, encouraging, fostering, promoting and developing programs to attract economic and industrial development” to Chickasha.
What does EDC do?
The EDC, through its various activities, “assists in providing jobs which bring in income within the corporate city limits” of Chickasha, the contract relates.
The EDC will not exercise policy functions pertaining to economic development; those will “remain with the City Council and the governing bodies of agencies served by the EDC…” Instead, the EDC “will be a service provider that performs consolidated economic development functions pursuant to contracts with policy-making bodies.”
Among its services, the EDC will:
• Promote Chickasha’s image in the job market.
• Promote cultural, commercial, industrial and economic events.
• Supply and analyze information, research and ideas intended to promote economic and industrial development “and to increase the number of jobs and employment;”
• Initiate original and follow-up contacts with firms, companies, associations or individuals who may be interested in locating businesses” or in increasing their job base in Chickasha.
• Develop statistical analysis “tracking job growth, patterns and trends” when requested by the CIA and/or the City Council.
• Maintain records and data on local demographics “or other factors that may bear upon economic or industrial development;”
• Assist in identifying, writing and obtaining grants for economic, commercial and industrial development purposes or projects.
Within 30 days, the EDC, “with input from the CIA,” will prepare a strategic plan “to include mutually agreed upon goals, objectives and performance measures.”
“We will continue to be aggressive in our trade area,” which has a population of “approximately 90,000,” Cowan told the Ledger.
Contract approved but one ‘no’ vote
The EDC will prepare and provide a budget to the CIA. Furthermore, the EDC pledges to maintain an “adequate accounting system” and will provide City Hall and the CIA “documented accountings of the distribution of the funds provided … for the activities and services governed” by the contract.
The EDC also will, at no cost to the city or the CIA, provide an annual audit and accounting of “the expenditures of funds covered” by the contract.
All persons working for the EDC in accordance with the contract will be considered employees of the EDC “and shall in no way be considered employees of the City or CIA,” and any liability “which might arise” will be “the sole liability of the EDC.”
The CIA endorsed the contract in a split vote. Jim Allen, Tim Elliott, Chairman/Mayor Chris Mosley, and Weston DeHart all voted “yes,” but City Councilman Brian Gerdes voted “no.”
A short time later, after little discussion, the EDC approved the contract in a unanimous vote by Kyle Abrahams, Ryan Posey, Tim Elliott, Troy Avant, Ronnie Bogle, John Feaver, Ed Stanton, Cale Walker, Andy Maher, and City Councilmember Kea Ginn.