HOCHATOWN – Eleven years ago Dian Jordan was in the fight of her life.
At that time Jordan, a teacher and resident of Hochatown, was battling a state agency – the Oklahoma Real Estate Commission. She and others who owned and operated cabin leasing companies in the Hochatown-Broken Bow area were fighting the commission over its attempt to shut down the area’s cabin leasing business.
The cabin owners and the leasing companies each received letters from the OREC, threatening legal action and big fines if the cabin leasing companies didn’t stop what they were doing and move their businesses under the supervision of a real estate broker. The OREC said the companies were violating state law. The agency said it was going to send its entire team of investigators to southeastern Oklahoma to examine the issue.
The cabin owners and management companies said they didn’t need a broker. The fight continued for more than year.
Finally, the issue was resolved. Cabin rentals continued and tourism exploded in the southeastern part of the state. Today, Jordan said, more than 30,000 people are in the small town of Hochatown on any given weekend.
“We have seen tremendous growth,” she said. “We’ve grown 20 percent every year for the past 20 years. For some it seems like Hochatown is an overnight sensation, but it’s not. We’ve been working on this for 20 years.”
At that point, Dian Jordan thought her fights were over. She thought she could relax and invest her time and her energy into the community.
She was wrong.
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In Hochatown they are all about tourists.
A small, unincorporated village about 10 miles north of Broken Bow along US 259, today Hochatown is ground zero for state tourism. People come from all over to explore the mountains, camp and fish for trout. Beavers Bend State Park – just a few miles away – draws more than a million visitors a year.
Originally settled by the Choctaws in 1820s, Hochatown was set aside for the tribe by the Treaty of Doak’s Stand. Later, after the federal government forced the Choctaws to give up their land and move to Indian Territory, more settlers came. Trade routes were established and by the early 1900s, timber and coal had transformed Hochatown and the area.
A post office was established there in 1894.
In the 1930s the economy tanked. Hochatown, like the rest of Oklahoma, struggled to survive. In 1963 the post office was closed.
Illegal whiskey saved the town.
Blessed with abundant corn and water, Hochatown’s moonshine-driven economy thrived until the early 1960s. In 1970 the Army Corps of Engineers built Broken Bow Lake. After that, area began to draw visitors. As people were attracted to the lake and the mountains, slowly bootlegging gave way to tourism.
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The people come for the scenery, the food, the experience, the ultra-modern cabins and the history. They also bring money to spend.
“We kind of do the recreation thing really well,” Jordan said. “Tourism is good for Oklahoma and introducing people to nature and to our culture is a wonderful job.”
Several weeks ago, stories touting Hochatown as a major real estate investment opportunity began appearing.
“Hochatown … is drawing Texas investors to its booming cabin rental business like honeybees to a magnolia blossom,” real estate columnist Richard Mize wrote in The Oklahoman.
The Hochatown-Broken Bow area, Mize wrote, was 17th on a list of the nation’s top markets for short-term rental investment.
Locals point to tourism, the water and the area’s rustic landscape as reasons for that growth.
“Hochatown is poised to double in size within four to five years,” Mitch McDaniel, a local business owner, said. “We have about 1,400 tracts for engineering that will be built over the next two to three years.”
McDaniel and his two brothers own and operate Hochatown Distilling, producing their own bourbon. They also manage approximately 130 cabins in the area.
The tourism footprint in McCurtain County is at least $200 million, McDaniel said. “It used to be a tenth of that. The entire county has experienced phenomenal growth in its tax base,” he said.
But even with its thriving tourism and cabin rental business, Hochatown has one big problem: it’s not incorporated.
“We’ve had this problem since the 1960s when we lost our ZIP code,” Dian Jordan said. “We’re not Broken Bow. Broken Bow is 10 miles away. We want to reclaim our heritage.”
Hochatown’s incorporation has been debated for years.
Some in the area want Hochatown to become a part of Broken Bow; others argue that Hochatown should become its own incorporated town. In the 1990s, the city of Broken Bow and Hochatown locked horns over an attempted annexation.
Broken Bow lost, but the fight continued.
Jordan, like most the residents of Hochatown, believes the small town should be incorporated. “If we incorporate, we can improve roads, establish police and fire departments and take better care of our residents,” she said.
Right now, she said, Hochatown is forced to rely on help from the county sheriff. The fire department is staffed by volunteers.
“When you have 30,000 people come into a town of 300 for the weekend, you need infrastructure and resources,” she said. “On some weekends it’s literally bumper-to-bumper traffic here.”
So, Jordan and others business owners moved to incorporate – and the trouble started again.
For the second time, Dian Jordan was in the fight of her life.
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Members of the McCurtain County commission and officials from the city of Broken Bow have, for several years, pushed back against the idea of Hochatown’s incorporation.
After the big annexation debate in the 1990s and the fight with the OREC in 2010, the residents of Hochatown organized and began building a tourism destination. By 2015, Hochatown merchants thought they had a way to prevent future annexation attempts. A law enacted by the Oklahoma Legislature made it more difficult for municipalities to annex property into their corporate city limits.
The measure said annexation of land by a connecting strip serving no municipal purpose other than to establish statutory contiguity or to capture territory within the area to be annexed, would “constitute an impermissible exercise of state-delegated authority by a municipality” and was prohibited.
The new law said municipalities with a population of 12,000 or fewer may annex only up to eight square miles in an area at a time and must obtain the written consent of the owners of at least 65 percent of the acres, and at least 25 percent of the population to be annexed.
But just days before the new law went into effect, the city of Broken Bow moved to annex the portion of Hochatown where most of its businesses were located, along the north entrance of US-259.
That effort, however, proved costly for Broken Bow.
Broken Bow’s city council voted in favor of annexation and enacted it via Ordinance No. 386. The annexation included nine tracts of land, all of which were zoned either agricultural or commercial and which lie along US-259.
The owners of those tracts, which constituted about 60 acres, gave their written consent to the plan.
However, because of the nature of the strip that ran along the highway for more than eight miles, the strip impacts or touches at least an additional 100 tracts of land.
The first group was comprised of four of those tracts, making up about 27 acres connected to Broken Bow via narrow strips of land annexed in 1998 for the purpose of installing a 24-inch-diameter water main from Broken Bow’s water treatment plant to the city of Broken Bow.
The second group was four other tracts, about six acres, along US-259 in the middle of the commercial area of Hochatown and connected to each other only by a series of narrow strips of land ranging from 15 to 25 feet wide.
The last parcel was 26.21 acres and contained a cellphone tower.
Group 2 was connected to the last parcel by a 25-foot connecting strip. All the parcels were tied to Broken Bow via a connecting strip to the 1998 strip annexation, court documents show. Those connecting strips were not annexed by consent.
After the annexation was announced, Jordan and other merchants in Hochatown pooled their money and hired an attorney to fight the process.
The case went to trial in February 2019.
Following a two-day hearing held in McCurtain County District Court, District Judge Jana Wallace issued a ruling against Broken Bow in July 2019. Wallace submitted 10 pages of findings of fact and 14 pages of conclusions of law.
During the trial court documents show that Broken Bow Mayor Jerry Smith admitted “the sole purpose of the annexation was to divert tax revenue from the annexed territory” to Broken Bow. Smith also said Broken Bow’s annexation effort was directly intended to thwart efforts to incorporate Hochatown, the plaintiffs wrote.
In her order overturning the annexation attempt, Judge Wallace wrote, “It appears Broken Bow has attempted to annex the property located in and around Hochatown due to the economic growth and prosperity of the area.” Wallace said the city realized after communications with the Oklahoma Tax Commission that Broken Bow could not get sales tax from the small strip annexation.
In her ruling Wallace also noted that after hearing rumors of incorporation in early 2015, Broken Bow began investigating the possibility of annexing the Hochatown area.
Broken Bow appealed the judge’s ruling.
However, in January 2021 the state Court of Civil Appeals upheld Wallace’s decision and authorized the 39 plaintiffs who filed suit in opposition to the annexation to collect appeal-related attorneys’ fees from Broken Bow.
Invoices provided under an Open Records Request show the city of Broken Bow paid the plaintiff’s attorneys – Tulsa lawyers D. Kenyon Williams Jr. and Bryan J. Nowlin – $269,192 in legal fees related to annexation issues between 1 February 2015 and 8 September 2021.
The amount the city paid to the plaintiffs’ attorneys under an out-of-court settlement announced on August 4, 2021, was not provided.
Though state courts stopped Broken Bow’s attempt to annex Hochatown, the pushback against making Hochatown an incorporated town continued.
“It about the money,” Jordan said. “The McCurtain County lodging tax generates about $4 million per year and the county commission gets 10 percent of that for their budget.”
Should Hochatown incorporate, it would be able to establish a sales tax that could reduce Broken Bow’s take. Jordan said the county commission and the city of Broken Bow don’t want to lose potential revenue.
“It’s ridiculous,” she said. “They don’t want to lose control. We have been told their major complaints are that we don’t know how to run a town. They’re wrong. We’re a community of very hard-working entrepreneurs. We built this town with our own money and resources with very little help from anyone.”
Jordan said city officials in Broken Bow continue to try to stall the incorporation effort. “Instead of fighting us, they should be talking to us on how we can work together,” she said.
Smith, the Broken Bow mayor, said both sides were “in the process of working things out” but declined to give details of what that meant.
“Our relationship is good. We share the same ZIP code,” Smith said. “But yes, there is some difference in how we view things.”
And though Smith acknowledged the ongoing debate between Hochatown and Broken Bow, he said he was “not necessarily” opposed to Hochatown’s incorporation.
“We are continuing (the) meetings,” he said.
If Hochatown could incorporate, Jordan said it could generate an estimated $800,000 per month in retail tax. “If we had a tax base, we could have full-time police and fire [departments] and have infrastructure for our residents and our businesses,” she said.
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At first, the incorporation process didn’t seem that bad, Jordan said. With only about 300 residents getting one-third of the registered voters to sign a petition wouldn’t be a challenge.
Supporters went door-to-door and soon had the number of signatures needed.
“We had enough signatures very quickly,” she said, “but were still going because we wanted to get everyone in town.”
With the notice of intent and a proposed map of the town filed, Hochatown residents have until March 23 to file their petition and signatures with the McCurtain County Board of Commissioners. State law requires the commission to hold a hearing on the issue within 30 days. After that, a resolution calling an election could be filed on April 29. An election, if authorized, would be held in late June.
“Then it’s up to the voters,” Jordan said.
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For Dian Jordan, the fight over Hochatown’s incorporation is worth the effort – even though it is exhausting.
“I think the story of Hochatown’s growth is a fabulous story about rural Oklahoma,” she said. “Of the town of 300, about 250 of them are self-employed. We are entrepreneurial. We know exactly what we are doing.”
Jordan said her main goal is to get an incorporation question on a June 28 ballot.
“We want to be on the ballot,” she said. “We hope the commission will approve the petition and we hope the city of Broken Bow won’t sue us. We’re trying to improve all of McCurtain County. That’s it.”
And as for her ongoing fight for the future Hochatown, Jordan said she’s ready for the struggle to be over.
“We should have help,” she said, “not obstacles, but help.”