CHICKASHA – City Council members voted to alter the concept of the downtown park from an entertainment venue to a healthy-living “wellness hub.”
The change proposed by retired banker Pat Brooks required the Chickasha Municipal Authority to amend a 15-year lease agreement with the Chickasha Community Foundation, dated Nov. 1, 2021, “for the purpose of creating a park for the benefit of the citizens of Chickasha.”
The $1.4 million, privately financed Arts Plaza was constructed and dedicated a year later, including the renovated railroad freight building now used as a visitor center, Brooks recalled. The plaza also includes the 50-foot tall fiberglass recreation of the leg lamp made famous in the 1983 film “A Christmas Story.”
Through 2023 a citizen committee developed a plan for the second phase of the 6.7-acre downtown park. It was to include a miniature train, playground equipment, horse carriage stables, and other recreational/ cultural features. The budget was estimated at $10 million, Brooks said.
Last year the Community Foundation moved forward with a fundraising plan, “focusing primarily on donor prospects from outside the area but with historical and financial ties to Grady County and Chickasha,” Brooks related.
By the end of last year “it was clear that the fundraising plan and efforts were not successful,” he lamented.
In February of this year the CCF board decided to abandon the phase 2 master plan “and develop a more conservative park plan focused primarily on” children’s playground structures, a “legends” plaza, and a walking trail, said Brooks, president of the CCF board of directors.
Earlier this year the Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust announced a Legacy Grant funding opportunity; the application period opened April 15 and closes June 16. Applicants that clear the first stage advance to stage two on Sept. 8.
Certain applicants will be invited to make 20-minute presentations during a TSET special board meeting Oct. 27-28. The board will announce the award winners on Nov. 20, and those projects are expected to begin by Jan. 1, 2026.
The program is a “one-time, historic funding opportunity designed to address Oklahoma’s leading causes of death: cancer and cardiovascular disease,” TSET explained. With an investment of up to $150 million, TSET is funding “large-scale, transformational projects that will improve rural health, healthcare access, prevention and data-driven solutions” across the state.
The Legacy Grant program will address “opportunities to create significant and meaningful health impacts across Oklahoma, which can include healthy eating, physical activity, healthy lifestyle habits, tobacco cessation, and obesity, to name a few,” Brooks said.
CCF has engaged architects and is “diligently moving forward toward submission by the grant deadline” with an application entitled “Grady Moves: a Community Wellness Hub promoting healthy-living choices,” Brooks told the CMA.
A ‘wellness hub’ proposed in park The proposed new master plan features a large, multipurpose space to include a yearround farmers market on Saturday mornings, he said. It also could be used for pickleball, volleyball, futsal, basketball, indoor soccer, and other activities and events, he said. The building also would have a demonstration kitchen for nutrition/ cooking classes, space for exercise/wellness classes, medical diagnostic/ screening space, and storage for urban garden usage, he said.
The proposal also includes playground structures (focused on active vs. passive usage), perhaps an exercise station for older youths and adults, a community teaching garden, and a walking trail.
The master plan also has a “Legends Plaza” space, just as the original plan did. It would honor civil rights pioneer and Chickasha native Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, and Mary Frances Thompson Fisher, best known as Te Ata, a graduate of Chickasha’s Oklahoma College for Women (now the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma) who was an actress and a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation known for telling Native American stories.
Famed pilot Wiley Post also would be recognized in the plaza, Brooks said, because Post “lived and worked in Chickasha before he made his solo, around-the-world trip” in July 1933.
The CMA voted 8-1 to approve the amendment to the downtown park lease agreement. Councilman Charlie Burruss voted “no.”
“Listening to the talking points in favor of” the pivot on the downtown park and on the city’s acquisition of the local country club, “no combination of promised future amenities outweighs what many citizens know,” Burruss told Southwest Ledger. “Our entire community has not demonstrated the discipline nor ability to work together and take care of what we already have. So how will directing our attention away from basic city services to focus on ‘fun stuff’ ever help in catching up with years and years of deferred maintenance?”
TSET trust fund was created in 2000 by voters Oklahoma and 45 other states sued ‘Big Tobacco’ in 1998 for the damage and death their products inflicted on Americans.
As the case was scheduled to go to trial, Big Tobacco and the participating states reached a compromise known as the “Master Settlement Agreement.” As part of this settlement, Big Tobacco is required to make annual payments to participating states, and those will continue so long as cigarettes are sold nationally.
Oklahoma voters created TSET in 2000. Oklahoma is the only state that has a constitutionally protected trust fund for tobacco settlements. This ensures that a portion of the state’s settlement payments from Big Tobacco are directed into an independent endowment trust fund. The TSET corpus balance has climbed to $1.9 billion, Public Information Director Thomas Larson told the Ledger in April. Interest earnings from that corpus finance tobacco prevention, cancer research, and other health-related programs.