Chickasha received a record city sales tax disbursement this month, federal budget cuts are affecting Grady County, and local educators and merchants are prepared for a new academic year.
The Oklahoma Tax Commission rebated $1.37 million in city sales taxes to Chickasha this month, a “significant increase over the same reporting period last year,” said Jim Cowan, director of the Chickasha Economic Development Council.
That distribution was 7.1% higher than the allocation 12 months ago, 7.8% greater than the sales tax take last month – and was “the highest ever in the history of Chickasha,” Cowan announced during an Aug. 12 CEDC meeting. Those sales tax receipts amounted to $85.43 per resident.
The taxes were collected on sales transacted June 16-30 and on estimated sales July 1-15, Cowan related. Local hotel/ motel tax collections “took a dip,” he said, but didn’t elaborate.
In a related matter, Cowan said “new revenue streams” will be discussed during the Sept. 9 CEDC meeting.
Ed Stanton, senior vice president of Chickasha’s First National Bank & Trust Co., said there is a lot of speculation that the prime interest rate will be trimmed by one-quarter to one-half of a percentage point within the next six months. Currently the prime rate is 7.5%.
Housing starts in the Oklahoma City Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Area, which encompasses Chickasha, “are up over the last six months,” Stanton added.
Stanton said a man he knows was offered $12,000 an acre for the mineral rights on his property, but turned it down. According to the state Office of Management and Enterprise Services, gross production taxes collected in Fiscal Year 2025 increased 13.9% over FY 2024.
“A lot of our customers have been moving forward with big projects,” said Ryan Posey, president of HSI Sensing and chairman of the CEDC.
“On our Genisco side, construction and expansion projects seem to be more related to interest rates,” Posey told Southwest Ledger. “There is some certainty or realization that the interest rate isn’t going to change much, so they decided to proceed with their projects.” Genisco is a subsidiary that manufactures electromagnetic interference filters.
“And on our HSI Sensing side, customers held off moving forward during the COVID pandemic,” he said. “But now they’ve decided they need to do new things, to rebound, and they’re planning new projects in Quarter 1 of 2026.”
City Councilman Clark Southard, an economic development specialist, reported that, “Since January, the dollar has dropped at a steady pace against the euro.”
The Trump administration has imposed tariffs and taken steps to weaken the dollar because of America’s persistent trade deficits. The strength of the U.S. dollar against other currencies has made American- produced goods more expensive overseas and foreign imports cheap in U.S. stores.
Federal budget cuts already being felt Grady County District 2 Commissioner Ruth Bingham said that because of recent rainfall, roads in her district sustained $250,000 in damage “that the federal government will not cover,” presumably because of reductions in the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Grady Memorial Hospital CEO Steve Pautler discussed federal cuts to Medicaid, which he said will be permanent. The cutbacks in Medicaid will have a major impact on states such as Oklahoma that have large populations of low-income families.
“More than 90% of our patients rely on Medicare and Medicaid,” Brian Whitfield, president and CEO of McCurtain Memorial Hospital in Idabel, told Southwest Ledger in July.
As of June, 1,046,756 Oklahomans – 53% of them children, 47% of them adults – were enrolled in SoonerCare, this state’s Medicaid program. That number constitutes approximately one-fourth of all state residents.
Congress and the president announced that as a partial offset, $50 billion, or $1 billion for each state, would be set aside for rural health care. However, “rural” was “ill-defined” in the legislation, Pautler said. Consequently, “It will depend on how each state sets up its distribution mechanism,” so that issue will be left for the states to decide, he later told the Ledger.
“My environment is shifting a lot,” Pautler said.
Chickasha schools welcome students Supt. Rick Croslin said the Chickasha public school district is acquiring a day care center that “closed a couple of months ago,” and they “hope to have it renovated and opened by January.”
President Kayla Hale said enrollments at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma for the fall semester are “significantly higher” than a year ago.
The preliminary fall ’25 headcount was 1,015. Students who are enrolled in at least 12 hours of instruction total 907, which is 37 more than the number of full-time equivalent students in the fall of 2024. Freshman enrollment has increased by 33: from 240 last year to 273 this year.
Those numbers will be adjusted “as we move toward the first day of classes on Aug. 25,” Hale said.
Nontraditional” education offerings “are growing, too,” she told the CEDC. Those classes are tailored to focus on changes in, say, banking or real estate. “We offer courses specifically to address those issues,” she said.
The start of school “is always good for business,” said Brad Wilkerson, owner of Chicken Express.
Progress reported on water plant, industrial park “The engineering is done” on the new water treatment plant, “we’ll go out for bids” soon, and construction will start early next year, Mayor Zach Grayson said. Also, the city bought a “hot patch” unit that will be installed on an old city trash truck for use in patching potholes and cracks in city streets, he said. Both of those items were reported in Southwest Ledger on July 29.
Grayson also mentioned that another tax increment finance district is planned in the airport industrial park. The city council approved that TIF, the city’s third, on June 2.
The TIF will be associated with businessman Chet Hitt’s plans for a data center powered by a natural-gas fired electricity generating plant co-located on 280 acres he bought near Chickasha Municipal Airport. The plan was unveiled during a ceremonial event attended by Gov. Kevin Stitt and held at the site June 5, as reported June 10 in Southwest Ledger.
The project will attract hundreds, if not thousands, of transient workers to Chickasha, Cowan told the CEDC. “We want to capture some of that transient workforce and entice them to stay here.”
The project will be a landmark joint venture between Citizen Capital and Lightfield Energy, a partnership led by Bond Payne and Billy Sorenson. Lightfield Energy will build the power plant and Citizen Capital will be the financing agent.
Energy Transfer, a Dallas- based pipeline firm, will connect the generation plant to at least one of two high-pressure natural-gas lines buried “fairly close to the airport land,” Hitt said.
Sorenson is the founder and chief executive officer of Lightfield Energy, a national leader in commercial and utility-scale power development and is based in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Payne is the founder and executive chairman of Citizen Capital, a global investment firm and merchant bank headquartered in Oklahoma City. In 2020-22 Payne served as chief of staff to Stitt, where he led the state’s strategy for economic development, infrastructure, and foreign investment in Oklahoma.
He also has familial connections with Chickasha. His great-grandfather, Stephen Homer Bond, was a dentist in Chickasha. His grandmother, Katheryne Bond Payne, lived in Chickasha before attending the University of Oklahoma and marrying Bond Payne’s grandfather, W.T. Payne, a pioneering oilman.