GLUE Member’s Report 9-15-09

It’s time for the politicians to step up to the plate

Yesterday was the deadline for filing comments on the recommended changes by the FERC staff related to the Shoreline Management Plan submitted by GRDA.  The GRDA response was a good one and I have to apologize for previous comments I made in an anticipated “Roll Over” by the authority staff. The response objects strongly to the two primary points which GLUE found most objectionable….reclassification of areas around Grove and Monkey Island to sensitive, which would prohibit any development in those areas and the re-zoning of the multiple purpose areas as defined in the plan. There were other minor changes suggested in the GRDA response as related to water quality monitoring when they pointed out the Oklahoma Water Resources Board and DEQ should be included in these activities in addition to the resource agencies named. In summary, there were 14 recommended changes and GRDA pretty much accepted eleven of them.

In most negotiation, conceding eleven out of fourteen points would be a deal maker, but will it be in this case? I’ll paste the 23 page GRDA response below for your review. If you review the document, it becomes very obvious how much weight the resource agencies have at FERC. In an effort to neutralize some of this power, GLUE filed a “Motion to Intervene” with FERC yesterday. We are using the Duncan-Allen Law Firm, with offices in Kansas City and Washington, who has a proven record interacting with federal agencies. The attorney handling the action for us is Gregg Ottinger, who is located in Kansas City. He was recommended to us by former GRDA assistant general manager Bob Sullivan.

A Motion to Intervene makes us an official party to the proceeding. It grants us equal status with the resource agencies and any other interveners. We will be able to seek out clarification, methodology and reasoning behind some or all of these recommendations. We could potentially take it as far as our funding would allow. The important thing is that we’ve recruited several other lake organizations to join in our efforts. That list includes GLUE, the Grand Lake Association, the Grand Lake Area Chamber of Commerce, the Grove Area Chamber of Commerce, the City of Grove, the Oklahoma Marina Association, the Grand Lake Marina Association, the Grand Lake Boaters Association, the Chronicle of Grand Lake Newspaper and the Grand Lake Business Journal. They will be made fully aware of the wide spread interest in the outcome of this negotiation.

Throughout this process, we have been keeping Representative Dan Boren and both Senators Inhofe and Coburn updated on these proceedings. In my opinion, the time has come to solicit the support of our elected officials in supporting what’s best for the future of Grand Lake. I would like to ask each of you to encourage our elected representatives to get involved in bringing this long, drawn out process to a reasonable conclusion. We can’t just hope for their support. We need letters, e-mails and phone calls. Grand Lakers are an affluent group as a whole and many of your have a history of significant political contributions….Isn’t it time for a little pay back?

As more information becomes available, I’ll get it out.

Cheers

I can’t seem to get this Adobe Reader document converted to Word in order to paste below so I’ve included the original PDF instead. Your computer will need to have Adobe Reader in order to open the file.

GRDA Response to FERC - Original PDF (6Mb-please be patient!)