Today’s meeting of the GRDA assets committee and
full board meeting had a more than loaded agenda. Commercial permitting
fees, residential dock permitting process and whether to allow habitable
structures were some of the more important agenda items. The assets
committee was made up of Chairman Jim Frasier and directors Chernicky and
Spears.
Directors Gay, Frost and Cantrell joined their
fellow directors for the full board meeting
The GRDA staff had reviewed the entire
non-commercial permitting process and had several recommended changes and
options for the committee. The full permitting package will be available
on the GRDA web site in a few days, but some of the high points are as
follows.
Docks being moved from one location to another will
have the option of applying for a waiver allowing them to keep their
existing flotation if it’s deemed in good condition. Under the old rules,
if a dock were moved the floatation had to be replaced with encapsulated
flotation.
No more new white Styrofoam on GRDA lakes. Under the
old rules, if a dock was in need of replacing as much as 1/3 of its foam
it could be replaced with the white foam. Under the new rules, any
replacement foam will have to be encapsulated. As in the past, all new
docks have to use encapsulated foam. There are now minimum requirements
for dock construction materials and dock builders will be required to tag
the docks with their name, manufactured date and contact numbers. The
required survey for new docks will be relaxed allowing new docks or
transfers of ownership to use existing surveys when they are available.
We’ll post the entire package on this site when GRDA makes them available.
The habitable structures issue was much more
complex. The staff presented a power point presentation on what Lake
Texoma had at Catfish Bay. They ranged from modest to $500,000.00.The
Brady Bunch spoke against the habitable structures citing FERC
preferences, black & gray water handling and how to insurance compliance
to any specified regulations. Your GLUE spokesman, that be me, supported
the approval of such structures as long as gray and black water were
adequately handled. I challenged the committee to continue the vision that
brought this great economic engine to northeastern Oklahoma.
The end result is the non commercial dock permitting
changes were approved while the commercial dock permitting fees were
tabled until next month along with a decision on the habitable structures.
Cheers
