Organizers formally seek vote on incorporation for booming Hochatown
Hochatown will be a boom town. Hochatown will be a tourist town. When the Choctaw Nation is done with its latest casino and hotel, Hochatown will be a real resort town.
But first Hochatown has to become a town, not just an increasingly popular spot in the road in the mountain woods north of Broken Bow.
Oh, the booming cabin rental business, boosted mostly by builders and investors out of Dallas-Fort Worth, will go on whether or not Hochatown residents’ years-long effort at incorporation is successful. People are smitten by the place.
What’s at stake is how growth proceeds around Hochatown and Broken Bow Lake: with some order, or, as some describe the situation now, like it’s the Wild West?
A petition seeking an election on incorporation is now in Idabel, with the McCurtain County Board of Commissioners, which will decide. Organizers turned it in a week ago. Commissioners have 30 days to consider it, organizer Dian Jordan said.
Hochatown won’t be on the agenda for Monday’s meeting, spokesman Heather Carter said. Chris White, commissioner for District 1 which includes Hochatown, had no comment, she said.
The petition drive started Feb. 22, led by the Hochatown Historical Association. Signing parties and events had the required signatures collected in no time, really. They needed more than one-third of registered voters living in the proposed municipality.
That’s not that many. Hochatown’s population in the 2020 census was 242 — and that’s everybody, young and old, whether registered to vote or not.
“The goal, upon approval by commissioners, is to have the incorporation set for a vote of the people at the next eligible election, which is slated to be June of this year,” said Jordan, “unofficial mayor” of Hochatown.
It’s been a long time coming. The move to incorporate started in 2015.
Residents took much larger Broken Bow, population about 4,000, to court when the city in 2015 annexed a 10-mile strip of land north along U.S. 259, through the heart of Hochatown and its thriving eating-and-entertainment area. A judge voided the annexation.
“After 6 years of delay, volunteers hope the historic community can begin a process to implement municipal services and improve infrastructure that will ultimately benefit the entire county as Hochatown continues to rapidly grow,” Jordan said.
More than business, and the need for municipal services, is involved here.
The first Hochatown, a mile east, was a Choctaw settlement from its beginning in the 1880s, and descendants want to keep that distinctive identity. The
community was resettled in its current location by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to create Broken Bow Lake in the 1960s.
“Hochatown’s residents have maintained a strong desire to preserve the distinct and separate cultural identity of their community, which has existed since before statehood,” organizers’ legal counsel Liz George said. “The petition process is a step towards creation of a formal government, which can take charge of restoring and preserving Hochatown’s unique cultural and historical identity for future generations.”
Hochatown isn’t yet a town, despite its name. Once known as the “Moonshine Capital of Oklahoma,” it wants to shake off its “Wild West” reputation.
A couple of “Town Limits” signs might do it.