Oklahoma Marinas | number one choice
Well we’re continuing our series on. Our Oklahoma marina and our Oklahoma Marino’s projects those being Keystone Harbor on keep on beautiful like Keystone. And our cross timbers Harbor Marina project. And. Amazingly beautiful sky too. Like I say amazingly beautiful sky. Like has one of the best water quality ratings in Oklahoma the Oklahoma Water Resource Board Audette via RV rates all of the lakes in Oklahoma and we have. Many many likes. I don’t even want to hazard a guess as to how many Likes and I’m not talking ponds I’m talking likes obviously that the bigger ones are you fall in Keystone and Oola certainly Texas is one of the fifth largest in the U.S.. Grand is flood control by the Corps of Engineers. Oklahoma Marinas. But Gerardia manages that like we have. Oklahoma Marinas. Gorgeous huge lakes 10 killer beautiful light wonderful water quality well. Turns out that sky look like since it’s a newer like it’s only now 30 years old is still as happens with likes settling out and yet it maintains a good to excellent rating on water quality. And because of the dramatic Osage hills around it you can see it from our Oklahoma marina at Keystone Harbor excuse me at cross timbers Harbor. Just Some days it looks honestly when you’re up a hundred feet above it on one of our hillsides almost like Lake Tahoe. Amazing beauty. Always. Fascinates me so many people don’t understand or appreciate the beauty of Oklahoma. Certainly we have and it’s got its own natural beauty but we have sand dunes and a part of our state. We have a lot of flat topography as you go central to west. That if you get down into the southern parts of Oklahoma and up in the northeast corner the foothills of the Ozarks you’ll see as beautiful a topography as you’ll find anywhere in the United States. So it’s been a real joy to be in Oklahoma Marina developer and have those two lakes as a canvas to put things on that are recreational beneficial. We were able to put things on these alikes because they when the corps has a authorization to build the like there are areas that are designed for high intensity and high intensity includes marinas restaurants cottages as long as they’re all not private for public use or have public availability. They can do all these things so on our large lease at our Oklahoma marina at Sky. We have about 10 miles of shoreline that we can develop for intense use. We still have to go back each time to the Corps of Engineers submit our plans even though it’s within our master plan. They still have to sign off on each and every building each and every trail each and every parking lot. But that’s usually a fairly routine assignment for them because already we’ve done all the environmental and cultural review for those purposes. So. Saying that Keystone at Keystone. Our Oklahoma marina there we have a much smaller footprint.Oklahoma Marinas. I would guess we probably have maybe a total of 50 acres between the land and the water. Still a good sized site but everything is is more compressed in just one development whereas because of the size of the lease it sky two things are stretched out and it gives us such room that we’ve been able to provide the four and a half miles of trails in between our Oklahoma Marina Cross Timbers Harbor. And our new cross timbers village which we’ll be talking about as well as over on the other side of the dam where we have the Overlook project that is now the Clint Hill gathering place for heroes that we’ve talked about. So very interesting how all of this. Lays out and all the moving parts there are two new development and as I said in our previous podcast where one of the few that continued to develop even though demand continues to go up we will continue to be one of the few major new developers on any Corps of Engineers like in Oklahoma. Kind of amazing. Based on what the demand is. But again our lakes generally were built in the 50s and 60s some even back in the 40s. We have had and had very little new development because the core has allowed old development to be. Continue to operate. Again there’s a lot of discussion about whether or not. That. Annual inspection should become more intense. The Corps actually has two inspections each year one is ergo And that’s an environmental inspection where they come to your site. And they make sure that you don’t have any hazardous materials on site or any old decaying batteries or you know that the site looks clean and efficient. They want things down to the marking of if you have water in a bottle. They want to have that marked water not just a clear container that they don’t know what the content is here to mark everything. I don’t remember the name of it but there’s a governmental requirement on that that if you’re a public use facility restaurant and all the rest all of your products are kept on site need to be clearly labeled. And so we obviously honor that. It’s not unusual for the court to come in and inspect it. Either one of our Oklahoma Marina projects we we have an excellent environmental record because we worked hard at it at both of our locations. Again so much so that we were nominated in 2009 for the green award. We were very flattered by that nomination and so environmental stewardship is very important to us as I mentioned in an earlier podcast. We’re the only Oklahoma Marina that not only has met but we’ve exceeded by means of a clean marina by means of our lead standard type of manufactured cottages by means of our analysis and. Dating of the ancient trees because we don’t want to lose a tree that we didn’t know was two or much less three hundred years old. So all the trees have been surveyed on our entire sky take sight side of one of our Oklahoma Marina projects and those trees are precious. Obviously you don’t want to be taken down a tree of 250 to 300 years of age out of ignorance. And so all those 1000 candidate trees have been identified so that we can’t ever take one down without knowing that that that’s an ancient tree. We have not had to take down an ancient tree yet. In our development we develop around the ancient trees because we cherish them as much as the governmental entities that are that are there to try and protect them. So. Oklahoma Marinas. That’s a little bit more again about our kind of our development philosophy and our development history. We’re very pleased that we received Excellence Awards. The assistant secretary of the army J.P. Woodley visited us back in 2007 2008 and very unusual he was the top civilian leader as the assistant secretary of the army under President George W. Bush at that time. And so he he came and recognized this is the finest national example of a public private partnership and awarded this with his medal of excellence which we were very flattered to receive and which we keep on display at our first Oklahoma Marina. That being the. Cross Timbers development with cross timbers harbor. So he toured the trails.Oklahoma Marinas. I remember that he was in my car as we were about to make a turn from an ancillary road onto the major road. And he was a fairly quiet fellow and all of a sudden he said oh my gosh. And of course I threw on the brakes because I thought I was about to pull in front of a semi and what he saw was. Probably seven or eight deer running across the road so. Very natural very unusual to have that kind of. Environmental beauty so close to downtown Tulsa. The thing with both the sky too and to a lesser degree with Keystone harbor or other Oklahoma Marina is just how. Much you feel you’re at a destination yet at the same time you’re you’re actually still right there on the the edge of the city limits that you feel like you’re a million miles from everywhere. And that’s what you want to feel. Americans more and more are looking for proximity. They call it stay cations where they can get that kind of environment and feeling. And that’s what we have at our two Oklahoma Marina projects is a very destination feeling while being metropolitan in proximity. Oklahoma Marinas