Below is the text of today's Journal Record column by Scott Carter. It deals with the apparently heavy-handed treatment of some rental cabin outfits by the Oklahoma Real Estate Commission. I went to the OREC Web site to find out who the commissioners are, but no luck.

Who's on the OREC board, why are they sending their entire investigations unit to Broken Bow? With furloughs and cutbacks in government agencies forcing everyone to do more with less, is this what we want the OREC focusing on?


Fourth reading: Common sense takes a holiday

By M. Scott Carter
The Journal Record
Posted: 10:39 PM Thursday, February 11, 2010

Broken Bow is about a four-hour drive from Oklahoma City. It’s scenic, tree-lined and beautiful.

Tourism is huge there.

The state lodge is always booked. Around the area, hundreds of exclusive cabins are rented by travelers for a few days or the occasional weekend.

And, until last year, the tourism thing was working well. In fact, in 2008, tourism in southeastern Oklahoma generated more than $9 million in revenue and several hundred thousand dollars in taxes.

Economists would spin that as having a $63 million impact on the area.

Enter the Oklahoma Real Estate Commission.

Last summer, the small mom-and-pop companies that rent Broken Bow’s private cabins started getting letters from the OREC saying they were in violation of state law. The letters were terse and threatened the rental companies with economic sanctions if they didn’t contact the OREC.

The cabin owners didn’t understand. They paid their sales tax to the state Tax Commission. They were regulated by the state Department of Health and they had been honored, earlier, by the Governor’s Conference on Tourism.

Still, they got the letters, so they contacted the OREC and waited.

A short while later, this newspaper learned of the issue and published the first of several stories about the fight. Since then, the story has exploded.

Cabin rental companies contacted an attorney and, at every step in the process, sought to understand what was going on, why it was happening and how it could be fixed. But the OREC hasn’t offered much help.

State lawmakers waded into the problem, at first requesting the state attorney general’s opinion, then developing legislation that would address the issue.

However, OREC staffers didn’t like the first version of the bill, saying it was “too broad,” and began negotiating with lawmakers and representatives of the state Department of Tourism for different language.

Everyone involved seemed hopeful the issue would be resolved quickly.

Those negotiations have continued. And, if you corner members of the Real Estate Commission, a couple of them will even admit the cabin rental agencies are in a gray area in state law – the square peg in the round hole thing.

Fast forward to this week.

At Wednesday’s OREC meeting, the board and staff took a state lawmaker, the executive director of the Department of Tourism and a Broken Bow business leader through a two-hour “here’s what we think” meeting, acknowledging that the law needs to be changed and that they recognized the cabin rental agencies were trapped between conflicting parts of state law.

Then they dropped a bomb.

As the presentation was ending, the OREC was asked what the cabin rental agencies should do about those letters and how the companies should proceed, in light of the fact everyone was working together – allegedly – to change the existing law.

The OREC said they would continue with their investigation.

In fact, OREC Executive Director Anne Woody said the agency would send its entire investigative team to Broken Bow to investigate the problem.

“I’m going to have all three investigators do down there and try to get it accomplished in a day,” Woody said. Keep in mind the OREC sent those letters last July – eight months ago – but just now decided to formally investigate the issue.

All while they were negotiating to change the law?

They should be ashamed.

With that statement, the OREC board and its staff pretty much said they are not negotiating in good faith. Instead of suspending their investigation until the issue was resolved, they held the hammer of state law over the head of the cabin rental agencies. Honestly, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that if you have the threat of losing your business, you don’t have an even platform to negotiate from.

For two decades, a hard-working, spirited group of people have built an industry from the ground up in southeastern Oklahoma. They’ve invested time, money and effort. Then last year, they suddenly were informed they were breaking the law.

Sorry, I don’t see it that way.

What I see is a state agency failing to use logic and common sense on an issue that could have a huge economic and legal impact on the rest of Oklahoma.

Then, as members of the OERC board joked and laughed belittled those three individuals who sought guidance and solutions, I sat there in the audience and witnessed a classic example of why people don’t trust their government.