StateImpact on OETA: Tourism Budget Cuts and Oklahoma’s State Parks

• Logan Layden
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  Logan Layden is a reporter and managing editor for StateImpact Oklahoma. He is a native of McAlester, Oklahoma and graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 2009. Logan spent three years as a state capitol reporter and local host of All Things Considered for NPR member station KGOU in Norman and six years as a reporter with StateImpact from 2011 to 2017. Most recently, he was news director for McAlester Radio before returning to public radio in 2020.

Since 2011, one of the ways the Oklahoma Department of Tourism and Recreation has dealt with budget cuts has been to close state parks or transfer them to new managers, like tribal governments or nearby towns.

With the agency taking a cut of more than $16 million dollars going into the new fiscal year, the big question is whether more parks will have to go. 

StateImpact’s Logan Layden has been following the offloading of state parks for four years, and talked with OETA’s Dick Pryor on Oklahoma News Report about how much worse the cuts are than they appear on paper.