Nation improving reservation roads through Tribal Transportation Program

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Louise Red Corn
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By

Louise Red Corn

A ribbon-cutting took place on Jan. 14 to mark the completion of improvements to City View Road near the Ponca City Osage Casino. Courtesy Photo/ON Communications

The Osage Nation’s nearly year-long project to rebuild City View Road near the Ponca City casino has been completed.

The $4.3 million construction project commenced in February of last year and was accomplished using federal funding through the Tribal Transportation Program, which funnels about $5 million a year to the Nation to spend on roads within Osage County.

That number may rise to about $6 million this year thanks to new legislation, said Justin Carr, the director of the Osage Nation Roads Department.

In addition to rebuilding City View Road, the Nation also partially rebuilt and overlaid Kelley Avenue.

“This project has had many hurdles to overcome over several years to reach completion,” said Carr. “It will provide drastically improved and safer traveling for decades.”

The Tribal Transportation Program has helped fund several projects, including $1.2 million for the Osage Nation Heritage Trails walking and biking trails in Pawhuska, about $15 million worth of improvements around the Tulsa Osage Casino location, all of the paving and sidewalks around the new arbors and community buildings in the three Osage villages, Chief Paul Pitts Road between Barnsdall and Wynona, and the new bridge in Pawhuska on LB May Drive, which had to be closed for more than a year due to a bridge failure.

Major future projects the Nation plans to support include $2.5 million to refurbish and widen the historic stone bridge over Bird Creek in Pawhuska in 2023, $4 million in improvements along 21st Street in Pawhuska this year.

In the early 2000s, the Nation only received about $1.5 million a year in federal road money, but that nearly quintupled when R.J. Walker, then the director of the tribal roads department (now a Congress member), invested in a massive inventory update and increased the amount of eligible roads from about 400 miles to over 2,000.

“We included all public roads in Osage County,” Walker said. “We said they were used to transport oil and gas to the marketplace and it flew through.

“It was a dramatic shift. It changed the Nation’s ability to build roads and bridges.”

Original Publish Date: 2022-01-19 00:00:00

Author

  • Louise Red Corn

    Title: Reporter

    Email: louise.redcorn@osagenation-nsn.gov

    Twitter: @louiseredcorn

    Languages: English, Italian, rusty but revivable Russian

    Louise Red Corn has been a news reporter for 34 years and a photographer for even longer. She grew up in Northern California, the youngest child of two lawyers, her father a Pearl Harbor survivor who later became a state judge and her mother a San Francisco native who taught law at the University of California at Davis.

    After graduating from the U.C. Berkley with a degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures with no small amount of coursework in Microbiology, she moved to Rome, Italy, where she worked as a photographer and wordsmith for the United Nation’s International Fund for Agricultural Development, specializing in the French-speaking countries of Africa.

    When the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl parked over Rome in 1986, she escaped to New York City to work for the international editions of Time Magazine. She left Time for Knight-Ridder newspapers in Biloxi, Miss., Detroit and Lexington, Ky., During nearly 20 years with Knight-Ridder, she was a stringer (freelancer) for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Parade Magazine.

    In 2004, she married Raymond Red Corn and moved to Oklahoma, where she worked for the Tulsa World before she bought the weekly newspaper in Barnsdall and turned a tired newspaper into the award-winning Bigheart Times, which she sold in 2018. She hired on at the Osage News in early 2022.

    Throughout her career she has won dozens of state, national and international journalism awards.

    Red Corn is comfortable reporting on nearly any topic, the more complex the better, but her first love is covering courts and legal issues. Her proudest accomplishment was helping to exonerate a Tennessee man facing the death penalty after he was wrongfully charged with capital murder in Kentucky, a state he had never visited.

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Louise Red Corn
https://osagenews.org

Title: Reporter

Email: louise.redcorn@osagenation-nsn.gov

Twitter: @louiseredcorn

Languages: English, Italian, rusty but revivable Russian

Louise Red Corn has been a news reporter for 34 years and a photographer for even longer. She grew up in Northern California, the youngest child of two lawyers, her father a Pearl Harbor survivor who later became a state judge and her mother a San Francisco native who taught law at the University of California at Davis.

After graduating from the U.C. Berkley with a degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures with no small amount of coursework in Microbiology, she moved to Rome, Italy, where she worked as a photographer and wordsmith for the United Nation’s International Fund for Agricultural Development, specializing in the French-speaking countries of Africa.

When the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl parked over Rome in 1986, she escaped to New York City to work for the international editions of Time Magazine. She left Time for Knight-Ridder newspapers in Biloxi, Miss., Detroit and Lexington, Ky., During nearly 20 years with Knight-Ridder, she was a stringer (freelancer) for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Parade Magazine.

In 2004, she married Raymond Red Corn and moved to Oklahoma, where she worked for the Tulsa World before she bought the weekly newspaper in Barnsdall and turned a tired newspaper into the award-winning Bigheart Times, which she sold in 2018. She hired on at the Osage News in early 2022.

Throughout her career she has won dozens of state, national and international journalism awards.

Red Corn is comfortable reporting on nearly any topic, the more complex the better, but her first love is covering courts and legal issues. Her proudest accomplishment was helping to exonerate a Tennessee man facing the death penalty after he was wrongfully charged with capital murder in Kentucky, a state he had never visited.

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