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PM NewsBrief: May 30, 2024

This is the KGOU PM NewsBrief for May 30, 2024.

OK County jail update

Oklahoma County Commissioners met for the first time Wednesday following the OKC Council’s rejection of their rezoning request to build a new county jail near East Grand Blvd. Commissioners expressed frustration to local media and are looking to get answers from a county attorney on if it’s still possible to build the detention center at the proposed site. But time is running out and federal funding is at risk. Commissioners are set to meet again on Monday.

Historical lands returned

Late last week the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes reacquired historical lands in Kansas in a culturally significant move.

A giant snake is slithering in the tall grasses of Rice County, Kansas - 75 miles northwest of Wichita. The limestone serpent stretches one-hundred-sixty feet inside a two-hundred-thirty-acre plot that formerly belonged to and was built by the Wichita people. Known as the Serpent Site, it’s believed to mark a trading intersection on ancestral Wichita lands.

Now, once more, it belongs to the Wichita tribe who purchased it in an auction. President Terri Parton of the Wichita Tribe says reclaiming the land is monumental.

The tribe plans on preserving the serpent effigy as a historical landmark and is discussing using the adjacent lands to potentially open an educational center or start a sovereign farm or bison herd.

Big oil deal

ConocoPhillips is buying Marathon Oil in what Forbes calls one of the 10 largest corporate deals of the year.

Phillips Petroleum Company was founded in Bartlesville in 1917. It was Oklahoma’s largest oil company before it merged with Ponca City-based Conoco in 2002. The newly-minted ConocoPhillips relocated to Houston that same year, and in 2022, it got rid of its Oklahoma oil fields.

But now ConocoPhillips is buying Marathon Oil, another fossil fuels company, for $23 billion and reforging some of those Oklahoma connections. The deal means some of ConocoPhillips’s petroleum production is coming home to Oklahoma.

Regulatory filings show about one-eighth of Marathon’s overall oil and natural gas sales came from Oklahoma last year. The company has been drilling in the Sooner state for more than a century.
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