A new federal bill which would create Georgia’s first National Park at the Ocmulgee Mounds site in Macon-Bibb County took a first step toward passage through a congressional committee Wednesday.
The National Park Service already oversees the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park. House Bill 9416 would remove one word — “historical” — from the name.
It would not expand the acreage of the park as an older, failed bill would have.
The National Park Service had been on the record during the debate over the older bill as saying it didn’t want to be responsible for a swath of land extending south on the Ocmulgee River, much of which is already overseen by U.S. Fish and Wildlife or Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources. Meanwhile, local advocates for the expanded park had been acquiring private land in that corridor.
The new vision for the park in the current bill would make it the second-smallest National Park after Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis.
Gary Wheat, CEO of tourism marketer Visit Macon, told legislators in the House Natural Resources Committee the name change would still transform the east side of Macon.
“For Middle Georgia, those numbers translate into careers, expanded tax revenue, stronger entrepreneurship and a higher quality of life,” Wheat said.
Wheat touted studies projecting 3,000 new jobs as a result of some 1.3 million visitors to the park every year for an estimated $206 million in economic activity every year which he said would ultimately help roll back property taxes for residents.
Wheat also reminded legislators that the economic development rides alongside renewed efforts in recent years to welcome citizens of the Muscogee Nation in Oklahoma back to their traditional homelands.
“And obviously, from a cultural perspective, the Muscogee Creek Nation, that was their ancestral home that they were forcibly removed from,” Wheat said. “For us, that’s the significance of that and the relationship with the Muscogee Creek Nation.”
The older bill had provisions spelling out co-management of a new park between the National Park Service and the Muscogee Nation. That provision is missing from the new bill.
But another provision remains which would place culturally important land that the Muscogee Nation owns nearby inside the nation’s sovereign borders.
The bill states plainly that land would be off-limits to casino development.