POTTSBORO, TX – Local game wardens, along with State and local officials celebrated the grand opening of a new facility on Lake Texoma Tuesday morning. It’s the first of its kind in the entire state of Texas and a milestone for both Grayson County and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

"Right now it's the envy of Texas, every game warden are casting their eyes with great envy on this facility," said Carter Smith, the Executive Director of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

This new station on Lake Texoma is a significant improvement from the FEMA trailers where game wardens previously worked.

"You have no idea unless you saw what we went through before,” said local Game Warden Dale Moses.

The new station is equipped with enough bunks to house 40 people, a laundry room, office, kitchen and meeting room so it’s ready for regional and district meetings and training. But it also serves its purpose of as a facility to for the tough, everyday work of keeping Lake Texoma safe.

"[It] gives us a good place, a platform to get some good rest after a long hard day on the lake on those holiday weekends,” said Moses.

The station also has a temporary holding cell and “intoxilizer” to process drunk boaters without ever having to leave the lake.

"We're probably set up as good as anywhere in the State to process the BWI's,” said Moses.

And our local station in Pottsboro is not only the best of its kind, but the best that the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has ever built.

"Hopefully this will be a model that we can emulate and replicate in other appropriate places around the state, but Grayson County and Lake Texoma is the first,” said Smith.

The cost of the facility was a little over three-quarters of a million dollars and funding came from the State. But Smith said getting that funding wouldn’t have been possible without some outside help.

"We are very fortunate to have a state representative in Representative Phillips and a state senator in Senator Estes who are very supportive of our department and our law enforcement personnel in particular and they helped to make this a reality,” he said.

So why did the Department choose Grayson County? Smith said one reason is the enormous amount of community support.

"Plain and simple, we can't do our job, whether it's the work of our game wardens, whether it's the work of our fisheries biologists, our wildlife biologists, or our state park here, without the strong support and advocacy and championship of the community. And we see that everywhere we turn in the community,” said Smith.

Game Wardens have been operating out of the new station since Memorial Day. Texas Parks and Wildlife has already used the facility for training and meetings as well.