$1.75M In Tornado Relief Checks Issued

Some $1.75 million in tornado relief checks will be signed and mailed Friday morning as the Tornado Relief Fund helps its first storm victims.

Citizens and businesses across the nation donated more than $2 million to the Cookeville-Putnam County Tornado Relief Fund in the weeks after the March 3 tornado.

“The committee that we set up has been working on this for the last few weeks, they’ve done an amazing job,” Putnam County Mayor Randy Porter said. “We’ve got about 442 families, I think, that have turned in the assessment forms and so we’re doing our disbursement checks.”

Other victims are working through issues with their applications and further disbursements are still to come, Porter said. A citizen-focused committee sorted the applications and made recommendations to Porter and Cookeville Mayor Ricky Shelton. Neither mayor, nor any government official had any say in the decisions. Porter called their work “amazing.”

“We picked a group of folks that community leaders, they put hours and hours and hours into this,” Porter said. “And the one thing that we want to do is make it as fair as possible. They used an assessment form. It was all based off of points of how they answered those questions. They didn’t know who the names of the people were. So it was all done mathematically through the numbers. And they have done an amazing job. And I’m so thankful to them and appreciative for what they’ve done.”

Even two months after the tornado, Porter said donations continue to the relief fund.

“I had a company that brought me a $25,000 check (Wednesday) morning,” Porter said. “Last week alone, we had about $133,000 come in.”

The county processed the checks through an agreement with the City of Cookeville. Donations will be accepted for several more weeks through the Bank Of Putnam County. Porter said they hope to finish distributing all the money, including the donations still being received, in the next few weeks.

“You just want to give everything and that’s the goal of this fund, is a hundred percent of it goes back out to those survivors,” Porter said.