$17.5M Loan From State Will Help Expand Cookeville’s Water Plant

TDEC announced Cookeville as the recipient of a $17.5 million loan Wednesday to help with water projects

Water Quality Control Department Director Ronnie Kelly calls state-revolving fund loan will help add 50 percent capacity to the city’s water treatment plant.

“We try to cashflow most projects and this one was a little bit bigger than we could cashflow so we decided to dip back into the SRF money,” Kelly said. “And the interest rates were so low, it was pretty hard to pass it up.”

Kelly said that they had applied for the loan about a year ago. He said that the 20-year loan has an interest rate of about 1.07 percent.

Kelly said that the next steps will be to have a preconstruction meeting with contractors. He said that this has been a need in the city that they’ve tried to prepare for.

“The plant’s at about 80 percent capacity,” Kelly said. “We started in about 2019 and hired an engineer to go ahead and start that process. It just takes a long time. to go through the design takes about a year, construction will take about two years, so we knew it was just time to start that project.”