News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Overton County officials are considering how the county could use potential funding through a community development block grant (CDBG).
County Executive Ben Danner says multiple options are on the table with grant funding reaching upwards of $315,000.
“There’s several things we can apply for – fire trucks, ambulances, and we found out today we could apply for paving roads,” Danner says. “Of course, it would be for small, confined areas. Really, we have about six ambulances in the county and half of them are over 100,000 miles. Instead of putting tax dollars towards buying new ambulances, we thought we could just apply for the CDBG grant, saving several hundred thousand dollars to buy new ambulances.”
Danner says applying for street paving projects would be beneficial for the county as its one of their top priorities.
“That’s what most of our calls are about are peoples’ roads,” Danner says. “The Highway Department, they got extra money through the Approve Act and they’ve been paving a lot of roads. But we’ve still got almost 200,000 miles of gravel roads in this county, and we’ve got a lot of chip roads that were chipped about 20 years ago that are in bad shape. That’s probably our biggest need is paving roads, but with this grant, we couldn’t but about three miles of road.”
Danner says fire departments have requested new trucks and equipment, making the decision on how to use the grant funding much more difficult for the county.
“We’ve talked about that too, and that was my idea to start with maybe doing new brush trucks for every departments and we’ve got 12 departments,” Danner says. “But when I talked to the state that does the grants, they talked like that wouldn’t score too high because a brush truck is only used at certain times of the year and wouldn’t be used all the time.”
Whatever doesn’t receive funding through the grant will be addressed by the county commission at a later time according to Danner.
Danner and a representative from the Upper Cumberland Development District discussed the county’s options for the grant during a public hearing Tuesday.
