News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Some residents in the Double Springs Utility District should be seeing their first water bill from the city of Cookeville this month.
Water and Sewer Director Ronnie Kelly said that the city bought water utility customers from Double Springs earlier this year. Kelly said the first bills should show a reduction.
“It’s going to depend on your usage and so forth,” Kelly said. “But I just took some numbers, the rate structure at Double Utility District, our rate structures, I did some general ideas. You’re in the 30 to 40 percent range reduction.”
Kelly said that the desire to purchase parts of the utility near Cookeville has been ongoing since some time in the 1990s when the city annexed territory out to the utility district’s service area. He said that the city thought that if someone lives in the boundary, they wanted to be the water provider. Kelly said that the city has a cheaper water rate and can provide water lines that are big enough for fire hydrants. He said that should give people a break on insurance rates if there were no fire hydrants around their homes.
Kelly said that the switch over was relatively smooth.
“There were a lot of customers that already had accounts with the city of Cookeville,” Kelly said. “They were either getting the electric service or the natural gas from the city so they were already in the system. And so those customers we just had to add that in the billing system and they’ll still get a city of Cookeville bill and now they’ll see the water on there and the other customers that did not have any utilities they had to come in and sign up and get that all set up, they’ll just receive a bill with their water usage on it.”
Kelly said that it’s been a long time coming. He said that the city is happy and that the Double Springs board and commissioners worked well with it. He said that they have plans now to upgrade the smaller lines in the future.
