Funding For Emergency Central At Fairgrounds

Putnam County Commissioners approved a plan Monday to use its disaster relief funding for an emergency central at the new Fairgrounds Expo Center.

County Mayor Randy Porter said the county and city of Cookeville are receiving a total of some $10.8 million in the wake of the 2020 tornado. Porter said the money has to be used for projects in the specific area impacted by the tornado.

“We would use it as a disaster recovery facility should we have something else,” Porter said. “You know, we’ve had the tornadoes, we’ve had two ice storms, you had COVID with all the testing and the vaccines and all those things. So we’d use it as disaster recovery, emergency shelter.”

The commission authorized Porter to turn in a proposal notifying the state how they want to use the funding. Porter said they hope to get the contracts finalized and receive the disaster relief funding by the end of December.

Porter said work on the facility should get started well before all of the paperwork is finished.

“We’ll have to work on design,” Porter said. “The one thing we’ve got to make sure of first is that the state approves the project as we submit it. Once we know it’s been approved, then we start working on the design of the facility.”

Porter said the state funding will not provide for the entire project so they will have to pull from their capital projects fund or use other unallocated money as the work goes on.

“It’d be a backup health facility for the health department,” Porter said. “It could be a backup hospital for the hospital. We’d do emergency generators. It’s already going to have the food facilities and the bathrooms in it, so it’d be a great facility not only for the expo center but to use it for all those other things.”

Porter said the county will share a little over $2 million with the city and keep the remaining $8.7 million to reflect the proportion of the county and city that were hit by the tornado.

“When Steve Pierce, our property assessor, did all the property assessment damage for Putnam County from that tornado, it come out at about eighty-one percent of the damage and about nineteen percent of the damage was inside the city of Cookeville,” Porter said. “So when working with the city, asking them would they be willing to split the money based on that percentage of damage and they were willing to do that.”