News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Sparta will limit how often parades are permitted to close down Bockman Way.
Mayor Jerry Lowery said the new regulations allows only five parades per year to shut the main road down. Lowery said he advocated for the rule after reviewing how much money the city spends on overtime for the police and fire departments to manage the road closures.
“So we decided to designate five parades that we will shut the roads down for,” Lowery said. “And then the rest of them we’ve made designated routes. We’ve made two or three routes for the, a lot of them were just run races and stuff (so) that we don’t have to shut the main roads down.”
Aldermen approved an ordinance to change the city’s municipal code. Lowery said the decision was partially influenced by T-DOT as the state department does not like when the city closes off Bockman Way.
The five parades are the Christmas Parade, Martin Luther King Jr. Day Parade, Fourth of July Parade, Veterans Day Parade, and one slot for the school system to use as it chooses.
“It’s working well,” Lowery said. “We’ve already kind of initiated this to, like if for instance the baseball team came in and said ‘Hey, we’d like to have this, we’d like to run across town for this,’ we would say well, we’re not shutting down the road but here’s a route. And we’ve measured it out with GPS and all this, here’s a route right here that you don’t have to shut down a road with.”
Lowery said the city historically allowed the main road to be closed for many different kinds of events. Lowery said the regulation will allow the city’s labor expenses to be much more consistent instead of changing with the number of parade requests.
“That was just something (where) I said let’s clean this up right now and that way we don’t have to keep doing this over and over and over and looking at it,” Lowery said.
Lowery said the school system usually uses its parade for a homecoming parade but it is ultimately up to the district how to handle it.
