Algood Awarding Funds For Sewer Cleaning And Testing

Algood City Council approved a $178,000 bid Tuesday night to inspect and clean the town’s sewer system.

City Manager Keith Morrison said the town originally budgeted around $75,000 for the work. He said they had planned to supplement it with an infrastructure planning grant. Morrison said he believes the city should use American Rescue Plan funding for such a project to fix problem areas, even without a grant.

“We need this to define what we need to do to fix the system to use that American Rescue Fund too,” Morrison said. “So this is kind of a building block too to use those funds.”

Morrison said that the work would consist of line cleaning, a camera inspection of the line, and a smoke test. The project includes some 80,000 linear feet of the system or about 75 and 90 percent of the sewer system. Morrison said they would begin with the main downtown area.

Public Works Director Victor Jones this is a project that has been put off for some time by the city.

“We’re having to pay for our sewer that goes to Cookeville,” Jones said. “So what we’re doing is we need to get in there and see where our big leaks our. Because when it does rain, it just floods the system. And years ago, it’s just been something they kind of wanted to set back. ‘We didn’t have the money, we didn’t have the money, we didn’t have the money.’ And now, Algood is doing a little better and it seems like this is the time to do it. We have the money, we need to do it, we need to fix our infrastructure.”

Jones said the work should take about two months.

Morrison said the most recent report shows an inflow of stormwater around 45 percent, which he said is a high rate comparatively. He said the city should not have to pay for water it is not treating.

In other business, city council also made a motion to move forward with a new Tennessee Consolidated Retirement Services plan for city employees. After some weighing three different plans, Vice-Mayor Bill Bilbrey made the motion to move forward to keep current employees paying zero percent of their payroll into their retirement, with all new hires following the plan’s integration to pay 2.5 percent of payroll into retirement.

Morrison said that this plan would go into effect January 1st.