Baxter Prepping For Projects Leading Up To Portobello

The town of Baxter will need to complete several projects leading up to construction of the Portobello facility.

Mayor John Martin said town officials will meet Tuesday to begin discussing some of those projects.

“We are going to do a road improvement and we are working now on the pump station,” Martin said. “We want to get that started and we’ve got a lot of developers that’s already putting sewer in on the South side, but we will be running sewer that will be attached to that from Portobello.”

The board of mayor and aldermen approved a motion last week, allowing Baxter to begin the process for completing the pump station.

Mayor Martin said the previous administration had a vision of extending sewer services to the area around the old Tennessee Motor Speedway site.

“They’ve got the wet well already there and the only thing we’ve got to do is get the pumps and everything hooked up to it,” Martin said. “They (previous administration) had the vision of what’s going to happen to Baxter and if they hadn’t, it would not have gone as smoothly as we hope it’s getting ready to.”

Aldermen also voted to enter into an agreement with TDOT for assistance in constructing a new industrial access highway for the Portobello project.

Martin said an ongoing TDOT corridor study will also be involved with the future project.

“We’ve shared all of our needs as far as ramp improvements and maybe another exit coming off of the interstate,” Martin said. “We’ve talked about turning radius at the bottom of the ramps going to Baxter Road. There’s a lot of things that need to be improved and we are talking about that.”

Portobello America is a ceramic tile manufacturer that will be investing $150 million to open a U.S. headquarters at the old Tennessee Motor Speedway site.

Portobello is expected to have their new facility built by 2021.