Cookeville City Council will vote Thursday to purchase land on Gould Drive as the new home of Fire Station Three.
Cookeville City Manager James Mills said the property is approximately 1.6 acres. Mills said the seller dropped the price because the city discovered a small piece of wetlands on the property. Cookeville Fire Chief Benton Young said the increased road frontage makes the property a great purchase.
“I think it will be a great location,” Young said. “We did our due diligence on it as far as checking it out, and it’s going to get them a little closer to Willow, closer to White, they’ve got access to three different roadways there that they can make access to the station, so.”
Mills said the site will provide plenty of space to house the station for at least the next 50 years. He said the city is hard at work looking for a property for the relocation and reconstruction of Fire Station Two as well. He said he hopes they can find a property in the next month and hire one architect to do both projects.
“It would save us quite a bit of money, and possibly even look at building two stations at the same time,” Mills said.
As for the Gould Drive property, Mills said the small piece of wetlands was discovered during a recent evaluation of the property. He said the original purchase price was $740,000 but dropped to $730,000 to compensate the city for the lost portion of the land.
“We’ve had people look at it for preliminary, people look at it for how it would lay out,” Young said. “It should be fine.”