Cookeville Faces Hurdles with Broad Street Light Strand Proposal

Cookeville officials are weighing their options as a proposal to add light strands over Broad Street seems less likely.

City Manager Mike Davidson said adding light strands to the downtown area won’t be easy.

“We’ve looked at it – Tony [Peek] and I, Carl Haney, and the Electric Department – and there won’t be a simple way to do that,” Davidson said. “The challenge is trying to keep lights strung across the roadway plus the sidewalk. There’s just not a way to do it and attach it to the facades of the buildings… There’s a risk it would damage and pull off wherever the facades are.”

City officials visited Chattanooga recently and got the idea for Cookeville to look into adding decorative light strands to enhance the downtown area. Electric Department Director Tony Peek said the strands in Chatanooga were attached to the buildings’ steel structures.

“Being up on top of some of those buildings, there’s not structural steel,” Peek said. “It’s just brick and mortar, and we’re afraid it won’t hold [the strands]. So we started looking… at a self-supporting, self-standing metal frame, basically with metal poles or metal guide wire.”

Peek said the proposed metal frame idea would cost the city nearly $250,000, with each pole costing between $30,000 to $40,000.

“It will be as unsightly as it can be because, those poles to keep that wire that you’re tying everything to at 9.5 ft of sag with the 21,000 lbs. of tension,” Peek said, “those poles have to be somewhere between 24 and 27 inches in diameter at the base. It’ll just look horrible.”

Peek said despite the expensive and unsightly option, the city could simply add strands to the bases and limbs of the trees along the street.

“That would be fairly easy to do and relatively inexpensive,” Peek said. “A few years ago, when they put the Christmas lights in some of the trees, we had power put in a lot of the planters. So it’s just a matter of going to one of the electrical stores and getting some lighting.”

The city has not officially proposed an ordinance to add the lighting to the Broad Street and downtown area, nor has funding been set aside as of yet. The project has only been discussed during the City Council’s work sessions thus far.