Cookeville Gets $5.5M Loan To Finish Plant Expansion

The city of Cookeville has received a TDEC loan of some $5.5 million to finish out the water treatment plant expansion project.

Water Quality Control Director Barry Turner said the city originally borrowed some $17.5 million to cover engineering and construction. Instead, the bid for construction, alone, came in at some $25.4 million. He said that after making some design changes, the project estimated to cost some $5 million more than the original loan amount.

“That was sort of as things were just escalating,” Turner said. “And when we applied for the loan was like a year or year and a half earlier, you know? So we did an estimate of construction at $16 million, and you saw how everything during that COVID spell just skyrocketed.”

The loan has a 20-year term at 1.85 percent interest. Turner said the project is roughly 75 percent complete and this loan will fund the home stretch.

“For this additional loan, there weren’t too many hoops because we could use the original application information from it and everything,” Turner said. “That original application was pretty involved.”

Turner said the project will increase the facility’s treatment capacity from 15 million gallons to 22.5 million gallons. The loan comes as part of the state’s Drinking Water State Revolving Fund Loan Program.

“We are doing a change where, and you may have saw that a year or so ago, where that chemical tank failed down at the water plant,” Turner said. “So we’re replacing some chemical tanks down there.”

He said that change would cost some $1 million.