Cookeville’s Eric Walker Running For Re-Election

Cookeville City Council’s Eric Walker is officially running for re-election.

After picking up his papers Thursday, Walker said that he’s excited to run again. Walker said that the city has gone through a lot over the past four years, and now with the accelerated growth we see in Cookeville he wants to help play a part.

“You know when you first come onto this there is a learning curve,” Walker said. “And I think that now that I’ve already been on the city council or four years it just really would be a benefit to the public to stay in there, finish out four years, see everything through. A lot of what we’ve started is just now getting going.”

Walker said that he hopes he can take the experience he has gained over the last four years and use it to the city’s benefit for the next four years. He said that it’s important to him to help keep Cookeville on track and keep up with the growth trajectory it’s on.

Walker said that the biggest thing he learned from his first term was how to successfully participate in the bureaucratic process. He said that in his first term he was able to learn what questions to ask and how to do so efficiently to keep the city focused on what it needs to be focused on.

“We really got to be focused on our roads,” Walker said. “Getting these road projects in the pipeline are necessities for growth. And looking at how the city gets to fixing old roads, we can’t be worried about fixing old roads and building new ones at the same time so we’ve got to start jumpstarting those projects, and looking at funding and knowing how to spend our sales tax revenue. We’ve had great growth on that based on some of the decisions made. You know when we bring in these new shopping centers and stuff it really helps keeps our property taxes down, I think those are important things.”