Council To Vote On Cane Creek Design Phase

Cookeville City Council will vote Thursday night on an agreement to begin the design phase of the 31-acre expansion to Cane Creek Park.

Leisure Services Director Rick Woods said the new area of the park will be on the first portion of land Cookeville originally purchased from the Cowan family next to the park’s courtside shelter. Woods said the expansion will include a parking lot, a new picnic shelter, a new restroom facility, and over a mile of new trail.

“So now we will bring the company in to do the actual final design work and get elevations and get exact dimensions and construction drawings and all of that completed,” Woods said. “That’s where we are in this phase.”

Woods said the project is being funded through a state grant, with both the city and state putting some $562,000 into the expansion. Woods said they hope to begin the design work in the next couple of weeks and expect it to take a couple of months to finish.

“We’ll be looking at sometime in the fall, late fall probably, of putting this out to bid and getting the project started on construction,” Woods said.

Woods said the city spent some $300,000 for the property and that purchase counts towards their half of the project funds required by the grant. The city has since purchased additional land from the Cowan family to expand the park further in the future.

Woods said the company handling the design phase will have input on the materials used and exact layout of the new space.

“We are just doing the final design of that conceptual (design),” Woods said. “We got public input on that back when we were planning to do this expansion.”