News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Land acquisition will play a key role in the next steps of Cookeville’s potential aquatic facility.
City Manager James Mills said that no site has been selected for the facility yet. He said that the two biggest hurdles will be finding a 13 to 15-acre tract and paying for that land.
“If anybody’s priced land lately, it’s expensive,” Mills said. “And all that goes into the total cost. We don’t want to have so much in land that we can’t afford to do the actual facility itself.”
Mills said that the city will more than likely have to buy the land to place the facility. He said that some of the sites already owned by the city were either too small or not topographically suitable, according to the design firm.
Mills said that when it comes to finding this land and trying to acquire it, all options are on the table. He said that the task falls to the city, not the design firm.
“What Lose and associates, the firm we hired to do to do the feasibility study, we did have them evaluate half a dozen sites primarily to see how it would fit,” Mills said. “We did have them look at some city-owned properties, and none of those that we submitted to them to look at would both facilities fit on and it would be difficult to fit just one. For example, we had the site evaluated by the Cane Creek Rec Center, but it was not large enough for either facility. We also looked at Parkview Park, the lower baseball field, we’ve talked about reusing that for another purpose and that’s not large enough either.”
Mills said that the council still has to decide how they want to proceed in the process of the aquatics facility. He said that they knew that the project would be expensive, but it’s something that they need to heavily weigh their options.
Mills said that he knows the public is excited, as are members of the city. However, he said there still is a long way to go in the process.
