Morristown Community Center Will Benefit Both Locals and Visitors

The City of Morristown’s work on a new 115,000-square-foot aquatic and community center could serve as a model as Cookeville begins exploration in future Leisure Services projects.

Morristown Mayor Gary Chesney said that the idea for a center has been in public conversation within the community since the late 1990s. Chesney said they funded the 35 million dollar bond issue by using a 25 cent property tax increase.

“Our philosophy for the last five or six years I would say has been ‘If you’re going to do something with property taxes, you need to be able to show the result immediately,'” Chesney said.

The community center will be home to four basketball courts, volleyball courts, indoor and outdoor competitive swimming courses, fitness center, climbing wall, a splashpad and spaces the community can use for meetings.

Chesney said Morristown hired a sports facility group to manage the community center.

“We’ve basically created a new department in city government which is called, ‘Morristown Landing,’ and so they work hand-in-hand with Parks and Recreation,” Chesney said. “But this is a separate division, a separate department, a separate program, that will do things like activities for local folks, but we do expect there to be a draw for things like travel basketball, AAU Basketball, swimming events, cheerleader tumbling–those kinds of activities that draw people in as go-to events from other communities.”

Chesney said the main issue the city faced was getting bids and quotes before what they anticipated was a huge price hike in construction costs.

“Which is currently in the process,” Chesney said. “We were fortunate that our quote for the center came in almost $5 million under what we had projected and we got those building costs locked in last fall and that’s been a big help for us as we’ve proceeded. We actually started construction in January of this year, and we’re actually about a month ahead of schedule and knock-on-wood we anticipate completion by Labor Day of next year.”

Chesney said the feedback from the community has been heavily positive.

“When you build new schools or you remodel or you build new structures you get a certain element that you put in the category of ‘labor pains and unsolicited advice,’ but once the finished project is there it’s almost like–I parallel it to childbirth,” Chesney said. “When the baby’s here the labor pains go away and folks go, ‘Oh wow.'”

Cookeville City Council members expressed a desire to look into bringing a facility like a community or aquatic center to Cookeville while giving feedback on the Leisure Services Master Plan draft last week.