News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
The City of Sparta will not receive a $500,000 TVA Grant for industrial park improvements.
City Administrator Brad Hennessee said he’s disappointed, but understands this is a competitive grant.
“We were told essentially that it wasn’t necessarily anything that we had included or not included in our grant [application],” Hennessee said. “They didn’t tell us who had been awarded, but we knew going into it that we were one of the smaller communities that had a grant request.”
Hennessee said it’s assumed the grant was awarded to a larger municipality. He said the city would have used the funds to make Industrial Park accessible and attractive to potential businesses.
Both the city and county own Industrial Park. Hennessee said each entity would have used $100,000 to fund site work and construction for a 100,000 square foot concrete pad. In the meantime, Hennessee said focus will shift to the city’s feed back session to fix small issues around the park.
“Those are typically, fairly, low budget items,” Hennessee said. “Things like establishing a tree buffer, a dirt berm buffer between the Industrial Park and the neighborhood behind.”
Once the TVA grant is available again, city officials will submit another application.
