The Fentress County Industrial Development Board has received a $100,000 grant from the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development to further develop the Clarkrange Business Park.
Industrial Development Board Executive Director Jacob Rosenbaum said the board originally applied for the grant to clear an estimated 35 acres on the property. Rosenbaum said the grant will be used to conduct geotechnical and due diligence studies on the portion of the the property.
“If you’re going to potentially sell this land to someone who wants to build on it or you are going to grade it and perhaps you know build a spec building then it all has to be up to code,” Rosenbaum said. “So this is just us making sure that the property is what we say it is.”
Rosenbaum said part of the study engineers and environmentalists will take samples of the property to see if that portion of the property is suitable for development. Rosenbaum said the additional cleared acreage on the property would make the property more attractive and hopefully bring in more industries.
“At present on the 85 acres that we have cleared we sort of subdivided it into a number of lots,” Rosenbaum said. “And so this will give us another total of potential lots just so that you know if one side of the road is not necessarily to the liking of a potential prospect, there might be a lot there that they do prefer and vice versa or if somebody was to select one of the presently available lots then there would be another one available for someone else if they chose to locate there.”
Rosenbaum said the board has been working on trying to clear the land for two years. Rosenbaum said recently the board has made advancements on the project.
“We actually just put that job out to bid a couple of weeks ago,” Rosenbaum said. “We did select a contractor. A contractor did win the bid and so they are about to be dropping trees. We got a preconstruction conference later on this week and trees will be coming down I imagine within the next couple of weeks.”
Rosenbaum said studies often take a long time and that he expects to have the study results within the next year. Rosenbaum said he is not sure how quickly we would see development on the portion of the property but it would be much quicker as the property already has utility access.
