The Tennessee Department of Transportation has issued drawings for a substantial renovation of the Baxter interchange that officials said will follow an uncommonly fast development schedule.
Engineer Tom Bennett said the project will completely renovate the interchange from Olan Maxwell to past First Avenue, including widening the bridge and modifying all ramps.
“The city has to relocate its facilities, so from kind of a nuts and bolts perspective on your utilities, we’ve got to deal with that,” Bennett said. “There’s all kind, we have a, our main water main feed runs right through the middle of that as well as our force main coming off the pump station.”
Bennett said the city must respond with its utility plans by November. He said TDOT will reimburse the city for the cost of relocating existing lines under Chapter 86 reimbursement rules.
“What they don’t pay for is if you want to make something bigger,” Bennett said. “An example would be your 12-inch water main. We probably don’t need to run a 12-inch water main as part of this project because that’s only going to serve us to a certain extent, so if we want to make it bigger then now’s the time to do that and then you can, you would pay for that portion only, which means to go from a 12 to whatever size you decide to.”
Bennett said the city needs to decide quickly if it wants to pay for “betterments,” such as larger water lines, to accommodate future growth. He said any infrastructure placed under the interstate during this renovation needs to be sufficient for long-term needs.
“I would like to have a time, you know, sometime maybe the next 60 days where we could sit down maybe in a workshop setting and and come to some conclusions about those betterments as they would call it, anything that we need to do for that,” Bennett said. “So but that’s it, we have a lot of other things going on but that’s the sort of high point of what, you know, I want to bring in front of you all tonight.”
One resident said the city should prioritize long-term planning over immediate savings when deciding on the size of the new water lines. The resident said it would be more expensive for future generations to return and enlarge the lines later.
The city will hold a workshop within the next 60 days to finalize utility plans for the interchange project.
