The DeKalb County Commission Monday night approved a plan to provide escorts of large trucks across Hurricane Bridge through at least September and to apply for a state grant to help recoup the county’s costs. The purpose is to control weight loads on the bridge.
Under the proposal, County Mayor Mike Foster says the county will appropriate around $20,000 to hire at least a couple of people with experience in law enforcement or traffic control who would work a forty hour week monitoring traffic across Hurricane Bridge. These officers will be responsible for making sure that no more than one large truck passes over the bridge at a time. Foster says the Tennessee Department of Transportation has agreed to the plan. “They have agreed and if the county would agree to supply people to go down there an escort people across the bridge so that only one big truck is on Hurricane bridge at a time, they (TDOT) will allow them (trucks) to carry 72,000 pounds. This will help our industries and school buses that are crossing it, and it will cost the county probably in the neighborhood of $20,000 to $25,000 between now and September. However, I talked to Paul Degges (TDOT Chief Engineer) today and he has acquired for us a Section 402 police traffic service grant from the Governor’s Highway Safety Office so that we can apply for a $20,000 grant to repay us through the sheriff’s office. We will pay for it (manning the escorts) and they (state) will refund us through Sheriff Ray’s office $20,000 through September. The money needs to flow through his department.”
Degges told WJLE Friday night that TDOT hopes to have the design plans for the rehabilitation of Hurricane Bridge completed by September and a contract bid letting could follow this fall if state funding can be secured for the project, which is expected to cost between $12 and $15 million dollars.
Foster says once TDOT begins construction work on the bridge, the county’s responsibility for manning truck escorts across Hurricane would end, because the state would be controlling traffic on the bridge.
Meanwhile, in other business the county commission voted to transfer ownership of the county owned shirt factory building, being used by Omega Apparel, to the DeKalb County Industrial Development Board.
Foster says this move will benefit Omega and help them create more jobs. “Omega is the sole maker of the 13 button broad fall Navy pants. Every pair of Navy pants is made right here and has been for fifteen years. We have about 86 jobs that work there. They recently received a new contract to make skirts. That will be 29 new jobs. They have also applied for another contract for class-A dress pants with a stripe on the side. If they get that, it will mean 82 more new jobs. They are going to apply for a federal loan but to get them a better rate and to make sure we do everything the way we’re supposed to do it, we would like to ask to transfer deed of the old shirt factory building to the DeKalb County Industrial Development Board. This allows them to assist Omega in applying for low interest federal loans to help provide new jobs. It will not happen unless they get this contract and DeKalb County gets 112 new jobs out of it. But it will help them, and they will spend that money on the county building to put a new air conditioning and heating system in it, divide it, and do some work on it. They (Omega) will move their cutting room across the street (to the shirt factory building) on this side (east) of South Mountain Street and manufacturing will stay on the other side (shirt factory building on the west side). The loan is to be entirely paid back by Omega.”
Foster brought the commission up to date on the latest developments with the Town and Country Shopping Center building, which is now owned by the county, and he asked for and received authorization to speak with architects about some renovation work on the buildings. “We actually got the deed to the property on January 4th and we legally could not do anything with it, nor could we take people out there to look at it, because of the liability issues. We now have it in our possession and have insured it. So we’ll begin having meetings (on potential uses). We talked about title insurance. I went ahead and got title insurance because it was a very complicated title. We’d also like to get some input from architects to begin planning as to what we need to do. I would like authorization to talk to the three or four architects that you all named in the meeting the other night to get some input and ideas and settle on an architect to do this work.”
On other matters, the commission appointed Judy Sandlin and Jimmy Herndon to four year terms on the county industrial development board and re-appointed Danny Pirtle and Jerry Taylor to the regional planning commission.
Foster says Jim Poss of DeKalb EMS will serve as the county’s TOSHA officer, subject to completion of a job description for the position.
The commission approved the county fire department’s selection for another year of Donny Green as DeKalb County Fire Chief and Roy Merriman as Assistant Chief.
The annual contract between the county and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was approved allocating $38,080 in federal funds for the sheriff’s department for providing a certain number of patrols at various lake sites from April through September.
Foster received authorization for an emergency purchase to have a garbage truck repaired, which was involved in a traffic accident earlier this month near Sligo bridge on Highway 70. He says the cost is expected to be $35,488. Foster will obtain more estimates and present them to either the purchasing and or budget committees for approval.
According to Foster, DeKalb County’s economy grew last year based on sales tax collections. “December sales tax revenues were $294,241. Last year, December (2008) collections were $252, 463. That’s up by $41,778, about a 14% increase over same month last year.”
“For the year, DeKalb County’s sales tax collections were $1,883,484, up $102,488 for the year, a 5.45% increase. We were the only county in the Upper Cumberland that had revenues that increased in sales taxes for the year.”

A 19 year old Crossville man escaped serious injury in a one car crash Sunday night on Highway 70 east near Sligo.
Trooper Todd Logan of the Tennessee Highway Patrol says Andrew Morgan was driving a 1999 Nissan Altima west on U.S. 70 when he lost control while going around a curve. The car struck a guardrail on the right, went back across the highway and hit a rockwall on the left side of the road. The car then overturned into a ditch, came to rest upside down, and caught fire. Morgan apparently got out of the vehicle on his own and was taken by DeKalb EMS to DeKalb Community Hospital where he was treated and released.
Members of the Midway station of the DeKalb County Volunteer Fire Department came to the scene to extinguish the fire.

Two people were arrested by the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Department last week, believed to have been responsible for at least three recent burglaries.
Sheriff Patrick Ray says 28 year old Michael Chad Owens of Shady Drive Smithville and 28 year old Angie Dawn Taylor of Carter Drive Smithville were arrested on Thursday, January 21st Detectives brought charges against the two after an investigation into a January 16th burglary on Old Snow Hill Road. Taylor allegedly drove Owens to the residence where he got out of the vehicle, entered the home, and stole a diamond ring, two jewelry boxes, a basket of jewelry, and money. The next day, January 17th, Taylor allegedly drove Owens to a residence on Campbell Lane in Smithville where he got out of the vehicle and kicked in the door. During this burglary, the home owner was present and Owens was scared off . Four days later, on January 21st, Taylor drove Owens to a residence on Midway Road in Smithville where he kicked in a door to the home and stole two jewelry boxes and a box of 45 rpm records. Most of the stolen items have been recovered by detectives. Taylor is charged with three counts of aggravated burglary. Her bond was set at $75,000. Owens was charged with three counts of aggravated burglary and two counts of theft over $500. Bond for Owens was set at $95,000. Both will be in court on January 28th on the charges.
Meanwhile, in other cases, 29 year old Derrick E. Reeder of School House Road Brush Creek is charged with a fifth offense of driving on a revoked license. Sheriff Ray says on Monday, January 18th, members of the Sheriff’s Department and the Alexandria Police Department were conducting investigations in Alexandria when they saw Reeder driving a motor vehicle. Having prior knowledge of Reeder’s license being revoked, officers stopped Reeder and placed him under arrest. Reeder’s bond was set at $10,000 and he will appear in court on April 12th.
34 year old Donnie Edward Stanley of Lucille Street is charged with possession of drug paraphernalia, simple possession of marijuana, and vandalism to county property. On Tuesday, January 19th, deputies spotted a vehicle parked in the roadway. Upon approaching it, an officer saw a long gun in the vehicle. Stanley, the driver, gave officers consent to search and they found a marijuana cigarette in his jacket pocket. Stanley was also in possession of rolling papers and marijuana seeds. He was placed under arrest and put into the back of a county patrol car. Stanley then kicked the back glass of the patrol car causing damage to it. Bond for Stanley was set at $4,000 and he will appear in court on February 11th. Deputies also recovered three long guns from Stanley and will be contacting the Federal division of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms hoping to indict him on gun possession charges. Stanley is a convicted felon and is prohibited from possessing any firearms.
30 year old Joshua Caleb Golden of Adams Street Smithville and 21 year old Randall Christopher Evans of Blue Springs Road were arrested on Thursday, January 21st after they were found intoxicated on Jacobs Pillar Road in Smithville. Deputies responded to a call on Jacobs Pillar Road and found both men in an intoxicated state having a smell of alcohol on their persons. Both were also unsteady on their feet. Golden and Evans admitted to drinking beer. Evans was also found to have in his possession a small bag of marijuana. Evans was charged with public intoxication and simple possession of marijuana. His bond was set at $2,000. Golden was charged with public intoxication and his bond was set at $1,000. They will appear in court on February 11th.
49 year old Jarvis L. Trapp is charged with possession of a schedule IV drug for resale. Sheriff Ray says on Friday, January 22nd, deputies received a call of a suspicious person on Highway 56. They found Trapp walking down the roadway. While the officers were talking to Trapp, he threw the backpack that he was carrying onto the hood of the patrol car and told the deputies to search it. After searching the bag, officers found an unmarked pill bottle that contained 30 pills believed to be Klonopin. Trapp said that a friend had given the drugs to him. Bond for Trapp was set at $10,000 and he will appear in court on February 18th.
43 year old Marty Brad Tallent of West Broad Street, Smithville is charged with driving under the influence, reckless endangerment, and evading arrest. Sheriff Ray says on Saturday, January 23rd, deputies while on patrol on Highway 56 South, spotted a vehicle in which the driver had committed a traffic offense. When the officer activated his blue lights, the suspect fled, driving at a high rate of speed. The vehicle turned onto Keltonburg Road and then turned onto Students Home Road where the officer ended the pursuit. The deputy was able to obtain a tag number and central dispatch contacted Warren County about the vehicle. A short time later, officers from the Warren County Sheriff’s Department stopped the vehicle on Highway 56 South in Warren County. The driver, Tallent, was charged locally with DUI after he failed field sobriety tasks.. Tallent also had a smell of alcohol on his person and he was unsteady on his feet. He also admitted to the officer that he had consumed six beers. Bond for Tallent was set a $52,500 and he will appear in court on February 11th.
Also on Saturday, 31 year old James Fredrick Summers of Hodges Road Smithville came to the DeKalb County Jail to serve a weekend sentence as ordered by the court. After he was booked into the jail, Summers tried to sneak into the cell area a plastic bag that contained nine pills believed to be seroquel and a cell phone. Summers was charged with two counts of contraband into a penal institution and his bond was set at $20,000. He will appear in court on the charges February 11th .

A fire destroyed a barn Sunday night in Lakeview Mountain Estates.
Lieutenant Brad Mullinax, Fire Prevention Officer of the DeKalb County Volunteer Fire Department says the call came in around 6:35 p.m. ” DeKalb E-911 dispatchers received multiple calls of a reported barn fire on Lakeview Drive. Upon arrival, firefighters discovered a large barn containing approximately 100 round rolls of hay belonging to Larry Summers fully involved with fire. By the time firefighters arrived it was too late to save the structure. Members of the Cookeville Highway, Short Mountain Highway, and Main stations along with the tanker truck responded and rendered aid on the scene. The cause of the fire is undetermined at this point but no one was injured. The barn and hay were destroyed.
Meanwhile around midnight, a fire was reported at 5549 McMinnville Highway and members of the Blue Springs and Keltonburg Stations responded along with DeKalb EMS and the Sheriff’s Department. No one was injured. In fact, officials say the persons living there extinguished the small blaze as firefighters were enroute.
(Photo provided by Callie Matthews)

The Tennessee Department of Transportation is developing design plans for the rehabilitation of Hurricane Bridge with a possible bid letting this fall if funding becomes available.
Paul Degges, Chief Engineer for TDOT said Friday night during a meeting at Smithville City Hall that he is hopeful the project is ready in time for a September bid letting. “We are working at an accelerated pace on this project to be able to have plans available, should money become available about the same time. We will have plans ready this fall probably around the first of September. However, I want to stress that the funding of this project, while it is a top priority in the department and we know it is an important project, there is a funding component to it. We’re going to have to have the funding made available to the department to be able to deliver the project to construction.”
According to Degges, the price tag for the Hurricane bridge rehab project is estimated to be between $12 to $15 million, a large expenditure with limited available state and federal funds. “Our bridge funding program is pretty modest. In fact, this year we’ll probably have less than $50 million dollars of federal funds available to us in our bridge program and somewhere in the vicinity of $30 million in our state bridge program.”
However, Degges says TDOT’s Better Bridges Program, adopted by the General Assembly last year, makes more funds available for projects like this. “Better Bridges” is a four year program approved in 2009 by the Tennessee General Assembly that utilizes bonds to pay for the repair or replacement of structurally deficient bridges in the state. The legislature must act to authorize funding each year of the program. “We were fortunate this year, the General Assembly passed a bridge bonding program to put another $87.5 million in our bridge program. So between those three components (federal, state, and bonding) hopefully in fiscal year 2011 starting July 1st, we’ll have a similar program to allow us to pump a lot of money toward bridges that are in this category.” Neither Hurricane bridge or Sligo bridge were included in the bridge bonding program during the first year.
Degges stressed that in order for any bridge project to be funded, design plans must first be in place.”It takes a certain amount of time to do the design work. This is a pretty intricate structure. It has a lot of components and it takes a while to develop a set of plans. We actually have a consultant hired that’s doing this work for us. It’s moving along quite fast.”
Unlike Sligo, the state will be looking to do a rehab on Hurricane bridge, not a replacement. And while both bridges remain safe to travel under posted weight limits, Degges says TDOT will likely give Hurricane bridge priority over Sligo bridge. “Certainly this bridge is one of what I would call a priority project across the state. It is very difficult to develop just a list (of priority bridges). There’s a lot of different factors that come into play when you’re talking about what is a relative priority but it (Hurricane bridge) is an important structure in the region. We feel that a ten ton weight limit on a bridge like this is certainly very difficult to have to live with. We want to be able to come in and put this bridge back in service at legal loads.”
“This bridge (Hurricane) was built in 1944 and in the late 1970’s the department came in and put a new bridge deck on it. We actually widened it. We met the design specifications at the time. Since that time, the design specifications for bridges have changed, particularly in the aftermath of the failure (of a bridge) in Minneapolis. Truss bridges in particular have been looked at a whole lot harder in the last couple of years. So we’re having to go back in and based on these new design criteria, look at this bridge. This will be a rehab. We’ll do a lot of work on the concrete deck. We need to narrow the shoulders a little bit and then strengthen some of the truss members underneath the bridge.”
In the meantime, Degges says TDOT and the county have come up with a plan to limit weight loads on Hurricane by escorting trucks with heavy cargo across the bridge. “The department came up and met with the business officials, business leaders, and local elected officials up here about a month and a half or two months ago. What we agreed to do was sharpen our pencils and go back and look at our analysis and make sure that we were where we needed to be on the weight posting. We also committed to looking at the feasibility of putting a traffic signal on the bridge and allowing one lane at a time to go. So we went back and did that and found that we were right on target on our weight posting. We might could squeak another couple of tons out of it but that really didn’t solve what the industries needs were.”
“We looked at putting a one lane scenario up with a traffic signal but we felt that while we could double the weight load of a truck going across the bridge, there was a lot of negatives to it including a lot of delay time. You have people coming down the big hill, coming in from I-40. So what we came up with was, “what if there was only one vehicle on that bridge at a time?” What we found was that we can carry a full legal load across the bridge. So what we starting talking with the (county) mayor about was, how about us coming in and working with law enforcement of some sort, and basically escorting vehicles across the bridge one at a time. By doing that, industries could bring a full load across the bridge. We wouldn’t have any significant delays to any other motorists using the bridge. So we think we have a solution that will work. We’ve worked with the county mayor to make sure that we’ve come up with a working solution that the county can live with. Right now, we’re in the final stages of mapping that scenario out, seeing if there is a way we can fund it working with the county, what are the logistics, and who are the industries that are going to be doing this, so that’s where we are. We are in the final throws in trying to get this solution. We think it will work and then ultimately we’re going to have to come in and do the construction work on the bridge. When we finish the construction work, it’ll be ready for a full legal load.”
Once construction begins on Hurricane bridge, Degges says short term lane closures might be required. “We might have to have some short term total closures but what we think what we’ll be able to do is to end up with a scenario where we put up a traffic signal and go down to one lane on it. We know that’s going to be difficult but one of the things we want to come and do is before we make a final decision on traffic control, we want to come back up to the community and talk to the residents and business owners about the different options we have in traffic control and what would be the best scenario for this community.”
Few attended the meeting Friday evening, which was intended primarily for local and state officials and industry representatives. Still, State Representative Terri Lynn Weaver, who helped set up the meeting, said it was a good forum. “It’s another venue of communication. I had a meeting in my office last week with Paul Degges and he said I would like to come to your area and have a meeting. We called the industry people and let them know we were having a meeting here so he could address them and keep the communication moving forward. This is not a political issue. It matters not what side of the aisle you’re on. It matters that we get the bridge done and that’s why I think it’s important to keep the community informed.”
State Senator Mae Beaver, who was also at the meeting, said she is encouraged by the progress that’s being made on the bridges. “I think it gives everyone a glimmer of hope that we are just about ready to get underway with these bridges. TDOT has helped figure out a way to get the traffic across the bridge temporarily, all the heavy loads and looking at a September letting on the Hurricane bridge so I think that’s really good news for everyone. It looks like things are moving right along. Of course on the Sligo bridge, Terri Lynn and I met with Senator Lamar Alexander’s staff and he is working on getting the rest of the money. We have $1.5 million now setting over at TDOT waiting to be used that they can start on. We’re just looking for the rest of the money and we think it will be forthcoming.”

Smithville Police have cited a local woman for shoplifting at Wal-Mart.
32 year old Amy Jeanette Lawson of 1243 Haley Road was cited for shoplifting at Wal-Mart on Saturday, January 16th. She had $7.88 worth of merchandise in her possession. Her court date is February 11th
Meanwhile, anyone having information on the following offenses is asked to please contact the Smithville Police Department at 597-8210 or the Tip Line at 464-6046.
On Tuesday, January 19th at 856 Cooper Street, someone took firemen equipment out of a tool box attached to the bed of Jeremy Neal’s truck.
On Sunday, January 17th someone took some jewelry from Ms. Mary Hughes’ room at NHC. Jewelry consists of a solid flat white gold heart with diamonds on a gold chain and one pair of matching earrings.
Any information received that will help Smithville Police solve any criminal offense will be greatly appreciated. All information is confidential.

Donny Green, County Executive Director of the DeKalb County Farm Service Agency, announces that annual payments for the Tobacco Transition Payment Program,
for the 2010 payment year, were released Wednesday, January 20. DeKalb County quota holders and producers will receive $483,405.90 in 2010 program year payments. Green says that direct deposit transactions should arrive in bank accounts within 3 business days while mailed checks should arrive within 10 business days for quota holders and producers who have enrolled in the program.
The Tobacco Transition Payment Program (TTPP), also called the “tobacco buy-out,” helps tobacco quota holders and producers transition to the free market.
The Fair and Equitable Tobacco Reform Act of 2004 (P.L. 108-357), signed by President Bush on Oct. 22, 2004, ended the Depression-era tobacco quota program and established the TTPP. The program provides annual transitional payments for 10 years to eligible tobacco quota holders and producers. Payments began in 2005 and continue through 2014. Payments are funded through assessments of approximately $10 billion on tobacco product manufacturers and importers. The remaining payments will be made in 4 annual installments that will be issued in January of each year.
For more information on the Tobacco Transition Payment Program, please contact the DeKalb County Farm Service Agency at 615-597-8225, extension 2.