By Ryan Lewis
Correspondent
JASPER, Tenn. – The Marion County Commission’s plan to bring water to Dancing Fern Road has collapsed.
There were just too many financial and bureaucratic problems standing in the way, officials said.
After finding out they would have about $27,000 left over from their Coppinger Cove water project, county administrators looked into using the extra funds to extend water lines to Dancing Fern residents.
Originally, commissioners had planned to expand the work they’d done in Coppinger Cove to the nearby Dancing Fern area, but problems quickly arose, officials said.
Coppinger Cove lies in Jasper’s utility district, while Dancing Fern is in Whitwell’s area.
“We have two different utility districts involved,” Commissioner Thomas Thompson said. “Whitwell doesn’t want to service that area because it wouldn’t be financially feasible from them to do it.”
Thompson said that, because the Dancing Fern neighborhood is in a different utility district, the job would have to be bid as a separate project.
Marion County Mayor Howell Moss said the grant money used for the original Coppinger Cove project couldn’t be used for a project in a different utility district anyway.
“We asked (the state) if we could use the grant money for this, and they said ‘no,'” he said.
Commissioners unanimously voted to use the additional funds to repair Coppinger Cove Road where recent construction has done significant damage.
“We tore the roads up in Coppinger Cove doing the work up there, and we’re required to fix that,” Moss said.
Thompson believes the County Commission did everything it could to use the extra money for water, but in the end, it just couldn’t be done.
“I know that puts us in a bad situation on the Dancing Fern project because we were hoping to help those people,” he said. “Maybe we can help them at a later time. You can’t always give people what they need or what they want.”