EPB officials eager to build a new facility at the Enterprise South industrial park are having to wait to smell the flowers — or at least to see if they will bloom this spring on part of their property.
EPB Assistant Operations Manager Bobby Hutcherson said Friday plans for a new operations center in Ooltewah have been delayed due to the discovery of two potentially endangered flowers on part of the 17 acres EPB bought three years ago to build a new operations center.
“We’re pretty much on hold with the building at this point,” Hutcherson told EPB directors during their monthly board meeting Friday.
EPB bought the site near the Tennessee Department of Transportation Region 2 office and the Erlanger Primary Care facility on Volkswagen Drive in 2020 for $1.1 million. The city-owned utility is seeking a more centralized location for its operations facility, which has been housed since 2010 at the former Cavalier site under the Bailey Avenue overpass off of Central Avenue.
“When we built the facility on the former Cavalier site, we were just an electric company, and as we have grown and added our fiber optics operations, we’re kind of busting at the seams for space for all of our equipment and staff,” EPB President David Wade said in an interview Friday with the Chattanooga Times Free Press. “About 40% of our crews and materials could work out of this new facility.”