Montgomery County, TN – Tonight, the Montgomery County Commission meets in it’s regular voting session. On the agenda, $102,000 needed to finish the new airport terminal. Montgomery County Mayor Carolyn Bowers hopes it passes.
There’s been a fair amount of misunderstanding about the new airport terminal project lately, with the very public discussion over unpaid bills by the city related to the project.
Airport Authority members were upset that the city of Clarksville was not keeping pace with their payments to the airport, like the county had been. That dispute was resolved last week, when board chairman Ron Whitford met with mayor Kim McMillan, who assured Whitford that the city would get their payments “up to date” and that the delay on the city’s part was due to multiple accounting systems needing to reconcile before invoices could be paid.
The city paid over $200,000 to the authority last week, and the city council approved their additional $102,000 due the airport, and plans to keep pace with the county to complete the project.
Tonight, the county commission will vote on it’s share of the remaining funds, and Mayor Bowers is “hopeful it will pass.”
Mayor Bowers told Clarksville Online in a phone interview today, that the misunderstanding came when the airport’s budget was adjusted from bids given the airport on the project, and it’s share of the matching funds was removed from their budget. This caused the airport to fall short on money they had budgeted, and led some board members to wonder what the county was doing, not to mention the cash flow problem this presented.
“Our people thought the grant money was in the budget,” said Bowers. “When we made the adjustments on some of the bids that were presented during the course of the project, this left them short of what was needed. Now, the county commission must approve this money tonight to bring the airport budget back to what it was intended to be. It will be a sad thing if they don’t approve tonight’s request.”
Mayor Bowers said that there are preliminary discussions underway to have the county handle all of the accounting for the airport. “We’re already doing several other departments, and we think this will make things easier in the future” Bowers said.
The new airport terminal is scheduled to open to the public in early spring.
Tonight’s county commission is at 7:00pm, and open to the public.
