Toll Bridge Proposed In West Tennessee

If you’re driving west from Houston County to Benton County in West Tennessee, you have to go about 40 miles to find a bridge across the Tennessee River. State Representative Butch Borchert has introduced a bill in the General Assembly to begin planning for a toll bridge that would span the wide river where State Route 147 stops at the banks near Danville.

He says the residents of his district won’t mind paying a toll to cross the river.

“Some of my people can see the stacks of the Cumberland City Steam Plant, but it takes them an hour and a half to drive around when it would be about 25 or 30 minutes if we had a bridge.”

An old-fashioned ferry crosses the river there, and it is funded for another three years. Borchert hopes by the time the ferry runs out of money, there will be a plan to build a toll bridge on existing footings where an old railway bridge now stands.

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The bill is SB 3003 by Sen. Roy Herron/HB 2836 Borchert.

The new bridge would be added to the list of possible projects under the new Tennessee toll road authority, set up last year to investigate such roads and bridges. State officials think the Department of Transportation could do a feasibility study on the project with $100,000 to $400,000 of federal planning money. If a toll bridge were found feasible, it would be financed by bonds floated by TDOT, the Tennessee Department of Transportation. And tolls would be collected by TDOT employees or contractors. So far no project is past the heavy-thinking stage.