Story, photo courtesy of Steve Nash – Special Contributor to BrownwoodNews.com

EARLY – Progress continues at the Early Town Center as council members approved agreements Tuesday night for an all-inclusive playground and artificial turf..

The council approved agreements with Cunningham Recreation for the installation of the playground and with Forever Lawn to install the playground’s artificial turf.

The cost of the freight and installation totals of the playground totals $317,000, Early City Manager Tony Aaron told council members. The cost of installing 6,000 square feet of turf is $95,525.

“We’ve got to have a safe surface for the kids to play on,” Aaron said. “I know a lot of people on this dais have probably played in the dirt and gravel when they were kids, but you just can’t do that anymore. You can, but there’s some risk that goes along with it liability-wise.”

In other action pertaining to the Town Center, the council:

• Approved and accepted the $1.34 million Mangrum Street project as complete. “It looked completed for quite some while but there’s been some punch list items that we’ve gone through, hitting some items that were left unfinished, so that has been completed,” Aaron said.

• Approved an agreement with Volkert Inc. for engineering services on the Tatum Street design.

“Tatum Street is the street that will run perpendicular to Mangrum Street,” Aaron said. “It’s also the street that will have the townhomes on either side of that.

“Their due diligence period expired, which means we’re moving forward into a full contract to construct those townhomes. Part of that agreement is that they were providing the funds available to do the engineering for the street and for the utilities. So we reached out to Volcker Engineering, who did the project in Mangrum Street.”

Aaron said he anticipates construction on Tatum Street will begin in late July.

“I think we’ll get there quickly,” Aaron said. “And then the construction of those townhomes will start once we get the road cut down to subgrade and then the utilities. So they can start the construction of those townhomes as quickly as possible.”

In an unrelated matter, council members agreed to apply for a grant from the Texas Water Development Board to address water loss within the city’s infrastructure.

“An example of water loss that we would be looking to address is, we do have some dead end water lines,” Aaron said. “So you don’t have that continual flow, which requires us to flush fire hydrants occasionally.

“So these grant funds would address looking at dead end lines, looping them back onto themselves or back to a neighboring street. It also adds resiliency with water line breaks, so you can imagine if you have a dead end line and something at the end of the line has a water leak, you don’t cut the whole street off.”

The city is eligible for up to $10 million in grant funds. “Our engineering company, Jacob and Martin, is looking to apply for this grant for us at no cost,” Aaron said.