Residents crowded into Eagleville City Hall at the April 7 planning commission meeting to speak concerning the possibility of a heavy haul trucking company locating on 18-foot-wide Cheatham Springs Road.

About 16 people spoke against the trucking company locating at the proposed site, and three spoke in support of the company’s plans. After the comment session, Jim Peach, owner of Bent Tree Transport Inc., responded to some of the concerns.

Bent Tree Transport Inc. of Brentwood is considering buying 3.6 acres of land on which to locate the trucking company. The company wants to build a bridge across Cheatham Springs Road to access the site.

Many of those who spoke in opposition to the plan live on Cheatham Springs Road and depend upon the road as their main way into town and beyond. Most of the speakers said it is not the owner of the company nor the trucking business that they were opposing but the proposed location.

Cheryl Mathisen, a Cheatham Springs Road resident, suggested the city annex property on south U.S. 41-A, "where nothing else is going on," for a site for the trucking company.

"It is not that we don’t ever want trucking firms here," she said. "This is just an inappropriate area to put them."

Some who spoke addressed the safety issue of meeting semi-trucks on Cheatham Springs Road, particularly because the north side of the roadway drops off to Cheatham Branch in the area where the trucking company would be located.

Carolyn Sapelak, another Cheatham Springs Road resident, noted that a tractor-trailer would only have three inches of clearance on either side of it to keep it within the proper lane.

"This is too great a risk and too small a margin of error to prevent a tractor trailer from crossing over the centerline into oncoming traffic," she said.

She also spoke about environmental issues, saying it is likely "additional contaminates such as petroleum, grease, oil and truck grime will be washed into Cheatham Branch from storm runoff, further deteriorating and contaminating the (Harpeth River) watershed."

James Curlee, a registered nurse who lives on Cheatham Springs Road, said he is most concerned "about the safety and the well-being" of the residents on the road, which he estimated to be the site of about 50 houses or about 150 people.

Bringing 53-foot truck rigs onto a narrow street could interfere with emergency vehicles responding to a fire or medical call, he suggested.

"If they block it, what if there is a fire, somebody has a heart attack or some kid gets hurt on a trampoline or ATV," he said. "There are lots of kids on Cheatham Springs Road, and there are a lot of people in Deer Valley."

Ted Sapelak, who drives a car hauler truck, said he would not consider bringing his truck down Cheatham Springs Road.

"The equipment I drive is 75 feet long and loaded it is 82 feet long," he said. "The blind spots on it you would not believe."

Jim Averwater, a builder and developer who also lives on Cheatham Springs Road, said he is a strong advocate for growth, but he sees nothing good for the community about the trucking company project as proposed.

"You have almost unanimous public opposition to the plan, you have tremendous environmental concerns and tremendous legal concerns having to do with the zoning issue, and you have the property values of the surrounding area," he said.

City resident Davina Tompkins said the trucking company would not be an asset to the downtown area.

"Our roads are too primitive and too narrow to handle heavy duty trucking traffic, such as semi-trucks," she said. "Our city cannot afford to repair or maintain the roads in our town with that kind of traffic use."

City resident Donna Jensen said the Cheatham Springs Road surface is "only five or six inches deep" and that the trucking company will not generate enough revenue for the city to cover the road maintenance.

"The city does not have the funds to do that, and surely we will not raise taxes to fix the roads to accommodate a trucking company," she said.

Jessie Smotherman, who lives on Clark Street, said her biggest concern is the proposed trucking company will be in her back yard.

"When things like this happen close to your property, it just depreciates it," she said. "It takes the price off, and we cannot afford it."

Larry Hazel, who lives across the road from the proposed trucking company site, also said it is not appropriate to put the trucking company there.

"I already have junk cars sitting at the mouth of my driveway with the wheels off and hanging off the edge of the creek," he said.

Between Hazel’s fence and the south edge of Cheatham Springs Road is a 9-foot grassy area, which Hazel said is his property and not part of the road.

"When I bought (the property) in 1967, the fence was sitting within one foot of the road," he said. "The fence kept getting torn up and I moved it back but kept it mowed, and I don’t intend for it to be a road."

Kelly Holliday, a Rutherford County resident, said a lot of misinformation has been put out about the trucking company, and that those at the meeting should give Peach and his engineers a chance to tell their plans and "how this can help Eagleville."

Sheila Conquest, also of Rutherford County, said she has known the trucking company owners almost all her life and said, "You cannot find better people."

The Bent Tree Transport location was across from Brentwood Academy, she noted.

"They never had an incident, they never stopped traffic, they never had a turnover, and their property recently sold as a park," she said. "They are good people and would be a huge attribute to this area."

Peach said Bent Tree is not a big trucking company, and only runs four trucks from the base site. The building he is proposing will have offices in one end, and maintenance in the other, where only minor maintenance, such as changing brake lights, is done, he said.

"We don’t create noise, we don’t create mess, and we don’t pollute," he said.

He noted that environmental workers examined the company’s former location "from one end to the other and could not find any kind of pollution."

He also said his company does not tear up roads and his trucks seldom leave or come in loaded. The trucks usually leave on Monday and come back on Friday and sometimes during the week. The company runs other trucks but they are in other states and do not come to the trucking company site, he said.

Peach said he plans to invest about $250,000 in the trucking company location, including the land and buildings with about $15,000 being spent for trees and landscaping. Instead of the chain length fence that the company initially proposed, a wooden plank fence will be used, he said.

Peach criticized the Eagleville Times for the photos it published of the truck storage area of the company’s Brentwood site, particularly of a trailer overflowing with trash.

"We have been trying to clean our barn out of about 60 years of stuff, and we put it in a trailer, it overflowed and it rained and we couldn’t haul it off," he said.

He said that the newspaper did not take photos of the surrounding horse pasture and other pastoral scenes on his property that were adjacent to the trucking area.