The question the Journal left open last week has an answer now.

The Tennessee Local Development Authority voted unanimously Monday, Aug. 24, to grant parity status to Columbia's $315 million WIFIA loan, the piece of financing tied to the Duck River pipeline and downstream intake that the state board had been sitting on for weeks. The vote does not fund the pipeline itself, the EPA remains the actual lender through its Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act program, but it clears the specific condition the EPA required before that federal loan can close: the ability for the WIFIA debt to share the same senior repayment claim on CPWS revenues as the city's existing $75 million State Revolving Fund loan.

The stakes behind that technical-sounding approval were real money. Had the TLDA denied parity, Columbia would not have been able to use the lower-interest SRF loan alongside the WIFIA loan, a combination city officials say was central to keeping the project's borrowing costs down. Columbia Mayor Chaz Molder said as much in pressing the board for approval, telling members the city was "pleading for" the parity decision "to be able to capture $50 million in savings for our rate-payers on what is a very expensive project."

With Monday's vote, the city gets to use both loan programs at once, avoiding the roughly $50 million in additional interest Molder and other officials had warned would otherwise fall on CPWS customers over the life of the project.

The approval comes despite the objection Maury County Mayor Sheila Butt raised earlier this month, when she cast one of two no votes on the Duck River Watershed Planning Partnership's Aug. 10 recommendation, arguing that a single city legislative body should not be deciding a half-billion-dollar borrowing question that leaves rural Maury County without direct representation. That underlying disagreement over process has not gone away, but it did not stop Monday's financing vote, which the TLDA and Columbia treated as a separate, narrower question about loan structure rather than a referendum on the broader Long-Term Water Supply Program.

For CPWS ratepayers already absorbing rate increases of up to 20 percent a year through 2030 or 2031, Monday's vote does not change the bill that is coming. What it does is keep that bill from getting bigger. With parity secured, Columbia can move toward closing the WIFIA loan and finishing the financing puzzle for a project that has now cleared every major state and federal checkpoint the Journal has tracked since July.

Sources: Tennessee Lookout. Tennessee Local Development Authority, Aug. 24, 2026 agenda. Previous Muletown Journal reporting.