A Barren River whitewater park in Bowling Green is one step closer to reality after the Bowling Green City Commission approved Tuesday filing a $3.64 million grant application.

“This is a big one,” City Manager Jeff Meisel said during the meeting. “This one would be really awesome.”

The whitewater park is part of the city’s Riverfront Park master plan, which was unveiled in January. Currently, city officials said the two nearest locations for this type of whitewater recreation are Ocoee River Whitewater Rafting near Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Whitewater Warehouse in Dayton, Ohio.

Brent Childers, director of Neighborhood and Community Services, said the whitewater park in Bowling Green would provide a much closer destination for area residents and even those who live out-of-state.

“There are 9 million people who live within a three hour drive of Bowling Green, and the closest whitewater park is four and a half hours away,” Childers said. “We see this as a multi-state regional destination project.”

The park would feature five instream drops in the Barren River, which would allow visitors to use the whitewater park at their own leisure. The park’s route would begin near the Bowling Green Water Treatment Plant on Chestnut Street and before ending at the College Street Pedestrian Bridge.

Childers said when the master plan was presented to residents, support was high for something like this.

“We got input from over 3,000 different data points, and access to the river and access in the river were two of the top five things that we heard,” he said.

The park would differ from traditional guided whitewater rafting. Childers said to create a rafting area, there needs to be several miles of naturally occurring whitewater, something Barren River does not have.

“You have to have an hour long float or a two hour long float,” Childers told the Daily News. “There’s no way to create that outside of nature. That was never even an option for us.”

If awarded this fall, the grant, with the National Parks Service’s Land and Water Conservation Fund Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership Program, would require the City of Bowling Green to match the other $3.64 million.

Childers said if the grant is awarded, the project would “immediately” move toward final engineering, gaining permits from the Army Corps of Engineers and would begin accepting bids for the project around 12 to 15 months after.

“We’d be looking at probably 12 months of construction to build something like this,” Childers said. “When we get past that year to a year and a half of engineering and permitting, then another year of construction, we’re out to two to three years before we can see this as a reality.”

The commission also approved Tuesday:

• An assistance agreement with the Kentucky Infrastructure Authority on behalf of Bowling Green Municipal Utilities to construct an 8,500 linear foot force main in the Kentucky Transpark. BGMU received $8,616,000 from KIA to help fund the project.
• A bid from Sunbelt Construction of Bowling Green totaling $1,788,000 for renovation of the GoBG Transit facility.

The commission will meet next on May 21.