02/10/2003

Where is Ray? - Ray Crouch was asked at the last minute to represent Tennessee firefighters at the National Firefighter Benefits Summit in Sacramento, CA Sunday - Wednesday this week. Wink Brown, current President of the Tennessee Fireman's Association (this is the nonunion group representing volunteers and nonunion career firefighters) was scheduled to attend, but was not able to go so he asked Ray to go in his place. It's an honor for Ray and, not only that, it's easy on the MTAS budget because it's fully paid for.

Where is Rick going to be? - Ray's heading west; Rick is heading east across the Atlantic. On March 10 - 16 Rick will be in Brighton, England representing the IMPA-HR at the annual meeting of the English Society of Chief Personnel Officers. IPMA selects two representatives each year. Usually, it's a city personnel director, but this year one of the representatives is Rick. It's an honor for Rick to be selected. And, once again, it's easy on the MTAS budget, because between the Society in England and the US IPMA, the trip is fully paid for.

Directory Delivery Team - With Lisa and Ann's help we printed up a special batch of 8 1/2 x 11 inch copies of the Municipal Directory. With Bill's help (and his large Dodge pickup), the directories were delivered to Nashville. And last week, with the help of Ray, Gary, Margaret, Rick, and Dennis, the 132 directories were delivered to the Legislative Plaza for the members of the House and Senate. THANKS to everyone for helping.

State Budget Cuts - We don't have a firm figure about any potential budget cuts. I read in the newspapers that we're going to have a 2.5% cut for this year and 8.8% for next. But those estimates are for all of higher education; different units will have different percentage cuts and we haven't heard about our specific cuts yet. We've made estimates up to 5% for this fiscal year and up to 15% for FY2004. It looks like we will be able to handle the impoundment of this year's budget by using money we budgeted for positions we didn't fill or positions that remained open for a period of time. The 15% for FY2004 (next year) is a little harder. Again, we can pretty much handle it by giving up our vacant positions. How and which ones we have to give up depends on what the actual percentage cut is for FY2004. Our vacant positions are the Systems Analyst (computer support) in Knoxville, the Publications Systems Administrator (in Knoxville), and the municipal management consultant (in Jackson). In all cases we would continue our almost complete restriction on out-of-state travel.

TML Survey - One of Janet Kelly's projects is a customer survey for Margaret Maherey, executive director of TML. Janet and Marea met a couple of weeks ago with the TML staff to start developing the areas of the survey. Our goal is to have the survey completed in time for the TML board meeting at the TML convention in Memphis in June. Please send Janet an email if you know of particular areas that you think should be considered for the survey. Thanks.

MTAS Customer Satisfaction Survey - Every two years IPS contracts with the Social Science Research Institute (SSRI) on campus to do a customer satisfaction survey for all IPS agencies. Their goal is to mail the survey in February (I'll send you a copy when they release the questions) with the results in May. Lisa has very carefully gone through the project reporting database and the training database to give them a list of nonduplicated customers. In the last two years we served 2,577 city officials. SSRI will send survey forms to a random sample from that file of 2,577 customers.