02/20/1996

Resignation - Becky Crowder has resigned effective March 8. She will be Administrative Services Director for the City of Merriam, Kansas a suburb of Kansas City. She and her family will be moving home. Becky will be responsible for purchasing, personnel, facilities management, courts, and special projects. We will miss her and will start the recruitment process right away.

Good Publicity - We don't often make the paper, but sometimes we make it twice in two days. On January 16, the Herald Courier in Bristol had an editorial praising discussing the city's upcoming selection of a replacement for city manager Frank Clifton. MTAS is mentioned as providing technical assistance to the selection process. ( Pat Hardy)
The Jackson Sun of January 15 has an editorial that praises the city for conducting sexual harassment training. MTAS is mentioned as the provider of the service. (Rick Stokes)
Both articles made the UT News Summary circulated among all the top administrators (and some of us not so top.)

Notes R4 - As we have discussed during almost everyone's APR, the upgrade to our current version (R3) of Notes was released in January. The MTAS Notes Committee is developing an implementation schedule. The new release (R4) increases the usefulness of our existing databases, makes some additional databases possible, incorporates a full featured E-mail system and will eventually be used to replace Netscape. Everyone is cautioning me to go slowly and to include training at each step of implementation and so, we will.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory - On February 1, Carole, Kirk, Al, Rex, JimF and I visited ORNL from 9 a.m. until 1:30 p.m. We heard about several ORNL programs that might be helpful to cities. They have a command and control program that runs on a PC that would be useful to police departments. In fact, Rex enjoyed the meeting more than the rest of us because most of the practical material they covered would help police departments. We talked about juvenile fingerprints, facial reconstruction, and air conditioning body armor. We also heard about remote sensing devices that could be used at water or wastewater treatment plants. They also explained some of their computer work on WWW pages for ORNL customers using several different types of software (including Lotus Notes!) We're going to work with them to discover ways we can make their resources available to Tennessee cities.

Municipal Handbook - Todd Moore is working to update the version of the Municipal Handbook on the Notes database. He is making changes to conform with the legislation from the 1995 session. We think the new version will be in the database by the end of March.