02/25/2009

Attached you will find a newsletter that CTAS is sending out to the counties on a monthly basis. I would like for MTAS to do the same and hope to send out the first issue in April.

I have asked Frances Adam-O’Brien to develop and manage our newsletter. However, for the letter to truly be successful it will need your support. The lay-out of our newsletter will have the following format and will be assigned as follows:

Overall development and management – Frances

Central items - Consultants
We want to use articles on breaking news such as court rulings, new state and federal regs, other federal issues, AG opinions, publication promotion, etc. We hope this venue will be an effective means of getting timely information out to the customer. Divided among us all, it should not be a significant burden for anyone. For example when we produce our annual public acts publication or our annual update to the Municipal Handbook a promotional piece and a link to the publication could be done with each of these updates. We are hoping to provide information and materials that will be useful to cities and not just publicity pieces that they will skim over and forget about. That’s why this material needs to come from consultants.

City Spotlight – Frances and Management Consultants - Cities will be selected oldest to youngest and we will be doing one a month and will know months in advance what city for what month. This will not be an extensive item.

Monthly staff feature – Frances - Once a month we would do a short bio on an employee. We would also use this to introduce new employees or say good-bye to retiring employees.

Calendar of Events – Frances and all Consultants – This will be a 3 month rolling calendar. Frances will pull together the event information, but we will all need to provide her information for this listing. Examples would be:
TAMCAR Sept. 23-26, 2009 Franklin
TCMA October 21-23, 2009 Chattanooga
ICMA September 13-16, 2009 Montreal Canada
IPMA-HR September 12th – 16 ^th, 2009 Nashville
TPMA October 16 ^th , 2009 (Middle TN Membership Meeting, location – East TN)


Upcoming Training Programs – Training Team – Will feature upcoming MAP and EOA classes.

I know everyone is busy, but I believe this is an excellent opportunity to get timely information to our customers. I hope everyone will approach it with this in mind and work with Frances to make it a successful effort.

Frances is also being asked to increase the timely information available on the MTAS website and is giving special attention to the front page. A lot of the information in the newsletter will also be available on our website, but we believe taking the approach of emailing a newsletter will be a step towards putting the information in front of them. There is no guarantee that it will be opened and read, but I think over time, assuming we provide useful and timely information, it will be used.

The April issue will feature a lot of anniversary news, since MTAS was created by the legislature in April 60 years ago. However, I would ask you to begin to give this some thought. I have discussed with Sharon and Frances the possibility of Frances sitting in for 10 or 15 minutes on each of the consultant team conference calls to discuss any possible “Central Items”.

Thanks

Mike