03/13/1996

Municipal Officials Orientation Training - two things.
1) We will do a regular Municipal Officials Orientation just before the TML conference in June. MikeT is lining up "volunteers" to present the various sessions.

2) We have started a very interesting and potentially very rewarding project with CGT and CTV. We are going to put a Municipal Officials Orientation on a CD-ROM. It will be more extensive and have greater depth than we have in our typical day and a half session. We will use video, audio, charts, graphs and various other methods of presentation. CTV is trying to get started with this technology and offered one free CD-ROM production to each sister agency. This will serve both MTAS and CGT and so will be a little more extensive than if was just for one of us.

The East team has accepted this as a team project and we have asked JoeM to coordinate the entire effort. He may be calling on you for help with a section in your area of expertise. We don't have a firm schedule but the entire project may take 18 months.

ICMA Pamphlets - ICMA has produced two new pamphlets. One, as you might expect, lauds the council-manager form of government. The other is a complete departure. It explains the virtue of hiring a professional administrator no matter what he/she is called: manager, administrator, recorder or whatever. Both pamphlets are designed for councilmembers. If you need copies, we have them in the MTAS library.

MTAS Staff meetings - Please remember the MTAS video staff meeting scheduled for Friday, March 29 from 9:30 eastern until 11:30 eastern. This meeting will be devoted to computer training.

Also, we have scheduled another video staff meeting for Thursday, May 30, same time, same places. We will spend some of that meeting on presentation skills.