04/27/2004

TML Awards - Consultants need to send their TML award nominations to Carole Graves by Friday.

Travel Reimbursements - The mileage reimbursement is going up to $0.35 per mile in May. Lisa has modified the T-3 database to make the computation automatically depending on the date of travel. That's not what I wrote a couple of weeks ago, but hey, we're getting better.

FY05 Budget - We've completed our budget submittal for FY05 to IPS. We are in much better shape than last year. Sales tax revenues have increased this year and will increase faster next year than we originally estimated. The only negative is that TDEC has had to reduce our contract by $130,000. TDEC is running out of federal funds in the area of our contract. TML is still working to restore the funds in this year's budget. If not, we will pick up most of the balance (and most importantly enough to retain Brett, Bill, and Steve along with most of the operating costs) from our regular account. Most of the TDEC contract expenses will be covered by the TDEC contract along with two contracts the team has developed with the Fleming training center and one grant we have with EPA. As you can imagine, we have worked and reworked the TDEC budget several times during the last month or so. I want to thank Bill, Brett, Steve, Nancy, and Sharon for all their help on all the budget permutations.

In addition, we will add a couple of positions. Initially, we will advertise for an IT administrator position in Knoxville. The purpose of the position is to help Lisa and Debbie keep up with everyone's hardware and software needs. We are looking at a couple of other positions and I will keep you informed as we develop the position descriptions and start recruiting.


Graduation - Jim and I officiated at our first ever graduation of the Municipal Management Academy for 15 supervisors from Franklin last Wednesday. I gave a stirring speech and if I could just get Jim to hum "Pomp and Circumstance", we'd have an act we could take on the road. Seriously, Jim and the rest of the training team have done a great job in jump starting our training program for department heads and supervisors. It's going so well that two of the initial cities - Franklin and Dyersburg have already booked additional classes.