10/08/2001

Governor's Conference call - Governor Sundquist conducted a conference call with all cities and all counties invited last Thursday. The purpose was to discuss homeland security and you have received an email from Roy Eckert with a summary of the meeting. What you may not know is that we notified all cities within the space of about three hours. It took several people helping: Jennifer, Sandy, Ann, Donna, Veronica, Daisy, Nancy, Brenda, and Armintha. We sent a fax to every city that has a fax machine. We also sent an email to every city with an email address. We made a phone call to the some 40 cities without a fax. What slowed us down was the time it takes for the fax machine to dial the number, make the connection, and transmit the message. So, we had six fax machines working for most of Wednesday afternoon. Nancy found four machines we could borrow in our Knoxville building. Thanks to everyone it worked well.

Mark Dudek - Mark's first day is TODAY. Please welcome him after he gets back from the UT orientation.

Legal Consultant - We have hired Dennis Huffer for our remaining legal consultant vacancy. Dennis has been Director of Legal Services for the TML Risk Management Pool. He has over 24 years of legal experience including 5 years at MTAS in Knoxville as codification and legal consultant from 1977 - 1982. He was the MTAS intergovernmental relations consultant assigned to TML from 1982 - 1989. Since then he's been with the Pool. We're glad to welcome Dennis back. He will start November 1. Since Melissa also starts that day, it means in November we will be fully staffed with attorneys for the first time since May when Pamela resigned.

Orientation design team - We had an interim report from Margaret and Rick during the management team conference call this morning. The team is still planning to complete this project by November 1.