12/15/2005

Welcome! - Carolyn Hicks has joined MTAS as Administrative Support Assistant II working the front desk and as part of the training team. She has been with us for about the last two months and accepted our offer to move to a full time position. Carolyn has worked in the UT Human Resources department and prior to that in several retail positions. She has a degree from the Tennessee Technology Center in Knoxville. She explains that customer service was important in her previous jobs and it's certainly important at MTAS. We're glad she's here.

NLC Conference - The National League of Cities held it's annual Congress of Cities in Charlotte, NC last week with about 3,500 attendees. Here are some excerpts from the sessions I attended:
There were a couple of panel discussions about the response to Katrina and Rita featuring several of the Mayors involved.

Total cost of Katrina so far is $34 billion – it may be as high as $200 billion.

There were over 1,300 people killed.

At one time 80% of New Orleans was under water.

Mayor Nagin of New Orleans said in retrospect he would have declared a mandatory evacuation earlier. He would never plan again to wait for the federal help to arrive.

The FEMA representative said: "We plan for the worst and this one was worse than we planned."

Mayor Joe Riley of Charleston, SC (Hurricane Hugo) suggested the US military create a commander who would be responsible for quick response to major disasters, but who would operate under local control. His city sent 52 police officers as a self-contained and self-supporting unit to Gulfport, MS to help.

The Mayor of Gulfport mentioned an unusual problem. The port handles large quantities of frozen chickens and pork bellies. Several days after the hurricane these became a real heath hazard as they were scattered all over town.

The Mayor of Beaumont, TX where they faced wind and storm damage said to make sure the city wasn’t part of the problem in recovery. They announced that building permits for storm repair were not required before starting work and then he sent the building inspectors door-to-door to issue permits.

Robert Reich, former US Secretary of Labor and professor of economics at Brandeis University.

The economy is starting to revive. Working against it is the size of the federal budget deficit, the housing bubble breaking, and high fuel costs, but overall it is getting better.

There are 44 million people in the US without health insurance.

Globalization is a term that has gone from obscurity to meaninglessness faster than most. Everything is coming from everywhere. 40% of what the US imports comes from US companies with plants overseas.

Toyota is a major US auto manufacturer.

Health care

Cities spend $68 billion on health care. That's up 11% from a year ago.

Starbucks pays more for health care than for coffee.

There doesn't seem to be a good short-term solution. Cities are trying to cost share with their employees and trying ways to avoid costs.

The long-term solution seems to be to encourage people to stop preventable behaviors – poor health habits such as smoking, excessive drinking, over eating, and lack of exercise. The speaker (the doctor who is president of the AMA) mentioned eight, but I couldn't keep up.

Nashville has a program of intensive case management that has saved 6 – 9% of its health care costs.

Michael Abrashoff, former commander of the USS Benfold has written a great management book: It's Your Ship.

And finally Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul, and Mary can still sing, but more to the point is the founder of Operation Respect, which is a foundation that works with schools to improve student-to-student relationships.