The Knoxville News Sentinel has comments from several County Commissioners regarding the criteria they will use to appoint interim replacements for twelve county offices vacated first by a term limits lawsuit then again by a subsequent "sunshine" lawsuit over the first appointment process.

The special County Commission meeting to appoint interim replacements will be held Wednesday, Feb. 20th at 9AM in the City County Building Main Assembly Room.

Following are the applicants for interim replacements according to the KNS, with links to KNS profiles or resumes submitted by the applicants where available. (Please let me know if this list is not accurate.)

As an editorial comment, I find it interesting and disappointing that none of this is mentioned on the Knox County Commission website.

It's great that they adopted a more open process and conducted a series of public forums for the replacement appointments (prompted by the "sunshine" lawsuit, I'm sure). But there's no announcement of the date, time, or place of the special meeting that I can find on the Knox County website (apologies if I missed it and if someone can find it please let me know), there's no listing of applicants or background information, no minutes or reports from the public forums, no explanation of the process, and no agenda for the meeting. They are leaving it all up to the media to communicate this to the public.

This is pretty lame given the concerns about more "open government" in Knox County. They shouldn't expect the local media (or bloggers for that matter) to do their job for them in terms of outreach and communication, just like the KNS shouldn't have to take them to court to make them do their job out in the open.

(Again, apologies if this information is somewhere on the Knox County or County Commission website. I just wasn't able to find it.)