The following is an e-mail recently sent to County Commission that contains information about what is available on Knox County's web site. Some of these items may be of interest to KnoxViews readers.

TO: All County Commissioners

FROM: Dwight Van de Vate

As we enter the New Year, I wanted to remind you that we keep substantial amounts of information available to the Commission and the public on the County's web site, knoxcounty.org. If you go to our home page and look on the right side, you will see a banner labeled "County Snapshot." Under it you will find the following links:

Purchasing card statements for the last two years. We began posting them monthly in early 2008, as a way to illustrate for the public the scope and effectiveness of the program. As you can see, almost a million dollars a month in goods and services are purchased on p-cards. When we began posting these, I would normally post a notice on a couple local blogs, (KnoxViews, KnoxBlab, etc), but eventually having the records available every month was sufficient.


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Travel card statements from inception of the program are available.

Our Fleet Records are on line, including the type of vehicle, the department it is assigned to, records of who has take home privileges, mileage and more. I would note that this is the most difficult of these records to maintain. The fleet is constantly changing, fleet management is not fully centralized due to the structure of our government (independent elected officials and so forth) and our Fleet Management Department is largely at the mercy of individual departments for current information. But the Fleet staff work hard to keep this record as current as it can be.

Also available is a complete copy of our position description records for all positions under the County's Human Resources system, including title, pay grade, salary range and more. We have not attempted to maintain an on-line position summary that includes the actual employees assigned to a particular position at any point in time, as this record would change almost daily. Also please note that positions that are outside our HR system are not represented here (The Sheriff's Office alone has more employees (+/-1005) than all departments in the entire Executive Branch added together (+/-900); they operate under a Merit Council, similar to a civil service board.)

We keep the current budget available on line, in it's entirety.

We keep a link available to the Charter and Code of Knox County.

Because it has remained a matter of on-going interest and remains relevant even today, we keep the Rodefer-Moss HR Assessment available.

We also maintain a summary of recent bid awards made by Knox County Purchasing.

We hope this information is useful to both you and your constituents. Please let us know if you have any questions or need any additional information.

Dwight Van de Vate
Chief Administrative Officer
Office of County Mayor Mike Ragsdale
400 Main Street, Suite 615
Knoxville, TN 37902
(865) 215-4750 voice
(865) 215-2002 facsimile
(link...)