On-Line Resources for County Commissioners

There are more and more resources available on the Internet to help local government officials perform their job better and more efficiently. For county officials in Tennessee, one of the best sources of information and resources is the University of Tennessee's County Technical Assistance Service (CTAS).

If you are not familiar with it, I want to recommend to you the CTAS website. It is located at http://www.ctas.tennessee.edu. If you go to the main webpage, you will see a column on the left that gives you access to the county officials directory, CTAS reference materials, information about training programs, upcoming events affecting counties, financial information about counties, environmental materials, legislative information and more. The site even has its own demo to help you understand how to use the resources available through the website. To find the demo, click on the tab for CTAS Reference Materials and scroll down to the bottom to find the section related to Interactive Learning. Not only will you find the website demo there which will walk you through all the features of the website, you will also find an on-line guide to the Tennessee Open Meetings Act.

The reference materials portion of the site includes a library of the many useful publications created by CTAS and a section of sample forms, including sample resolutions for use by county legislative bodies. (You can find the sample resolutions here: http://www.ctas.utk.edu/public/resolutions.nsf/View+By+Chapters?openview ) Within the CTAS library of publications you can find the comprehensive Tennessee County Government Handbook, the annual Tennessee County Tax Statistics publication and, under the tab for legislative information, the annual Index of Acts for county governments in which the CTAS legal staff summarizes all the new legislation that passed the TN General Assembly affecting county governments. Also on the page for Legislative Information, you will find a collection of the compiled Private Acts for Tennessee Counties. CTAS is essentially the only source for this comprehensive collection of private acts arranged and compiled by county.

In a future post, I'll provide additional information about training and educational programs offered through CTAS, but for now, I encourage you to spend some time checking out the many resources that CTAS provides to help you serve your consituents better.