Economic Development Education Grants Announced

Matt Kisber, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development announced a grant to the University of Tennessee Institute for Public Service (IPS) which will allow the organization to award $30,000 in Three-Star scholarships for city and county elected officials. The scholarships, overseen by the UT IPS and ECD, will be used for continued economic development education and 28 rural Tennessee counties and cities will be eligible to apply.

“This partnership between the University of Tennessee Institute for Public Service and ECD allows us to reach out to a group that is traditionally underserved,” ECD Commissioner Matt Kisber said. “It is imperative to further the education of our economic development professionals across the state. They will help create the higher-skilled, better-paying jobs of tomorrow.”

Grant recipients will receive the opportunity to participate in one or more of three training options provided by the UT IPS:

• The Tennessee Basic Economic Development Course, which focuses on fundamental concepts, tools and best practices needed to be successful in today’s economic development environment;
• The County Officials Certificate Training Program and Municipal Elected Officials Academy, nationally recognized training programs that provide specialized technical, administrative and managerial training to county government and municipal elected officials; and
• The Pioneer Academy, a joint city/county training program that educates attendees on economic development, planning and zoning, and retail economic development.

The Three-Star Scholarship Grants will accept applications from 28 rural Tennessee counties who have been determined to be undeserved in elected official training by the UT IPS Fiscal Year 2009 Training Data Report and by Economic Status of Tennessee as of July 1, 2009.

To see a list of these counties and to find out more information about applying for these scholarships, go to the ECD website here

For more information on applying for a Three-Star Scholarship Grant, please contact Beth Phillips, (865) 974-0268 or beth.phillips@tennessee.edu. All scholarships will be awarded no later than June 30, 2010.

Possible Impact of Census on Official's Salaries

Counties should begin thinking now about how the upcoming 2010 census could impact officials' salaries. The census process will begin in earnest over the next few months. For census years, April 1 is set as the formal date of the census. This has an impact on county official's salaries as minimum statutory salaries are set for county officials based on population classes. On an annual basis, county officials' minimum salaries are adjusted based on the percentage increase in compensation granted to state employees the prior year. As the state budget has tightened, state employee raises have been rare and therefore county officials' salaries have also seen few increases. After the census is complete however, a number of Tennessee counties will see population increases that move them up one or, in a small number of cases, two population classes and therefore trigger new minimum salaries for county officials. It is important to plan in advance and set aside funds for this purpose if you expect your county to move into a new class, because after the census is certified the salary increases will become retroactive back to April 1 of this year.

I will try to follow up with more information on this topic and a projection of those counties likely to move up a class in an upcoming newsletter. The staff at CTAS has already done some excellent work in this area to assist counties in planning for this budgetary increase and they brought this issue to my attention.

Governor Bredesen's Proposed Budget Resources On-line

A great deal of information about Governor Bredesen's proposed budget is available on-line. At the following website, http://www.tennesseeanytime.org/gov/state-of-the-state/, you can read a news release related to the state of the state address, read the full text of the address, link to archived video of the speech, view a 37 slide power point summary presentation of the 2010-2011 Proposed Budget and even access the full electronic verions of the 2010-2011 Proposed Budget. Be warned, the full budget document comes in two parts, with the larger document being over 670 pages long. In addition, from the link above you can access archived video of Governor Bredesen's Open Budget Hearings, which were held in November 2009 as the budget process began.

SCORE Summarizes Tennessee's Race to the Top Application

The Statewide Collaborative on Reforming Education has summarized the state's Race to the Top Application. As previously posted on this blog, the state's application was over 1,000 pages long. The six page SCORE summary can be seen here. For a link to the full application, see the posted below dated January 21st.

Comptroller Announces New Website with County Financial Info

Citizens can now look up financial information for most counties across Tennessee online, thanks to a new service that is being offered by the state Comptroller’s office. By visiting a page on the Comptroller’s web site, it is now easy to find detailed financial information about revenues and expenditures for 89 of the state’s 95 counties. The web address is: www.comptroller1.state.tn.us/TAG/

These 89 counties represent those audited by the county audit division of the Comptroller's office. Six counties are audited annually by private certified public accounting firms rather than the Comptroller’s office, so their financial information isn’t available on the site at this time. Those counties are: Davidson, Hamilton, Knox, McMinn, Shelby and Washington.

The information is compiled from the annual audit reports done by the Comptroller’s Division of County Audit. Jim Arnette, the division’s director, said revenue and expenditure data from the last four fiscal years is now available at the site, which is called Transparency and Accountability for Governments (TAG) in Tennessee. Arnette said several years’ worth of data will be kept available for access through the TAG Tennessee archives.

“We envision this as a tool citizens can use to keep up with what their local governments are doing,” Arnette said. “And local and state government officials should find it helpful to have easy access to this information as well.” The TAG Tennessee site includes information about school departments, but not other agencies, component units or enterprise funds that are accounted for separately from the counties’ main budgeted operations.

State of the State Address - Budget to Be Unveiled

Governor Bredesen will give his State of the State Address to a joint convention of the Tennessee General Assembly this evening. The address is expected to focus on the proposed budget, which will also be unveiled tonight. Many interested parties are nervous about the changes to come, with 6-9% cuts expected in many state departments and agencies. These cuts come on the heels of last year's cuts and cumulatively reflect over a 20% reduction in some departmental budgets.

Since many governmental functions are shared between state and local government levels (K-12 education, corrections, transportation, the court system, etc.) changes in the size and funding of state government impacts county government. The state shares certain streams of revenue with local governments, it reimburses local governments for some services they provide and it funds some operations jointly. Absent a groundbreaking piece of legislation, the state budget proposed tonight will probably have a greater impact on county government in Tennessee than any other individual piece of legislation considered and passed by the General Assembly this year.

Senate Bill Filling Deadline Passes

This year, breaking with its usual practice, the State Senate established a single bill filling deadline of January 28 (last Thursday). In the past, Senators had a period of unlimited filling before one deadline followed by a second period when each Senator was allowed to file only 9 more bills. Unless there is a backlog in the system due to the rush of bills at the deadline followed by the severe weather that hit Nashville the end of last week, it appears the Senate topped out at SB 3915 at the deadline. This reflects a little over 1500 new bills filed for this second year of the legislative session. Almost 2400 bills were filed in the first year. A few more bills will trickle in for private acts for individual cities and counties and it is possible a few bills can make it through the late bills committee. Still, the number is well below recent years.

The second year of a legislative session often has fewer bills since there are many left still pending from the first year, but usually it is not this significant of a reduction. The earlier filing deadline would have been a factor; but, the expected challenging budget has led many legislators not to even file legislation that comes with a significant price tag. This reduction in total number of bills filed reverses a trend that had seen bill fillings growing rapidly from session to session.

In the late 1990's and the earlier part of this decade, 2-year sessions of the General Assembly topped out between 3250 to 3550 bills. Totals fluctuated up and down within that narrow window. The 103rd General Assembly completed its work in 2004 with a total of 3529 Senate Bills. The 104th General Assembly upped the total to 4052; the 105th to 4280. With 2400 bills filed in the first year of this session, the 106th appeared poised to push that record further until this year.

Now the work of sorting through the impact of the legislation begins for legislative committees, staffers and organizations like this one.