Skip to content Skip to main navigation Report an accessibility issue

From the Director

by Matt Cate, P.E.

It’s amazing how big a difference a couple of months can make. At my last update I closed this column by saying, “Maybe we can talk about UT Football’s miraculous turnaround and a great start to the season for the UT Men’s and Women’s Basketball teams in my next report.” Two out of three isn’t bad, but it’s not the two that I would have guessed at that time. The football Vols closed out the season with six straight wins to turn in a pretty decent showing for the season and the Lady Vols are off to a good start under new head coach Kelly Harper. Maybe Coach Harper can soon add some more national championship rings to the collection that she earned while playing for the legendary Pat Summitt. Now it’s the men’s basketball team that has hit a rough patch. More help is on the way in the form of a great recruiting class, so this should be a short term issue.

It wouldn’t be a “From the Director” column without mentioning the weather. As I scrolled through the pictures on my phone I saw a lovely picture of my snow-covered yard. That was November 12. It was 61 degrees on Christmas Day and Knoxville hit 78 degrees on December 29. My annual early January trip to Washington, DC, for the National Local Technical Assistance Association’s Winter Business Meeting was the warmest that I can remember with highs in the 70s. It’s been wet, it’s been windy, and I’m sure that we haven’t seen the last of Old Man Winter. No wonder bears hibernate through the winter! Can someone wake me up when spring arrives?

2020 is going to be a year of changes for TTAP. This issue of RoadTalk marks our last quarterly newsletter in the traditional format. Moving forward, the print version of RoadTalk will only find its way to your mailbox twice per year. The internet has changed the format and timeline of the information that we need to share with you over the years, and we’ve decided that a monthly email newsletter is a more effective way of delivering that information to you. Our new “RoadTalk Express” emails will allow us to share webinars, videos, time-sensitive requests for information and feedback, and news as it happens. More importantly, the email newsletter makes it much easier for us to share news from other sources.

Many of you will have already received the January 2020 RoadTalk Express by the time this issue reaches you. If you aren’t on TTAP’s email list, I encourage you to join. Signing up is simple: just visit the TTAP website at http://ttap.utk.edu and look for the form at the bottom of the home page. We will always do our best to respect your time by delivering information to you using the lowest possible number of messages. You can unsubscribe from our list at any time if the information is not what you expected.

Beyond our email newsletter, we are working on several more updates and additions to our program. This list includes new training titles, more website updates, more social media activity (@TNLocalRoads on Facebook), and maybe a few more things that we aren’t quite ready to share. We’ll share more information on these changes through our newsletters. As always, please let me know if there is anything that TTAP can do to help you.


Back-Contents-Forward