Pionke receives pretty cool award

Cindy Pionke

Knox County Director of Planning and Development Cindy Pionke was awarded the John F. Exnicios Government Employee Outstanding Service Award at the Southern District Institute of Transportation Engineers annual meeting in April.

The award, established in 2006, recognizes outstanding professionals who make extraordinary contributions to both their community and the public sector transportation engineering profession. It was named in honor of John F. Exnicios, the longtime traffic engineer for the City of New Orleans.

Founded in 1930, the Institute of Transportation Engineers is a community of transportation professionals who serve as a gateway to knowledge and advancement through meetings, seminars and publications. The Southern District of the ITE is one of ten regional subdivisions that includes transportation engineering professionals in the states of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

For more info, click right smack here.

County again prepares for icy weather

If you believe the weather reports, and at this point I do, then looks like it's another end-of-the-week snow job. Heh.

Anyhoo, Knox County Mayor Tim Burchett said in response to this evening's winter weather advisory, the highway crews will begin applying brine to county roads after rush hour - about 6 p.m. - and will continue to treat primary and secondary roads until midnight.

To report a problem with a county road, please call 865-215-5800

No word yet on whether the mayor will join the brine crew again for another round of misadventures.

Mayor part of the road crew today

Knox County offices are closed today, but Mayor Tim Burchett and folks in the Public Works and Engineering Department are putting down salt and brine on the roads.

Yup, that's right. The big man is out there, too.

County Mayor Tim Buchett salting roads with Andrew Bivens

The mayor said he couldn't sleep last night, waking up at 2 a.m. He said what the heck and a few hours later was riding shotgun with a work crew.

It's good for morale, he said, for the top boss to hang with the rest of the folks whose work often goes unnoticed. Plus, he said, it gives him first hand knowledge about what type of equipment and clothing they might need.

“These guys are away from their families right now, working 20 hours and we don't thank them enough,” Burchett said. “When the rest of us are curled up safe in our warm homes, they're out here in this mess and soup.”

The mayor said he's been tweeting away this morning and noted that so far he's seen upside down cars, a salt truck in a ditch and “ambulances and people in a bad way.”

“If you don't need to be out today, then don't go out,” he said.

Asked so far whether he's had any close calls, Buchett said he was giving a radio interview this morning when the truck he was in “got sideways as we were going about eight miles an hour.”

“I told my guy: Dale Earnhardt doesn't have anything on you,” he said chuckling. “It was pretty treacherous. We were right there on a side of a hill with the potential to roll two or three times before we hit.”

In the meantime, Knox County Communications Manager Michael Grider might not have gotten the message that county offices are closed.

“At the office . . . crickets at the City County Building,” he tweeted this moring.

(You can follow the county mayor on Twitter at by clicking right smack here.) 

County prepares for winter weather

Looks like Dwight and the boys over at the county's Engineering and Public Works Department put in some extra work, monitoring the local roads and taking some precautions due to this rainy - potentially snowy - mess.

Anyone who needs to report a road problem or hazardous road condition on a Knox County Road should call 865-215-5800.

In the meantime, click right smack here for the department's weather plan.

County prepares for winter weather

According to my fancy calendar winter start Friday. Nice. Not really. 

AND, according to the fancy spin release coming out of the county's side of the Death Star, the Knox County Engineering and Public Works Department “is taking a proactive approach by preparing its fleet for colder days ahead."

This stuff cracks me up. A news release touting the department for doing something it should be doing???? Oh well. I suppose it could be the worse. You know, bunch of overpaid PR people sitting around doing nothing. And we don't have that in local government. No way.

Anyhoo, the release says the county's highway department is doing some stuff with brine tanks. Click right smack here for all the details.

TBI probe shakes up county 'dirty lot' crew

It started with an anonymous phone call: A handful of employees in the Knox County Engineering and Public Works Department were stealing equipment.

It ended with one worker indicted for theft, a supervisor retiring and another worker fired "for making it through an entire day doing absolutely nothing business-related for Knox County," officials said. Two others were demoted — one because he mowed his lawn on taxpayer time, the other because he falsified his job application.

Although only one person was ever tied to the stolen-equipment tip, the results shook up the public works department's "dirty lot" crew that is typically tasked with cleaning out abandoned buildings and keeping county property tidy.

Officials say the department is better off with this behind them."Since we dismantled this dysfunctional crew and repopulated it with new supervision and personnel, they've been turning in work orders at record pace," said Dwight Van de Vate, engineering and public works director. "We've got good folks in place and they are getting it right."

Here's what happened.