Staff Appreciation

We recently celebrated another round of our biannual employee appreciation and invite you to congratulate our staff for their hard work, dedication, and years of service.

In August, Doug Burton celebrated his 30th anniversary with the Knoxville Regional Transportation Planning Organization. Doug is a principal planner and our expert on all things transit and Title VI. He works closely with Knoxville Area Transit (KAT), Knoxville-Knox County Community Action Committee (CAC), East Tennessee Human Resource Agency ETHRA, and other local agencies focused on transit in our region.

In addition to this major milestone, we also want to highlight staff members who were nominated by colleagues to receive Planning’s Staff Appreciation Awards. Mike Reynolds and Liz Albertson were recognized for staff achievement. Both planners recently accepted extra work on top of their regular responsibilities while we were in the process of hiring new staff. Liz worked on a greater than normal number of plan amendments and rezonings, while Mike took over the responsibilities of our previous historic preservation planner. The willingness of both of these staff members to take on extra work to ensure that things continued to run smoothly was appreciated by all.

In addition to their recognition, Tina Piatt was also given a staff appreciation award. Tina is Planning’s sole finance officer, responsible for grants management, financial reporting, and human resources. Her success in this role stems from her organization and attention to details. This ability to make things run smoothly from behind the scenes means she doesn’t get much credit for the important work she does much of the time. Because of this, we are particularly happy that she received this recognition.

Though we know better than anyone that our staff is doing important work, we always enjoy these awards. It gives give us an excuse to recognize contributions certain individuals are making to our team to ensure we’re able to best serve our community. Help us congratulate them on their hard work!