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County Mayor Jerry Cunningham has issued the last word on the number of vehicles in the Blount County Sheriff's Office inventory.

In response to continuing requests for information related to the vehicle inventory for the Blount County Sheriff's Office, Cunningham has ordered all vehicle inventory data for the entire county to be placed online. He informed the Blount County Commission in a Feb. 28 letter that also outlines new procedures for requesting information from the county departments under his authority.

"I have also decided to place all information which my Accounting Department has relative to the sheriff's vehicles together with all other county vehicles online," Cunningham wrote.

"Requests for information relative to vehicle inventories have caused an enormous amount of time to be spent by accounting personnel. The Accounting Department has done absolutely everything humanly possible to accommodate the requests and to be as completely transparent relative to the numbers as anyone can be. Still the requests flow in. You now have available online every detail which we possess."

The vehicle inventory can be found online at http://www.blounttn.org/accting/vehicle/capital%20assets%2006-07.htm.

Members of some local citizens groups have claimed that about 25 vehicles were missing from the Sheriff's Office inventory, compared to the number listed in previous audits. Auditors from the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury's Office found deficiencies in the paperwork tracking the disposition of about eight Blount County Sheriff's Office vehicles, according to the 2007 audit report released Dec. 28, but made no mention of actual missing vehicles in the report.

Cunningham has declared the issue a "closed matter."

"From this day forward, each person should do his or her research on the vehicle questions from what is online," Cunningham wrote. "Again, every possible piece of data we possess is online. At this point, if you feel there are still irregularities, you will need to address it with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation or the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I have advised my Accounting Department to move on with the business of the county and to spend no more time on this matter."

In the same letter, Cunningham asked members of the Blount County Commission to contact his office when requesting information from the county departments under his control.

"Should you desire to make a request for information, please tender the request directly to either Amy Cowden or Pat James in my office," Cunningham wrote. "They will then share your request with all of the other commissioners and when the information and/or data is ready, it will be shared by this office with all 21 commissioners.

"I have advised my department heads of this procedure, and they will only process requests forwarded in this manner. However, this does not in any way mean to preclude anyone from calling the department heads directly and reasonably discussing matters that you feel pertinent nor does it attempt to preclude anyone from visiting with the department heads, of course."

Reached by phone Wednesday, Cunningham said the policy targets requests for detailed information that requires extensive work by county staff to gather.

"If you want to talk to somebody, sure, you don't have to run that through me," Cunningham said. "I don't have time to fool with every citizen's requests and reporters should have access, but if you want a lot of data that is going to take a lot of persons to find, that should flow through me. We have citizens and some commissioners walking in and demanding stuff that is taking a department head three to four days to put together, and it pulls them off other stuff. We've got to prioritize."

On its face, the policy does not conflict with state open records law, according to Frank Gibson, executive director of the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government.

"You can't say there is anything improper or illegal about the policy until you know how the policy is being enforced and interpreted, if it's being used to deny access to information that is public and whether it's just being used to delay.

"If it's aimed at just basically controlling work flow, it would all turn on how a court would look at it. ... The law says simply that public records are to be open for inspection during regular business hours of whatever agency has possession of those records, that has been interpreted to mean you are entitled to go in and ask to see something and they should show it to you, unless it contains information the legislature or some other law has determined to be confidential."

The Tennessee Coalition for Open Government Inc. is a nonprofit and nonpartisan alliance of media, citizen, and professional groups working to educate Tennesseans about their right to know about the affairs of their government as set out in the state constitution and the state's "sunshine" and public records laws.

Departments under the authority of the county mayor are account, animal control, building commissioner, building safety, emergency management, environmental health, health clinic, health department, human resources, information technology, maintenance, planning, probation, purchasing, records management, risk management, soil conservation and storm water.