Knox County Mayor Tim Burchett received mileage reimbursement  for thousands of dollars of travel to events outside the purview of his role as mayor, according to a competing campaign in the recently completed Republican congressional race..

Second Congressional District candidate Jason Emert’s campaign requested documentation for all of Burchett’s travel reimbursements since becoming mayor. The documentation, which was shared with the News Sentinel, includes thousands of pages of receipts, mileage logs and event descriptions.

Burchett, Emert's campaign alleges, incorrectly billed the county  for a total of approximately 11,000 miles worth of travel that  had nothing to do with the functions of the mayor’s office and was incorrectly reimbursed $6,100.

According to the campaign, those miles included trips for 113 personal meals, 46 political donor meals, 124 funerals, 90 campaign events and 94 non-mayoral events among others.

The events included a 220-mile-trip to speak at a Johnson City Libertarian Party meeting in June 2017, 43.5 miles to the Anderson County Republican Party’s 2017 Reagan Day Dinner, and an 89-mile-trip for a Roane County Republican Club dinner in June 2016.

"For eight years the taxpayers of Knox County have been footing the bill for Mayor Burchett to galavant (sic) around the state to various political functions and personal engagements without any accountability whatsoever,” Emert spokesman Chris Olmstead said in a statement.

Knox County spokesman Michael Grider said there has been no wrongdoing.

“The mayor only logs mileage for travel to and from events and meetings he’s attending in his capacity as mayor,” he said in a statement. “If there was any question about the validity of the mileage, the finance department would have questioned it, because there is a multi-step review process in keeping with proper accounting practices.”

Ethics complaint filed

Knoxville politico Ken Gross said he filed an ethics complaint about Burchett’s travel with the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury last Saturday.

Gross is a member of the Tennessee Republican Party’s State Executive Committee and also was a one-time Second Congressional District candidate. But he pulled out of the race and endorsed Jimmy Matlock’s campaign in November.

Gross denied his complaint filing was politically motivated.

“When you’ve got black and white information posted and you look at it and see something’s wrong, (you have to act),” he said. “How it turns out is how it turns out. But to me, it’s just not right. It’s not how I expect our county (officials) to act.”

County spokesman Grider dismissed the complaint.

“It is important to note that the person who supposedly filed a complaint is a former opponent in the mayor's Congressional race and has since dropped out and endorsed another candidate, and it's unfortunate that they are wasting taxpayer resources for political purposes,” he said in a statement issued shortly before Thursday's election.

Burchett defeated Matlock in Thursday's election by about 49 percent to 35 percent. Emert ran a distant fourth in the seven-way race with a little more than 2 percent of the vote. Ashley Nickloes, a lieutenant colonel in the Tennessee Air National Guard, finished third with about 11 percent of the vote.