December 9, 2020
Poor communications from Council are the single biggest source of complaints from residents, Mayor Brett Otto told Wednesday’s SBRC Standing Committee meeting.
The Mayor made the comment during a lengthy discussion about a proposed Customer Service Charter to be considered at January’s General Meeting.
The Charter will set maximum time limits for Council staff – and Councillors – to respond to customer requests, with the aim of improving service levels and making response times more uniform and predictable.
The Mayor said he had noticed since he was elected in March that poor communication was at the root of most complaints about Council.
The lack of clear timeframes for getting a response from Councillors or staff caused annoyance and frustration for many residents.
He believed this had not been a major issue prior to the 2008 Council amalgamation because the old Councils had been much smaller, had fewer staff and had to deal with fewer regulations.
But during the past 12 years the South Burnett Regional Council’s bigger size and scope had built barriers between Council and the general community.
Mayor Otto said he believed this was counter-productive, and the solution was to introduce a new policy that would ensure customers had their issues responded to in a uniformly prompt way.
Debate over the new policy was largely focussed on the maximum time customers should be asked to wait for a response from staff or Councillors – two, five or 10 days.
Several Councillors argued that in general, the shorter the time, the better.
Against this, officers noted some requests Council received were highly technical and required a lot of background work to produce an adequate response.
They suggested that a short response to tell customers that a more detailed response would be forthcoming in a set number of days might be a better procedure.
Another issue was the volume of customer requests, with officers noting Council now receives about 15,000 a year (ie. between 50 and 60 every working day).
Responding to this volume of requests required a large amount of staff resources, so it was important to ensure any new system was properly resourced to meet any new customer service requirements.
In the end – after almost an hour of discussion – Councillors voted to continue workshopping the policy to find a set of time frames that would suit most situations.
A final version of the policy is now expected to be adopted early next year.
