Elliot Lake City Hall recently began using an automated phone system that the acting director of public works applied to solve a problem in a novel way, at least for the city, anyway.
Bill Goulding says the city used to have a 24-hour public works incident reporting line for the public to report water outages or water main breaks but it turned out to cause more problems than it solved so it was shut down.
Now, people can call 705-915-0357 to report issues such as water main or sewer line breaks any time of the day or night, any day of the week.
Goulding says callers will be greeted with an automated message informing them they are talking to an automated system and instructing them on what information they should leave in a message.
That information will then be transcribed by the system and sent in an email to the appropriate staff member to act on.
"It was rather simple to implement and has already been used a couple times," Goulding said. "It worked out really well."
He says the new system will allow public works to respond to incidents in a more timely manner and work more efficiently.
For all non-emergent issues, people should still contact 705-848-2287 Ext. 2600.