The Crown Corporation announced earlier this week that they would be closing 12 district offices in southern Manitoba by May 19. Boissevain is on that list.
According to Hydro spokesman Bruce Owen, the move has its roots several years ago – at the time people in town feared Boissevain’s office would be on the chopping block.
“In 2013 Manitoba Hydro made the decision to consolidate 24 district offices into existing Customer Service Centres (CSC),” Owen explained, “and at that time the remaining 12 district offices were still under review. It is now time to move forward with the closure of these remaining 12 district offices; Boissevain being one of them.”
The thrust for the move includes being able to use resources more efficiently. They believe that moving employees and equipment into Customer Service Centres makes for a “one stop shop” situation for all services, and the centralized planning and allocation of resources allow for a quicker response time for electrical outages. It allows the CSC’s to locate through computers the employees in the area of an outage and send them where they need to go based on location, driving times, work priority and skills required. A Hydro release said after the first consolidation in 2013, they were able to reduce the average duration of customer outages while maintaining average outage response times.
As well, finances play a big role. Owen said once the moves are fully implemented, the project is expected to reduce costs by $2 million annually and avoid doing about $50 million worth of maintenance and upgrades to the 36 different offices.
There was a decline in the use of district offices by the general public. In 2007, 24 percent of customers paid their Hydro bills in offices compared to six percent in 2016. In April 2013, 11 percent were paying online with MyBill. As of April 1 of this year, 19 percent of customers, 115,402 people, were paying online.
“Consolidating customer service operations allows Manitoba Hydro to use resources more efficiently, better meeting the evolving customer expectations and growing system maintenance requirements – while also reducing operating costs.”
Owen said there was nothing specifically ‘wrong’ at the Boissevain office, but it followed the trends. Only five percent of customers were paying bills at the office by June of 2016, and Hydro felt there was a better way of organizing, placing and using their employees than scattering them around the province.
Although there were many more employees working out of the Boissevain office in the past, currently there are three – two gas field workers and one administrative representative, who will be working out of the Killarney office.
Office buildings will be put up for sale, with first shot going to local or district governments. The sale process could take a while as there needs to be an environmental assessment and cleanup if necessary.
Other communities impacted by this are Pilot Mound, Glenboro, Fisher Branch, Gimli, Winnipegosis, Ste. Rose, Grandview, McCreary, Beausejour, Powerview and Falcon Lake.
Owen said they do not expect it to impact communities in a big way. The customers who paid at the office can do it through their financial institution or online. For many years, Hydro has made use of their Mobile Workforce Management system to dispatch work to field staff where and when it is needed. He emphasized that it is not expected to badly impact the response to problems.
“We’ve seen in other CSCs that response time wasn’t negatively affected overall, and our ability to gather staff and focus our resources on trouble response is actually improved by having them report and be scheduled by a central location,” Owen stressed. “We continue to take advantage of the MWM system to dispatch closest personnel to trouble calls during the day which shortens response time. After-hours response time isn’t affected as we still have staff living in the Boissevain area who are in a position to be able to respond to trouble in that area quickly.”
Speaking right after hearing the news, Boissevain-Morton Councilor Rob Adams said Council had yet to talk to each other about the situation and so did not have a specific comment. He said they would be meeting Thursday morning and would discuss the change and see what measures, if any, they would be taking in response.
by PAUL RAYNER, Recorder staff