Board of Aldermen 03-16-2020 Page 17
answer, social media will blow that up in a heartbeat, so even if you have to write down, “here’s the
official response answer’ for the people that help you, it would go a long way. Because like | said, if it
gets out in different answers, people are going to pick up on that and then they won't trust the call in.
Director Kates
Sure. So one of the things that we had talked about today, again we’ve done a lot of this stuff, we’ve
just never done it to this massive scale. We've set up call centers before related to natural disasters,
so if we’ve got a major Noreaster that comes through the City, we’ve had a line set up where people
can call in and report non-emergency related things, “I’ve got a tree down in the middle of the road
here” or “I need a bottle of oxygen re-filled at my property”. Those types of things, things that we don’t
want people calling 911 for. The challenge that we recognized during those incidents going back to
the whole Lessons Learned/Continuous Improvement, if you have to have a shared document, shared
location where everybody who is answering a phone in the City can see that one location. So that way,
the messaging that goes out, that question and answer is the same regardless.
So Public Health has already started to develop some of the like frequently asked questions related to
the health side of things. As we start seeing some of the consequences that are non-public health-
related like, “Il need food”, “I need things ...” that are outside of the scope of COVID-19, we are going
to add those types of things to our canned responses that we are providing back to citizens and it will
all be in one central location so that way if they call Public Health or if they call the Mayor’s Office of if
they call Public Works as an example, they all have the same information to be able to provide back to
the residents.
Alderman Dowd
So Lesson Learned from the Middle School Project that would cut down on some of your calls is to
have a place where people can go look at frequently asked questions and then they won't have to call
in and ask you again. You can grow that list as you get more questions and more answers.
Director Kates
Exactly.
Alderman Klee
Actually that was my comment and my question, these shared documents and frequently asked
questions, they will be accessible by the public?
Director Kates
Yes, we would want the same information that we are pushing out via the phone to be the same
information that’s on the web. So it all has to be on the same platform and that’s the concept behind
the Joint Information Center. So having all of the folks who do external relations with the community
all have to be in sync on the messaging that they are pushing out. Even something as simple as if we
send out a Press Release, we need to have all those players review it first so that way there’s not
something that’s not correct in there that goes out and then we have to send out a separate Press
Release from the other Department to explain those things. So as much as possible we want to have
