6.1. ERMUSR 09-15-2010 - Laserfiche WebLink

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completely, or never getting through at all. We received a number of emails and a number of phone calls throughout the remainder of the day from customers voicing dissatisfaction in trying to contact us during the outage. As a staff, we discussed some things we might be able to do differently in the future, such as having apre-recorded message ready to place on the phones in the event of such an outage again, and exploring the option of "unrolling the phones" without the assistance of Bob Pearson (he, of course, is onboard with trying to figure this out as well.) One other thing that came out of this outage experience is GRE offered to look into ERMU utilizing the system their member utilities use for receiving customer calls to report the outage and respond back to the customers that they are aware of an outage. GRE's system is automated and once they recognize there is an outage they convert the system over to the automated service. GRE is working on a proposal for us to determine what the cost would be. There are some additional technical items to work through because the database that drives the automated system is interactive. It helps identify who is calling and where they are calling from, as well as let the customer know they are aware of an outage. There will also be an increase in our monthly fee for this dispatch service. As I have more details on this, I will bring them forward. Some really good news is that I have received our medical insurance renewal rate for 201 I and it is a zero increase. Our 201 I rates will be the exact same rates we currently have. If you recall, our dental rates are locked in until January 1, 2012 and so the 201 1 insurances wIll all be the same as 2010. Per commission request, I looked into a check reader/processor for the front counter. Our bank could offer a 1.5% transaction fee, plus $.25 per transaction, with a minimum charge of $40 per month, and an additional monthly fee of $15. The check reader does not have to be purchased separately, it is provided for using their service. In using this equipment, the funds would be verified (although not 100% guaranteed) as the check is processed at the front counter. The volume of checks we process at the front counter is an average of 10 per day, with a max of 20. Using an average amount of $175, an estimated cost would be X590 per month for this service. Staff estimates they collectively spend an average of l 5 to 30 minutes processing an NSF. If it were assumed that al] NSFs come from the counter traffic, and currently we have an average of approximately 24 NSFs in a given month (varying from I S to 33 per month) that cost is approximately $276 per month. While it is not known definitely, it is suspected that the majority of NSFs are not from the counter traffic, but the mail in payments.