It’s lights out for the SaskPower cashier services in six Saskatchewan communities, office closures that the NDP Opposition says are a blow to rural residents.
But the Crown power utility says the decision to curtail walk-in service for bill payments in Assiniboia, Biggar, Humboldt, Kamsack, Rosthern and Weyburn as of Aug. 31 is a continuation of a process that began in 1996.
“We’ve been consolidating our customer services operations into a more centralized location,” said Blair Debruyne, manager of calls centres and collections with SaskPower.
The walk-in, face-to-face method of payment has been on the decline, Debruyne said, with less than 15 per cent of SaskPower customers in the affected communities choosing to pay their bills by going in person to the local office.
“Having an employee sitting in a small town rural office is one of the most expensive things we do to collect cash payments, when everything that person does can be done in a different location, with the exception of dealing with the person face-to-face,” he said.
Most employees at the affected locations had already retired or moved on to other work at SaskPower in the lead-up to the changes, he said.
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SaskPower service personnel, such as those who respond to outages or put in new services, are still present in the affected communities, he noted.
But NDP SaskPower critic Warren McCall criticized the loss of the cashier services under a Saskatchewan Party government that, since taking office in 2007, has promoted the province as being “ready for growth” and a party that bills itself as a friend of rural Saskatchewan.
“Humboldt is a fine example of a community that’s growing, that has the base there that you would think demands a good customer service representation on the part of a corporation like SaskPower,” he said.
“Anytime you diminish the customer service component like this it moves the company further away from the people it’s trying to serve and we think that this is going to make for worse service in what are fairly sizable communities, and it will be particularly hard on rural families but seniors first and foremost,” McCall said.
Debruyne said that cashier services at 17 offices were shut down in 1996, followed by five more in 2006 and three in 2007. Others will likely follow suit in the future.
“Since we started this process in 1996, the plan would be to continue to consolidate our smaller offices as attrition opportunities present themselves,” he said.
Assiniboia Mayor Paul Topola said any time an office is lost in his community “it’s a concern.”
“I don’t know what the usage of the office was, but I do know that it was fairly well used,” Topola said, when asked about the impact on his town.
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