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Don’t whine online, complain to City instead - councillors

For anyone with complaints with the city of Flin Flon, members of city council have a suggestion–actually complain to the city instead of posting about it online.
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For anyone with complaints with the city of Flin Flon, members of city council have a suggestion–actually complain to the city instead of posting about it online.

After a conversation about recent dog and animal sightings that were posted online but not reported through the city’s animal control officer, councilors voiced frustration with people’s tendency to post complaints online during council’s July 2 meeting. Councillors, including Mayor Cal Huntley, urged people to either come to City Hall or formally lodge a complaint through the city website or phone service in order to fix the situation.

People need to be aware that, if they have a complaint, they need to formally lodge it if they want it to be dealt with. It’s very easy to do,” said Huntley.

There’s information in The Reminder, on our page in there. There will soon be a new website that will allow a different form of doing that. There’s always City Hall, too - general inquiries, come on in to the front desk, that sort of thing. We need to know who’s making the complaint and what the details of the complaint are, if people want a response from us. We can’t deal with innuendo and stories- come in and let us know what’s going on and we’ll put some resources on it.”

Rants on social media don’t work either. You need to follow the process,” said councillor Colleen McKee.

Making an online post about a city related issue may allow friends, relatives and neighbours to see the problem, but it is not guaranteed that anyone from the city, including members of council or highly regarded employees, may see it. Councillor Tim Babcock said he has looked into online complaints in the past, with some turning out to not be as they were initially described.

As councillors, you follow up on those a lot of times, just on our own personal time. A lot of times what we find out is somebody will put something on Facebook and it’s not necessarily first hand information, it was something that they heard from a neighbor. So the neighbor says, ‘Well, I called City Hall and they didn’t do anything about it.’ Well, a lot of times we actually did. It’ll go to a committee like engineering services and we look into it,” he said.

We had we had a complaint about a lot that was full of cars. It turns out that all those cars are registered and that wasn’t in violation of any bylaw.”

Councillors urged any members of the public with an issue with city services to contact the city directly.

There’s a proper procedure to follow for complaints. If you don’t follow the proper procedure, chances are it’s not going to get dealt with, so if you really want something done about it, then follow the proper procedure,” said councillor Karen MacKinnon.

City Hall might be able to answer your question and probably know the truth. Social media isn’t going to do it but we welcome any inquiries.”

 

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