At a March 12 meeting, the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD) Board of Directors discussed new protocols for addressing what the meeting materials refer to as “atypical customer relations.”
PAWSD District Manager Andrew Connor opened discussion of the issue, stating that he wanted to see if the board was comfortable with moving forward with recommendations from PAWSD legal counsel Marcus Lock of Law of the Rockies for procedures for handling antagonistic interactions with customers.
The board expressed general support for moving forward with these recommendations, with board member Bruce Jones asking that PAWSD look at ways to create efficiencies in its ability to respond to emergencies while also protecting its staff.
He added that protecting staff needs to be the district’s “go to” due to challenges of obtaining and retaining staff.
“I don’t want to see our staff leaving because we’re not doing what we need to do to protect a safe and appropriate working environment for what services we do provide,” Jones said.
PAWSD board member Bill Hudson asked what the cost of implementing the recommendations would be.
Connor explained that the phone services involved are already budgeted and purchased for 2026, although he would need to look into its capabilities to record and save incoming calls in the appropriate manner once it is installed.
He stated that staff could set aside calls involved in antagonistic incidents with customers while deleting the remaining call recordings.
PAWSD board member Alex Boehmer commented that this policy would likely be continuously tweaked in the future based on staff feedback.
He added that he was willing to move forward with Lock’s recommendations and that issues with them could be revisited in the future.
“We need to make sure our staff are being respected,” he said. “Everybody has the right to be upset about their water bill, but …”
In response to a question from PAWSD board chairman Gene Tautges, Connor stated that the staff only needed direction from the board on the issue.
Jones commented that he would hope that staff would not have to manually delete call recordings and that they would be automatically deleted as more recordings accrue unless saved by staff.
Connor stated that this would be true and that unnecessary recordings would be deleted automatically.
He added that PAWSD currently has the ability to manually record calls, but that staff do not know what they are going to encounter when a call is made, so he would like to have all calls recorded so they can be appropriately reviewed as needed.
Connor stated that these recordings would provide evidence of what happened during calls and would help staff determine if they need to limit a particular customer to email correspondence.
Hudson asked if accounts limited to email correspondence could reach PAWSD by phone in case of an emergency.
Connor stated that these customers could still make emergency calls and that these could be directed to voicemail first, after which staff can listen to the voicemail and contact the customer or determine next steps.
Jones commented that the ability of customers limited to email correspondence to make emergency calls should be explained during the email correspondence, although it should be noted that emergency calls go to a different number than normal calls.
Tautges then commented that Connor had direction from the board to move forward.
“We appreciate this,” Connor said.
josh@pagosasun.com
>