Times-Union
WARSAW — The city of Warsaw has extended its Spanish call center service through the end of the year.
The city board of works on Friday voted to extend the service through the end of 2023 at a cost of $15,680.
Mayor Joe Thalllemer, who chose not to seek re-election, said the decision going forward after this year will be left with the next mayor.
The Spanish call center went live in November and there’s been a period of just trying to get the word out about it.
“We’ve kind of been doing some beta testing, if you will, and we’ve had a pretty good start. I mentioned to somebody I got my first complaint about the roads in a bilingual call, so it tells me that it’s working,” he said.
“But we want to extend this at least through the end of the year, so we’ve got a period of time to evaluate how effective this is.
Staci Young, assistant to the mayor said getting the word out about the service has been a work in progress.
“In our Hispanic community, promoting things works best by word of mouth, and so it has taken some time of getting people out in the community talking with these individuals, letting them know about this opportunity,” she said.
Within the last month or so, she said they’ve seen a big uptick with the Spanish call center.
“As we head into spring and summer, our call volume for different situations increases dramatically. We expect that to happen with this as well,” she said.
Thallemer said the city has had great success with Language Matters as far as getting documents translated.
