The Peoria City Council narrowly approved a $90,000, six month contract with the Group O call center to answer questions about public safety pension fee bills that will be sent out soon to property owners.
The council voted 6 to 5 Tuesday to approve the contract.
City Manager Patrick Urich said these services are needed.
"As our experience has been when we moved the garbage fund to its own individual bill, and then when we instituted the stormwater utility bill, we received a significant amount of calls," Urich said. "We don't have the staff here to handle that."
The fee is supposed to raise $1.2 million this year towards paying down city fire and police pensions. But the call center money will come out of those fees.
That rubbed At-Large Councilman Sid Ruckriegel the wrong way.
"The citizens, when they see this, are expecting each and every dollar to go to the pension. They're not expecting it to go to a call center that they may or may not use," he said.
Other council members suggested city employees or a local call center could have handled the service to provide better answers than the Milan, Ill.-based Group O.
However, Urich said the city only has 47 phone lines to handle both in-going and out-going calls. The volume of calls is expected to be heavy when the bills are sent out to 45,000 Peoria property owners.
Owners of a property with a building of less than 5,000 square feet will pay $50 a year. Properties more than that will be bill $300 a year. Individual parcels will be billed between $25 and $200.
At-Large Councilwoman Beth Jensen said there should have been better communication to property owners from the city before now since it was implemented nearly a year ago.
The fee was approved last December by the previous council, also on a 6-5 margin.
