OUR commits to serving western Jamaica…from afar
Director general of the office of Utilities regulation (our) Ansord E Hewitt has reassured residents of western Jamaica that even though it’s unlikely there will be a branch of the watchdog group in their section of the island anytime soon, this will not prevent the our from helping them with concerns about service providers. “We are aware that there is an ongoing request for the OUR to set up an office in the west. We saw that in our canvas. We cannot promise you that this will happen soon, or at all,” Hewitt said. He was addressing a forum with representatives and stakeholders from Trelawny, St James, Hanover, and Westmoreland last Thursday.
The evening virtual event was the first-ever, in the OUR’S 25 years of service to Jamaica, dedicated to the western end of the country.
“If there is one thing that this COVID pandemic has taught us is that we can do business from anywhere. What we can commit to, therefore, is to use a combination of the available technology and leverage, in partnership with critical stakeholders in the west, to ensure you have both the sense and reality of greater access to the OUR,” the director general said.
“In the meantime, we wish to emphasise that the OUR is very accessible to customers. We don’t have an automated system so you get to speak with a human when you call. We can be reached via a website contact page and direct messages or social media pages. Our website is zero-rated, which means that you can access it without eating into your data,” Hewitt stressed.
To prove his point about accessibility, he noted that their Kingston office had not taken any walk-in clients since 2020 as part of COVID containment measures, but had seen “record increases in a number of matters we have”.
“Don’t mind that we are not in the west, we can be reached. We continue to host community meetings and never seem to turn down requests to meet with stakeholders,” he assured.
“Please reach out to us if you need us to come and talk at any of your community meetings. We’ll even bring utility providers with us. They have given their 100 per cent support every time we ask them to journey with us to our community and interact with their customers,” added Hewitt.