Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services

NNSL (May 21/99) - One lunch hour about four or five years ago, Prem Persad overheard someone near the end of a long line-up in city hall lament that their lunch hour was going to be spent waiting their turn to pay a city bill.

"I thought, that's the only time people have to pay their bills, at lunch hour or on coffee breaks," recalls Persad, computer system manager for the city.

That was the beginning of a process that has resulted in anyone with a telephone and a credit card being able to pay their bills "at your convenience, not ours."

The city Interactive Voice Response system (920-city) has been up and running for about four years, with more services added each year. Today, you can do any kind of business you want with the city, from paying your water bill to renting an arena or signing up for summer programs.

For those who prefer the Internet to the telephone, the City of Yellowknife's Virtual City Hall (http:\\city.yellowknife.nt.ca) provides all the registration and bill-paying options of the IVR system.

City hall watchers can also review committee and council minutes and agendas at the site, which also has information for visitors, dates and descriptions of upcoming events and city hall contact numbers.

Persad designed both the IVR system and the Virtual City Hall. Programming for the systems was done by outside contractors. The systems have been emulated (a nice way of saying 'copied') by several southern cities.

"What is sad, is people of Yellowknife are not aware of this," said Persad. "We're getting international recognition and people here don't know about it."

For its Virtual City Hall, the city has been selected as a finalist in the Global Bangemann Challenge, an information technology competition run out of Stockholm, Sweden.

The City of Yellowknife is one of seven finalists, the only one from North America, in the Small to Medium Sized Enterprise (population less than 20,000) category. In all, the Global Bangemann Challenge attracted 700 entries, 51 of them in the category in which Yellowknife is competing.

Just coming on-line now is something that will be known as a City Card.

The card will be available for use at the pool starting next week. Customers simply pay cash on their card and can use it, or let their kids use it, as a substitute for cash, or draw cash from it for vending machines or locker rentals.

"It's not up yet, but we're working on linking it to the virtual city to transfer money from their credit cards to the city card," said Persad.

The card will also provide, via the Internet, a complete list of transactions conducted with the card.