JEDDAH, 14 November 2007 — Members of the public will no longer experience heavy crowds when visiting the city hall as the Jeddah Municipality is soon to introduce a new electronic service allowing the public to gain answers to their queries through the Internet, e-mail, fax and SMS.
“Future plans include unifying all of the services offered by the municipality into a comprehensive unit through electronic channels,” said Salem Baraidah, head of the Public Affairs Department at the Jeddah Municipality.
Baraidah said that the first step involves establishing public affairs offices in all of the municipality’s branches to ease the pressure of people visiting the main municipal headquarters. The second step involves providing a system to allow the public to follow up on queries via the Internet, e-mail, fax and SMS.
Baraidah said that around 18,000 members of the public visit the municipality each month.
This amounts to approximately 700 queries a day that are served through 41 tellers. Visitors include ordinary members of the public, investors and companies, and most queries relate to three main departments: investment coordination, urban planning, licenses and real estate.
Visitors then individually go to their concerned department to finalize paper work. “Unifying all services into one department and offering an e-monitoring system would help ease pressure and facilitate work flow for both the municipality and members of the public,” Baraidah said.
He added that the municipality has started training more than 50 officials on how to deal with the public, and provide assistance in the fastest and most easy way.
