My office will respond to e-mail messages from Stevens Point constituents with return e-mail, if desired. Because of the unique nature of e-mail correspondence, I believe it is important to be honest about what is and is not feasible. That is the purpose of this message. I hope you will read this information thoroughly. Much of what is stated here may already be familiar to you as an Internet user. However, if there is anything you have questions about or would like to discuss further, please contact the my office at (715) 346-1570.

Who can receive an e-mail response from your office?

I will respond via e-mail to any correspondence that comes to me from Stevens Point residents or from people with ties to the community. Your full name, postal street address, and phone number must be included. Unfortunately, due to staff and resource limitations, I may not be able to return an electronic response to people who do not meet these criteria.

Are my e-mail messages to you, and any you send back to me, private?

The Internet is a public network. A message can be read and even modified at any juncture between sender and receiver. Think of Internet messages as postcards, rather than letters, which can be read by anyone who turns the postcard over. Please be fully aware of this before agreeing to receive electronic responses from my office.

Because of the inherent lack of privacy on the Internet, my office may not respond electronically to any message requesting help with casework, projects, grants, or other personal or privileged information. That is why we ask you to include your phone number in case we need to reach you on personal matters.

If you receive a message which you feel may have been sent to you inadvertently or fraudulently or that you feel may have been modified between my office and you, please report this immediately to my Administrative Assistant.

How quickly will I receive an e-mail response back from you?

Although e-mail certainly increases the speed of correspondence, the "behind-the-scenes" efforts of my staff in responding to mail, and our ongoing commitment to quality, will not always facilitate the kind of speedy response users of Internet e-mail may anticipate.

My office receives numerous letters, phone calls, faxes and e-mails a week. Although we have a very small staff, I have made mail a priority for my office. We make every effort to ensure that each constituent who contacts us receives a timely, accurate and thorough response. My staff researches the issues presented in the correspondence and prepares a response. The response is proofread twice, signed by me and sent out. This process is an integral part of our correspondence to you.

Regardless of how a letter is received in my office, or how we ultimately return our response, that letter must still be routed through my staff. It may take from two days to two months for a letter to complete the process, depending on the amount of research required to respond, the total volume of mail I am receiving at that time, and other factors.

Simply stated, this internal review process precludes me from being able to respond to your message immediately. Although responding electronically will increase the speed by which you receive our response once it is sent from my office, each letter still needs to be routed through my staff so that we can ensure it is responded to properly. I hope you will understand that accuracy and completeness of response are more important to me than speed of response, and that sometimes the two are mutually exclusive.

What is a reasonable time to expect to hear back from you?

You should receive a response from my office within two weeks, and often much sooner. If you have not heard from us within three weeks, or you have reason to believe your message to us did not go through, please contact us by phone to check whether or not your message was received. Please be prepared to submit another copy of your message if it was not received intact in our office.

Will you always respond electronically to my messages?

We will certainly try to respond to your messages in the manner you prefer. But as all of us living in the electronic age know, information systems are prone to outages. If you find a response from us in your postal mailbox rather than your e-mail inbox, you'll know that something was out-of-order in my office when we prepared your response.

Additionally, if you indicate to us that you would like to receive an electronic response, we will try to respond this way to every contact we have from you, unless you indicate otherwise. For example, if you write us a postal letter and do not indicate that you want your response to also come via postal letter, we will respond electronically.

One exception to these scenarios is if our response to you includes an enclosure that cannot be sent in e-mail. In this case, we will send the entire letter - with the enclosure - through the postal mail.

If you are writing only to express an opinion and do not want a reply, please state this in the text of your message. Your opinion will be logged, but no response will be sent.

Should I still include my postal mailing address in my Internet messages to you?

Yes, please include your postal mailing address in any messages you send to us.

What should I do if my Internet ID changes, or I no longer wish to receive electronic communications from your office?

In this case, please contact my Stevens Point office by phone or postal letter to make the change.
Thank you for reading this message. I look forward to hearing from you.
Andrew Halverson, Mayor

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