A new, overhauled Lenoir City Utilities Board website offering customer friendly options will soon be online, replacing a defunct website that has been in place almost 15 years.

On Monday, board members saw a taste of the new website, which should be finished and ready to go live by the next board meeting, according to IT director Lee Hartline.

Hartline said the new site will offer easier payment opportunities, department information, a list of current job opportunities and consumer tips.

The current website has broken links, no job openings posted and "some of it hasn't been probably updated since then," Hartline said. "A lot of the information is incorrect as well."

LCUB used Google Analytics, a program that gauges what customers are looking at on the utility's website, to find what page links had the most traffic since the end of October. Those included bill payment, contact information and job opportunities.

"To my knowledge, we have never posted anything as far as job opportunities on the website," Hartline said as he navigated board members through the new site. "Hopefully, we are going to get it to a point where we can keep stuff like that updated, posted on the website, because people truly are looking at our website. We really need to look at redoing the way we are doing it. It's just not working."

LCUB hopes to use social media outlets to notify customers of services and outages in the near future to "communicate better with the customers," according to Hartline.

"We can serve more people that way," he said.

Mayor Tony Aikens agreed the current technology needs to be updated. "We all know we are way behind on technology in that field and it's certainly available," Aikens said.

In other business, the board:

● Approved a 5 percent premium increase in employees' BlueCross BlueShield health contract price over last year's total cost.

"The cost as a whole only went up 5 percent," Shannon Littleton, LCUB general manager, said, adding that individual and family premiums may vary. The increase will go into effect May 1.

Littleton said LCUB budgeted to where "there will not be an increase in a customer's bill."