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Utility Bill-Pay Going Online

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By KEVIN WIATROWSKI

kwiatrowski@tampatrib.com

Published: December 5, 2008

Come June, Pasco County water and sewer customers will be able to pay their bills online.

County officials plan to begin testing a Web-based system in February that will eliminate the need for most of the county's 95,000 utility customers to mail or hand-deliver their payments to the utility office.

The goal is to make bill-paying more convenient, James Cerny, the county's information technology director, told county commissioners this week.

The county already offers customers the option of using electronic transfers to pay their bills - a system that gives the county access to their bank accounts. About 19 percent of the county's customers use that system.

"The billing system we have currently was fine when we had 10 or 15 thousand customers," said Michael Nurrenbrock, who directs the county's Office of Management and Budget. He said the current system can't handle the larger customer load.

The new payment system is the public face of a larger, behind-the-scenes electronic makeover aimed at making county services more efficient, Cerny said.

In the past three years, the county has:

•Developed ways to track buses, emergency vehicles and building inspectors;

•Created systems that speed up billing for ambulance services and standardize reports that accompany ambulance patients to the hospital;

•Installed technology on ambulances that can transmit live heart-monitor readouts to doctors before the ambulance arrives;

•Used cell-phone technology to report the results of building inspections as they happen and reassign inspectors within minutes as workloads demand.

In the coming months, the county will kick off two more technology projects.

One will be another Web-based system that Cerny's staff calls "e-complaint." It will let residents send questions or concerns to county employees.

The other project expands vehicle-tracking and report-filing technology to other county departments such as animal services, Nurrenbrock said.

Eventually, the county plans to use similar Web-based technology for reviewing and permitting construction projects, Nurrenbrock said, but that will have to wait until county officials finish reorganizing the departments involved.

County officials hope the new technology will create efficiency on the scale of what they have experienced with ambulance billing, which used to consume a lot of paper and time, Nurrenbrock said.

"That was where we had a system that was very slow," he said.

Reporter Kevin Wiatrowski can be reached at (813) 948-4201.

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