Ferndale cuts online bill pay for utilities amid budget woes

ZOE FRALEY - THE BELLINGHAM HERALD

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FERNDALE - As of Monday, Oct. 12, Ferndale residents will no longer be able to pay their utility bills online.

In an attempt to save money and employee time, the city has cut its iConnect service, which allowed residents to pay utility bills online using their credit card.

About 14 percent of utility customers, or 585 people, used the online service to make their payments, said Patti Papetti, utility billing analyst for the city. But the price of the service was too high for the city to maintain, especially after having recently laid off two of the five people in the clerk and finance departments.

"It's ever-increasing costs," city Finance Director Mark Peterson said. "We're going to save about $10,000 a year just in out-of-pocket costs. Plus all the employee time."

The city had to pay 75 cents per payment made online, plus an additional 80 cents when a batch of payments was submitted, Papetti said. It also was charged a percentage of each payment, plus monthly service fees, and had to pay for a software vendor for support maintenance and hosting the iConnect Web site, which also required the city to pay per customer.

The city has had the online pay option for about two years. It still will offer an autopay option to automatically withdraw payments from customer bank accounts.

"It's a hard thing to do. This is a nice service for the customers and I think most of them like it," Peterson said of the cut. "We thought we were going to be all innovative, pay your bill online, but the economy has just sucked, and we've had layoffs."

The city sent its iConnect customers an e-mail earlier in the week letting them know the service would no longer be available.

In addition to finding out they were losing the convenience of paying online, those customers also got to see the e-mail addresses of everyone else who was using the service. Papetti blamed the issue on the e-mail software, which didn't give an option to blind cc. It was going out as a mass e-mail, so it was assumed that all the addresses wouldn't be visible, but they were.