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Pasco Customers Can Pay Water, Sewer Bills Online

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By KEVIN WIATROWSKI | The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 4, 2008

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

County officials plan to begin testing in February a Web-based system 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 to the county's customers, James Cerny, the county's information technology director, told county commissioners this week.

The county already offers customers the option of using electronic funds transfers to pay their bills – a system that requires customers to provide the county with 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 15,000 customers," said Michael Nurrenbrock, who directs the county's Office of Management and Budget. The current system can't handle the larger customer load, Nurrenbrock said.

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

Over the last three years, the county has:

Developed ways to track buses, emergency vehicles and building inspectors through the course of their day

Created systems that speed up billing for ambulance services and standardize reports that accompany each ambulance patient to the hospital

Installed technology on ambulances that can transmit live heart-monitor readouts to doctors ahead of the arriving ambulance

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 will start moving vehicle-tracking and report-filing technology to other county departments such as Animal Services, Nurrenbrock said.

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

County officials hope the new technology will create more efficiencies on the scale of what they've seen with ambulance billing, which used to be a process that consumed a lot of paper and a lot of 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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