Council hears pay-study, customer-service and billing updates; discussion on credit-card fees and sewer/permit payments

City staff and outside consultants presented a series of administrative and financial updates Tuesday, including the status of a citywide pay study, customer-service operations after a software migration, and the financial case for solid-waste rate increases. Council also discussed whether the city should absorb or pass along credit-card transaction fees for permits, taxes and utility payments.

Michael of Evergreen Solutions, the consultant conducting a pay study for the city, told council the work has completed internal data collection and employee job-duty descriptions and is finishing external market benchmarking. "We're anticipating we'll have draft recommendations to the city probably within the next 30 days," he said. The consultant said the study compares Milford to 38 peers across Delaware and parts of Maryland and will include county-level cost-of-living adjustments.

Customer-service staff summarized billing and cashiering operations following a recent software transition. Susanna, who manages customer-service and billing, said the office now handles more online and phone payments and supports two payment portals following a Tyler Tax implementation. She described fields of work including meter-management entry, leak-reporting and monthly cycle billing and said staff run weekly leak reports and contact customers when unusually high usage appears. She added the office uses automatic-call notifications for customers facing imminent disconnects and noted the department paused cold-weather disconnects between Dec. 19 and Feb. 14.

On solid waste, consultant Dawn Lund of Utility Financial Solutions said the department projects operating losses without rate action and recommended a five-year plan of roughly 4% annual increases. She said the plan would restore a modest operating income target (about $33,000 per year in the firm's model), stop cash balances from deteriorating and allow a modest capital replacement reserve for truck purchases.

Council also discussed credit-card processing fees in the city's newly deployed enterprise permitting and licensing (EP&L) system. Planning and finance staff said EP&L now accepts online card payments, but that change has increased the city's merchant fees. Planning director Rob Pierce explained the fees are notable because some third-party passthrough charges (for example, a county sewer fee) leave the city absorbing the merchant fee while remitting the full third-party amount to the other jurisdiction.

Finance Director Lou Vitola said the city should distinguish between two contexts: utility billing and government transactions. "On the utility side, I think it's absolutely appropriate and best practice and probably on the most solid legal footing anyway to absorb those fees," Vitola said during council discussion, citing collection and credit-risk management benefits. For strictly governmental charges (property taxes, permitting fees), council can either pass the fee directly to customers at payment time or otherwise cover it in the city budget; staff noted disclosure requirements and merchant rules apply.

Council did not adopt a single policy during the meeting but received staff reports and asked for follow-up options. Finance staff said they would present implementation choices and legal disclosure language for council consideration.

What happens next

- Evergreen Solutions expects to present draft pay-study recommendations to city administration within about 30 days. - Staff will return with options on credit-card-fee policy, including possible convenience-fee disclosures, fee recovery methods and budgetary implications. - The solid-waste rate schedule was adopted in the consent items (see votes summary); staff will implement the schedule in billing operations.