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City IT outlines HNL Pay, mobile driver’s license and AI chatbot; card fee draws questions
Summary
Deputy Director Steven Courtney briefed the committee on Department of Information Technology services for the public — HNL Pay payment platform, a mobile driver’s license with roughly 37,000 users, and a generative‑AI chatbot — and answered council questions about payment coverage, platform expansion and fees.
Steven Courtney, deputy director of the Department of Information Technology (DIT), briefed the Honolulu City Council committee on May 29 about DIT divisions and three public‑facing tools: HNL Pay, a mobile driver’s license (MDL) and a chatbot now powered by generative AI.
Courtney described HNL Pay as a centralized, API‑based payment platform that “runs over 18,000 transaction per month” and is integrated with several city services such as Parks and Recreation Online System (PROS), motor vehicle renewals and other department workflows. He said the platform is intended to give residents the convenience of online fee payment and to reduce duplicate development effort by offering a reusable API.
On mobile driver’s licenses and usage
Courtney said the MDL was deployed in coordination with TSA, HDOT and Apple last August and that “over 37,000 Hawaii citizens have a mobile driver's license today.” He noted the MDL currently supports iPhone only and that adding Android support is a planned next step. The deputy director also said Honolulu is the only city in the country providing an MDL for the entire state, and that the service is run out of the city data center.
Chatbot and AI
Courtney said the city’s chatbot for driver’s license and motor vehicle pages has existed since 2021 and was this year upgraded to use generative AI trained on department web content to produce more human‑like responses. DIT said the chatbot and other AI experiments are currently in testing with a few departments.
Fees and council questions
Council members asked about use of HNL Pay for real property tax payments and why DIT had implemented the appeal fee online rather than broader tax payments. Courtney replied that real property tax payments are handled by a separate vendor arranged by the Department of Budget and Fiscal Services (BFS), while DIT implemented the appeal process. When asked about credit card processing fees, Courtney confirmed the public pays a 2.35% fee on credit card transactions. Several council members expressed concern that a percentage fee can be burdensome for large transactions and suggested offering lower flat fees or other tiers for debit or ACH payments.
What’s next
Courtney said DIT aims to bring more departments onto HNL Pay (the film office was given as an example), to add Android support for the mobile driver’s license and to expand chatbot deployments. He described internal AI resource testing in the city’s data center and said a few departments are already piloting those capabilities.
Public comment
Angela Melody Young of CARES praised the DIT presentation and said greater modernization helps committees craft effective legislation and supports community programming and workforce pipelines.
Implications
The briefing underscored both the expansion of online city services and outstanding policy questions: how to incorporate more fee types into HNL Pay, how to reduce costs to residents for large payments and how to govern and scale AI‑enabled tools across departments.
