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Council weighs online-billing options as water-meter alarms and replacements prompt fixes
Summary
Council discussed implementing SmartPay billing (declining to accept credit-card surcharge), while water-meter alarm resets and some meter replacements were reported as fixed or planned.
The Interlaken Town Council addressed both the town’s billing system rollout and ongoing water-system monitoring at its Feb. 4 meeting.
On billing, staff reported work with Grand Valley Bank to set up SmartPay for online bill payments and asked whether the council wanted to enable credit-card payments. Staff said card fees would be about 2.8 percent of transactions and estimated—using rough back-of-envelope figures—that enabling card payments could cost the town roughly $6,500 annually if every payment used a card, or about $3,200 if half the customers used cards. After discussion, councilors agreed not to enable credit-card payments immediately, preferring to launch the new system without card acceptance and revisit the question if demand warranted it. Councilors supported testing the system before wide rollout and asked staff to send a test link to council members.
On water-system operations, staff reported that widely used meter alarms had stopped triggering after a configuration change made by the meter-analytics vendor (named during the meeting as either Xylem or Sensus Analytics). The presenter said the vendor had been reading at the wrong time of the cycle and that resetting meters to a middle-of-minute (MOM) reading inadvertently erased previously configured alarms. Staff said they reinstalled alarms and were now receiving alerts regularly; Watermaster Derek was handling alarm responses. Staff said a few meters still required physical replacement (one example named was Doreen McLaughlin’s meter) and noted the town had replaced a section of line on Saint Lawrence, which contributed to elevated water expenses this year.
No formal votes were taken during the billing or water-system discussions; council members asked staff to proceed with setup and testing of the online-billing system without credit-card acceptance for now.
