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Council pushes to restore online bill pay as water meter rollout nears
Summary
After months of outages with legacy billing software, councilors set a target of July 1 to enable online bill payments while the city finishes a meter-installation project and coordinates vendor integration between meter hardware and accounting software.
Councilors pressed staff to get online bill-pay working after a prolonged outage tied to legacy utility billing software from GWorks. Lloyd and other councilors explained that GWorks’ older product stopped working last August and that the city has already paid for the vendor’s cloud product called Front Desk; staff said the city can activate Front Desk but needs vendor training and must complete meter-vendor integration with Summit.
Lloyd said the new process could be enabled quickly once training and the final integration pieces are complete; staff reported roughly 600–700 of about 1,000 meters are installed and that full functionality depends on the meter vendor completing data integration. Councilors asked staff to set a public target date and the mayor asked staff to aim for July 1 as a realistic milestone for restoring online payments. "We just need to be moving on this," one councilor said, urging deadlines and vendor coordination.
Staff said the switch involves training for front-office staff and coordination with the meter vendor; if the meter lids cause interference in reads, staff will test and, if needed, consult the city attorney and vendors. Council also discussed whether to migrate fully to Front Desk or consider other vendors over a longer timeframe; several councilors favored activating the already-paid Front Desk product to avoid further delay. Staff will notify the public via the website when a launch date is confirmed.
Next steps: staff to direct vendors to start training, finish meter integration, run acceptance tests and publish a public launch date for online bill-pay.
