City of Columbia water bills going online

Customers will have new way to pay by credit card

By ADAM BEAM - abeam@thestate.com

Columbia’s water customers can soon pay their bills online with credit cards — and the city promises to pay any extra fees that come with the service.

Paying bills with a credit card often carries two extra charges: a merchant fee, which goes to the credit card company, and a portal fee, which goes to the service provider that processes the payment.

Most companies add these charges to their customers’ bills, but City Council members voted unanimously Wednesday to have the city pay those fees for its customers.

“It’s a convenience for us. It’s something that we want to encourage people to do,” Councilwoman Tameika Isaac Devine said.

Now, the only ways to pay a city water bill by credit card are over the phone or in person.

For the phone transactions, the city uses BillMatrix, which charges a $4 processing fee. About 37,000 of the city’s 129,229 water accounts use that service.

If those 37,000 accounts all use the proposed online system, it would cost the city $98,861 per year in fees, Austin said, but customers who have been using the phone to pay would save the $4 added to their bills.

“I think it’s a small fee to pay against that revenue,” City Manager Charles Austin said. The city brings in nearly $98 million each year from water and sewer customers.

The credit card fees would cost an average in-city customer $1.64 and an average out-of-city customer $2.11, but the city will pay the charges.

The city’s water customers include people in Richland and Lexington counties.

The city will use the money generated from its water and sewer sales to pay the credit card fees. It will not use money from the general fund, which comes from city residents’ property taxes.

The credit card payments will be processed by South Carolina Interactive, the same company that handles payments to state government and other local governments, including Cayce, Myrtle Beach and Spartanburg, and the Lexington County judicial system.

Starting in October, customers will be able to log on to the city’s Web site and click on a link that will take them to another Web site. There, customers can check the balance of their water bills and pay them with credit cards.

Vince Simonowicz, information technology director for Columbia, said the new service will coincide with what he called a “face-lift” for the city’s Web site, www.columbiasc.net.

Austin said the city will evaluate the system after it has been running for 90 days.

Reach Beam at (803) 771-8405.