Gettin' With The Times

Summit County Executive Russ Pry ought to get a nice round of applause for helping to drag local government into the late 20th century by updating collection practices to include credit cards. Going plastic is more than just everyday; it's the way the world does business.


Pry's publicity machine reminded the news media of this in a news release today, noting Summit County's Animal Control and Building departments were the latest to go MasterCard, AMEX and Discover ( I'm not sure what happened to VISA; there's the follow-up) in giving taxpayers the same opportunity to pay public bills as they use to pay private.


With the explosion of digital payments -- not just using a credit or debit card, but also using e-banking to serve your e-commerce needs -- it was long overdue, and surprising that it didn't come sooner than the March 2009 vote from County Council on Pry's bid to modernize government billing.


You DO pay a convenience fee for this; the company managing the payments charges 2.5%, a heck of a lot cheaper than many businesses enjoy (and pass along to their customers) and considerably less than what it costs to buy a ticket to a concert or sporting event with all their consumer-unfriendly add-on fees. But in the long run it's worth in, allowing the government to more track with more accuracy their payments and cash flow. Ditto the consumer: the end-of-the year statement most credit cards provide is a gold mine when figuring out taxes and tracking our own payments.


If you've been tagged with a traffic ticket recently (count me among the nailed) then you know you can do the same thing through the court systems on the most routine violations, saving considerable time and trouble.


There is always great discussion on the impact of the web on government information, most recently the "costs" of opening city records to critics of the Plusquellic Administration. But the growing use of web-based payment and electronic billing shows another side to making government records more available online; it includes the system of billing that no longer ties us to remembering to send the check or taking time out of the day to drive down to the courthouse to make a payment. And unless the mainframe computer has a serious case of e-digestion, there's always a record of it.

During a recent trip overseas, I was struck how restaurants and cafes in even the smallest of towns used wireless credit card processing (such as the unit, at left) and servers and hosts didn't have to take the card away from customer view to process, they would tally up the bill and slide the card right in front of you. It addresses a security concern while also standardizing the use of wireless technology, which provides great opportunity for growth in other ways as well.

Welcome to the new way of doing things. It is a great reminder of how far we've come -- and how far we still have to go in taming technology to work for the end user: us.