The City of Alexandria - Online Payments

Business Case

In 2014, for a solution for citizens to make payments to the City of Alexandria online was recognized. Opting to tackle a specific payment type as a step towards allowing more online transactions, the City choose to implement a solution for viewing and paying Personal Property taxes. While the requirements were being gathered for the new solution, other departments within the City were also struggling to keep up with the volumes of manual transactions and payments being made for City services and fees.

One specific payment type was problematic and required a disproportionate amount of human oversight and handling. As with many northern Virginia cities, the City of Alexandria has parking spaces that are in high demand, and parking citations are common. The City's parking enforcement officers regularly patrol the streets, and issue citations for violations, each of which represented a citizen obligated to make a payment in person. A traffic jam of paper checks was causing difficulties for the city by adding lengthy back-end operations for tracking and processing payments made for parking violations.

Solution

To help design and build a solution to simplify how citizens and businesses interact with their local government, the City partnered with Virginia Interactive (VI). The team worked to gather requirements and VI built a new online payment portal for customers to view and pay their bills securely and conveniently online. Starting with Personal Property Taxes in February, 2016, the portal now provides a single convenient location where citizens can go to search their various accounts and make payments securely online. The initial roll-out of Personal Property Tax payments was timed to coincide with two separate mailings of delinquency notices. The payment service experienced immediate adoption with over 2,500 payments made in the first month. In 2018, VI extended the solution with the capability to process eCheck/ACH payments for parking citations.

The solution has gained tremendous support from the community and planning is underway to provide additional services in the coming months.

Results

• Since the application launched in 2016, over $76,000,000 has been processed.
• Due to the simplified, improved user interface, customer services calls have dropped significantly since launch.
• Since launch, the application has processed nearly $200,000 in parking violation payments
• Over 600 citizens immediately adopted the online parking ticket payment solution within the first month