Town Bills - Electronic vs Paper?

• Electric bill
• Water bill
• Athletic fee (BHS)
• School lunch account
• Property tax

At other times of year, add car excise tax or pool tags. Some of these incur a "convenience fee" on the order of $0.25 to $1.50. When my kids were younger, the convenience fee for online signup for some rec program was on the order of $5. Ouch.

It is still free to deliver (US mail or in-person) a check and paper forms for most of these.

Or is it "free"? I wonder if it costs Belmont more to process paper forms and checks than it does all-electronic, where the customer does a lot of the work. Why else would most commercial entities strongly urge us to move online? In the case of paper processing, someone is paid (by you and me) to type in all the info, check the checks, make deposits, etc.

If the fees are for Town trying to cover it's bill collection costs, perhaps it should also charge for the processing of paper submissions and checks. It seems that the cheapest route for the town is being penalized; the customer is paying fees and doing the work. If all costs were accounted for, we customers could choose either the most convenient route, or the cheapest, for us and the town.

Even more streamlined. Given we get some number of bills from the Town every month (for me, sometimes one, sometimes up to 5).Why can't I just get a single itemized bill? It's not rocket science, or even cutting edge accounting. Some town officials have hammered the School Department about consolidation of various services. How about consolidating financial, or at least billing, services within the same building?

I realized the various "silos" in the town and school can find it difficult to interact.  I'm sure some of that is regulatory, some just "because it's always been that way." But we (taxpayers) paid several hundred thousand dollars for a custom accounting system about 6-8 years ago. Perhaps this kept the old processes and procedures, just moving them from paper to computers, without fixing the processes themselves. Were the 10,000 customers (approx number of households) not considered? I really don't want to hear that the computer systems are not compatible. If that is the case, we blew it.