The City Council met with representatives from the Department of the Treasury (City Payment Center) to review operations, collection rates, and challenges in revenue collection. The discussion covered billing processes, delinquent tax enforcement, school zone fine refunds, and opportunities to improve payment accessibility.
Oh, he lets you off the hook. All right. Good morning, everybody. Welcome back. We are moving on to part two of four for today. Joined by the same group of counselors with Commissioner Nestry and Vicky Voss joined us for the Department of the Treasury, which is more commonly known as the City Payments Center. We are on page 87 for the counselors. And I'll turn it back over to you all to give us an intro of the payments center and what it does, how it connects to everything, and then we'll jump in with some of the details. Sure. City Payment Center, also known as the Treasury, is where we collect the money. We collect and process tax payments, water payments, parking payments, the new school zone payments. We process the cash payments here at the city. We have a lot of people who pay cash. So I said let's make it easy for people to pay. And we made an agreement to collect cash payments here for those kinds of violations. We also do the billing for the Syracuse Police Department for all the overtime they work at, like the dome or individual security details throughout the city. If somebody's property is broken into at three o'clock in the morning, the city has a gentleman in DPW who's on call, not a job I'd want. But he'll go out at three o'clock in the morning and board up the broken windows, so further damage isn't uh experienced. We do bill for the service because we don't get plywood for free, and the guy doesn't work for free. So we bill for the board ups, we bill for the cut and cleans. Those are properties that are either not maintained by owners or um the owner is you know MIA, vacant lots that you can't figure out who owns it. They need to be cleaned of either litter or they need to be mowed, overhanging branches need to be trimmed. Um if it's a major cleanup, we also bill for those. Um that involves um and Andy Jacobowski and his crew where they take a bunch of trucks and you know get they sometimes have to get the police out there to tow illegal vehicles. I mean, it's you know, it's what when the lots are really a big big mess. Uh we bill for the demolitions that the city does for the emergency repair program. And we bill for the pilots and shelters. Those are payments in lieu of taxes, agreements that uh SIDA and the city has made um for um to improve development uh shelter rents are for um section eight housing entities that um have an agreement with the city, they pay a lower base rate based because they are government uh subsidized. So uh basically we have uh five cashiers, um eight control clerks, three uh information aids, and we answer any questions constituents call about any of the aforementioned types of bills that we send out. Uh we do research um if there's questions. Um sometimes uh there might be a mistake on the tax bill, whether for whatever reason, um, and we work with assessment to get those um corrected and bring them to you and we have them corrected. We also do the uh municipal sidewalk billing, um, and that goes on the tax roll. All of the um board ups, cleanups, ERPs, um, demolitions, um, municipal sidewalk. All of these things have to be updated every year. We roll any onto taxes that as of April 1st have not been paid. Um if we bill it on April 1st, we figure by the time somebody mails it in and gets it to us, then we're really getting too close to the cutoff in May for the tax roll. So we do that. We do add uh late charges as announced on the bill. So if someone doesn't pay, we do add it to the tax roll. If they don't pay the taxes, then they are seized. So or they're uh potentially seized, I should say. Um that's a good overview. We get emails from people, we get letters. Uh we did the tax trust program, is a big deal for us. Um managing uh delinquent taxes. Uh we've been had real good uh results collecting delinquent taxes, working with people who in a lot of cases really can't afford their homes anymore because you know everything goes up, right? And if they're living at particularly people living on a fixed income, which most of us are, um just depends on how high it is, but you know, there are uh particularly elderly people, senior citizens who um are challenged to pay their all their bills. Yeah. Okay, is you a question? Of course.