TOLEDO, Ohio — The return envelopes people are getting with their water bills in Toledo have an address to a P.O. Box in Chicago, instead of Madison Avenue.
Toledo Public Utilities said it's meant to streamline the payment process.
Some Toledoans on social media are wondering why they're being asked to mail their water bill payment all the way to Chicago. People even reached out to WTOL 11 to find the answer. So, we asked the city.
"This was a decision that was made to just really make processes more efficient," Commissioner of Utilities Administration Cindy Geronimo said.
She said the city's been partnering with Fifth Third Bank locally to take in payments, but she said the process just wasn't efficient.
"We would send staff to the post office, pick up the mail, bring it back here, process it in-house using an old Opex machine that we had here," Geronimo said.
Fifth Third Bank proposed a faster way to get this done that would cut check processing from four days to two. But to do that, customers had to send their bills to the Windy City.
"That's because Fifth Third's processing center is located in Chicago," Geronimo said. "They felt that would better serve our needs with our size of volume. This was an easy change that kind of really helped expedite that and reduce the amount of postage errors."
Geronimo said it's cheaper in the long run because Fifth Third is processing these payments in bulk.
She said the city plans to make further technology improvements, like installing payment kiosks around the city, and hopes people welcome these changes.
"I think we all want to serve the public better and we're always trying to figure out how to do things better," Geronimo said.
If you're worried your bill will be lost in the mail, you can drop your bill off at the dropbox located at 420 Madison Ave. in downtown Toledo. Those payments will then be processed at the Toledo Utilities offices.
But Geronimo said the fastest way to get this done is by submitting a payment online through the city's website.