CAPE CORAL, Fla. — On Wednesday, one week after the City of Cape Coral launched an online utility pay system, dozens of complaints are piling up on the city's Facebook page.
An email sent out by the city said efficiency and responsiveness would be improved, but some who live in Cape Coral, like Rickis Clark said there are some hiccups in their game plan.
“What I can see is, the system they are introducing, it's not working,” said Clark.
While Clark considers his Cape Coral home paradise, in the case of the city's new online utility system, he says even from the time he registered it's been a pain.
“We had to go to the site, which they tell us to, and then you have to verify through an email which you can do, but then when you go to verify, it says you didn't verify,” said Clark.
That verification request Fox 4 found on the city's instructional video where it tells customers that will happen via email after they create a new account and password.
Fox 4's Colton Chavez spoke with homeowner Genelle Bennett, who told him, she hadn't even started the process.
“So as soon as you brought it up, I went onto the Cape Coral website,” said Bennett on Wednesday.
When Bennett walked through the process with Chavez several times,
“It definitely got frustrating after five times or so,” said Clark, saying she could not register either.
In an email, spokesperson Melissa Mickey blamed lots of people logging on.
Telling Fox 4 the registration portal had been experiencing outages and told customers to keep trying.
A reality, homeowners like Rickis Clark said they're left wondering if the new system was rushed.
“ Make sure you have ironed out all of the kinks," said Clark.
Mickey told Fox 4 there's no urgency to sign up on Wednesday or this week.
She says they will not be charging people late fees in February while they make this transition.
Mickey said if customers call Customer Billing and receive a busy signal, please try again later.
She said if you pay electronically, please check your email receipt for your customer and account numbers.
Mickey said users should pad the account numbers with leading zeros until it is 6 digits in length.
she said also, make sure to use the correct phone number and enter it with dashes, i.e. 239-111-2222.
A link to register can be found by clicking here.
