Background
In early 2020, API participated in a 10 week learning opportunity through What Works Cities at Results for America focused on helping cities learn how to take immediate steps toward ending or reducing the impact of driver’s license suspension in their communities. In the US, driver’s license suspension due to nonpayment of fines and penalties, or failure to appear for traffic court, is legal in many states and municipalities but results in loss of economic opportunity, autonomy, and reduces public safety. The opportunity, hosted by What Works Cities in partnership with the Fines and Fees Justice Center and the City of Durham Innovation Team, prompted us to evaluate the impact of debt-based license restrictions on our own community by looking at quantitative data on the concentration of driver’s license suspensions by census tract disaggregated by suspensions due to failure to pay or “appear.”
Midway through the 10 week sprint, we had a conversation with the State Director of the ongoing campaign in New York State aimed at passing legislation that would prevent State and local government bodies from suspending driver’s licenses on the basis of failure to pay or appear. She spoke hopefully that the legislation would soon be passed during the coming legislative session in the spring, which it did. That minimized the role that the City of Syracuse would have to play in proactively advocating for change on the local level. With the work minimized, we wondered what type of impact other municipal fines and fees assessed to residents were having, particularly if those fines and fees were disproportionately impacting communities of color.
Most of the time when an individual pays a parking violation or a tax payment, they make a lump sum payment all at once. However, in a flexible payment scenario, a person is provided with a payment plan option that allows them to break down that lump sum amount into installment payments that can be made over a period of time. The purpose of a payment plan is to make purchases more affordable by accounting for financial or budgetary constraints with the added bonus of allowing you to grow your savings and catch up on debt.
We knew that the city offered payment plans to the public, but several staff and residents told us that parking violations and property taxes were both incredibly difficult for residents to pay back if they fell behind in payments. The numerous barriers to enrollment and compliance included:
Residents are required to make a sizable downpayment at the time of enrollment which can deter them from choosing to enroll despite financial benefits.
There is no standard process in place for residents to enroll in a payment plan or track payments owed.
Residents are not provided with a payment schedule, payment notification options or late payment notices making it easier for them to miss payment due dates. That coupled with the “One Strike Policy” the City currently enforces (where missing one monthly installment payment results in the resident being pulled out of their payment plan) is financially detrimental as the resident now begins to accrue more debt with additional fees and fines being added to their outstanding balance. This defeats the purpose of a payment plan being affordable and fair.
Payment plans are not advertised by the City and residents are unaware that a payment plan option is available to them. Residents do not have the option to enroll in the process online as the process is paper-based. Enrollment usually happens in person upon inquiry by the resident (usually when the resident is making a payment at the City Payment Center and finds it difficult to pay the full balance on an outstanding parking ticket).
Eligibility and documentation requirements are not available online for residents to be better informed and prepared to enroll.
What We Did
So, we started a project aimed at making city payment plans more accessible and affordable for residents. Our approach to this was threefold, tackling one component at a time:
Policy. The “rules” set by the City of Syracuse or the State of New York dictate to residents if and how they are allowed to pay back money owed to the City.
Tools. Anything that helps the process function more efficiently, including forms or applications, or even checklists and fact sheets to help staff and applicants know how to navigate the process.
Process. The steps required by the applicant and the city to execute a payment plan from start to finish.
We decided to begin by applying this approach to the existing payment plan framework for parking violations, then expand to property taxes since changing policy around property tax payments was more complicated.
How We Did It
Our first step was to take a real hard look at our existing parking payment plan service and identify challenges our residents face in navigating it and opportunities for growth within the process city departments could expand on.
To ensure our ideas worked when applied, we turned to Service Design tools to design, test and revise the recommended process changes with city employees and residents incorporating their feedback and making changes as we continued to improve the parking payment plan service.
We relied on a couple of main tools and techniques – service blueprinting and service prototyping (or user testing), in order to identify challenges and design solutions to existing policies, tools, and processes surrounding payment plans.
We’ve already discussed service blueprinting for payment plans in a previous blog post. To read more on how we used this tool to help identify opportunities for process improvements, you can read part one of this blog. Linked here.
Then, we turned to service prototyping.
Service Prototyping
The service prototype has the objective of replicating, as much as possible, the final experience of interacting with the service, in order to test and validate all the design choices.”
- Service Design Tools
While a service blueprint focuses on how the components (people, process, and tools) interact to deliver a service conceptually, service prototyping allows you to test how these components are implemented in the environment they are intended to be used. This form of “contextual learning” allows service owners to gather insights on how staff and residents' environments shape their behavior in utilizing tools and processes. To do this we used the blueprint to identify the most appropriate parking payment plan service to prototype. We then replicated as closely as possible the final experience of interacting with the service by recruiting mock applicants to enroll in dummy parking payment plans. We gave each participant a “parking violation scenario” that included providing them with fake tickets to process at the City Payment Center. Parking ticket amounts were carefully chosen to allow cashiers to test eligibility requirements and get comfortable with processing different monthly payment amounts. For frontline staff the benefit of this approach was twofold. It gave service owners the opportunity to train cashiers on the new process by increasing their knowledge of new policies and procedures pre-launch while also testing their staff's compatibility with the chosen digital and physical tools to troubleshoot any implementation challenges in real-time. For applicants, service prototyping allowed service owners to identify potential accessibility issues and mitigate their unintended impacts on the process pre-launch. Project owners then prioritized the impact of each of these challenges allowing them to reassign resources or align stakeholders on making high-impact decisions affecting service delivery where required.
Separate rounds of prototyping provided us with the time needed to implement feedback and make changes to the technology, application, checklists, and final user journey decisions for further testing to ensure a smoother experience for residents and staff.
Lastly, identifying key performance metrics is an integral part of validating service improvements. Amongst other indicators tracking the number of residents enrolled in payment plans, shows the volume of pre and post-service changes giving us insight into if service improvements have in fact led to higher enrollments in payment plans. By measuring the overall health of the service system these indicators work as a feedback loop and identify additional opportunities for growth within the service ecosystem.
Service prototyping with mock applicants and cashiers
Service prototyping with mock applicants and cashiers: applicants were given fake parking tickets of various amounts to help cashiers target training on different payment plan scenarios
Next Steps
Now that the policy, tools, and process for parking violation payment plans have been tested and implemented, we are applying the same approach to property tax payment plans. The first step here was changing the Tax and Assessment Act, a local law that dictates the ways in which some municipalities in New York State are allowed to collect property taxes from property owners. In order to make down payments optional and extend the term limit for plans, we needed to seek approval from Common Council, followed by New York State. Legislation recently passed through Council and is now pending approval from the New York Department of State. After legislation is solidified, we will design the online application, guides for staff and applicants, and document a Standard Operating Procedure.