It’s going to take more work than expected, so City Hall has postponed plans to start charging a 2.5% fee to individuals and businesses who pay their utility bills or harbor fees with a credit card.

The new fee was to have started on July 1, but it now looks like it will take several months to resolve and standardize the inner workings of the electronic financial transactions.

The borough has long accepted credit card payments for utilities and harbor charges at no fee. That free service for consumers costs the borough about $100,000 in fees charged each year by its card processing services.

Part of the issue is that different borough departments use different vendors to process credit card payments — and many charge a different fee to the borough.

“We are using five different vendors for credit cards,” said Rob Marshall, borough controller.

Though borough officials would someday like to get all departments using the same vendor, in the meantime staff needs to figure out a fair application of the user fee across several vendors and set up the online payment protocol so that the 2.5% fee is added to the bills paid with a card, he said.

One vendor charges 2.75%, which means the borough would still incur a loss, even with a 2.5% fee charged to consumers. Other vendors charge lower fees.

The Parks and Recreation Department uses MyRec.com to process credit cards; the police, library and Nolan Center use a different provider, Square; and the Port and Harbors Department just moved to a new vendor, Gravity, last year, Marshall said.

The borough last year started using PayIt — a digital payment site for government services — to accept credit cards for property taxes and sales taxes, charging a 2.75% fee.

After getting everything set up to charge a fee on utility and harbor accounts, Marshall said, borough officials will present the information to the assembly, which would need to adopt a resolution amending the municipal fees schedule for the change to take effect.

“I really don’t know what the timeline will be,” he said, adding that City Hall will ensure plenty of advance notice for the public.

The municipality takes in almost $10 million a year in user fees charged for water, sewage, trash, port and harbors and Marine Service Center services, with many people paying their bills with a credit card.

Several other Alaska cities and boroughs charge a fee for payments by credit card.