Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council. We have a few things that I'd like to discuss, or cover this evening. We'll start out with the AMR transition. We are set tonight to finalize the transition from Emergency Medical Services Authority, or EMSA, to American Medical Response, or AMR, for primary emergency ground transportation service within the Edmond City limits. With AMR receiving their licensing by the state last week, the official change will take place tomorrow, January 23rd. While the provider changes, the service will still be available to residents for a $3 monthly charge on their City of Edmond utility bill. If residents are currently enrolled, no action is required to remain at their current status. I do want to say we are especially thankful for EMSA for working with us, extending the emergency ambulance service to residents for many years. And through this transition period, we are happy and excited to begin service with AMR.
The biggest change for Edmond residents, businesses and visitors is AMR will have operations dedicated in Edmond. They will have a base of operations at the old Fire Station 2 location at 1315 South Broadway. Most importantly, they will have ambulances dedicated to our city and posted in our city on a daily basis. There will be up to five ambulances stationed here at peak times, which will ensure more timely service to our residents and visitors. As the change occurs, we understand that there may still be questions. If residents are looking for more information, there is a link at the top of our EdmondOK.gov website to the extensive Frequently Asked Questions page on the transition and what this service provides. The beginning of AMR service to Edmond continues the City of Edmond’s commitment to provide the best in public safety to our residents, businesses and visitors. We know Edmond’s continuous public safety commitment is a prime determining factor of why residents and businesses choose Edmond. Moving on to AMI, or Smart Meters. Nearly two years ago, the City Utilities and Information Technology Department launched a project to upgrade our utility meters by installing smart meters to record residents and businesses’ water and energy usage the same as our previous meters did.
However, unlike previous meters that required manual monthly readings, smart meters will transmit customer's utility usage to the city daily. This will make their usage data more accurate and accessible to both customers and our utilities. I just wanted to remind you. This was no small undertaking with about 43,000 Edmond Electric customers and nearly 33,500 Water Resources customers. It's taken a while to get meters in stock and get them installed. Starting in the summer of 2022, Utility Partners of America, our contractor with the City of Edmond, began installing meters. They were able to accomplish the bulk of those meter installations when and where they were available. You remember that was kind of at the end of the COVID period. Right now, Edmond Electric has about 1,800 meters remaining to install, which they will handle in-house as the meters become available and we receive them. Water Resources has about 4,300 left to install. Just as Edmond Electric is proposing, we will handle those final installations as meters become available. The next step is connecting our customers with their data.
Roughly 29,000 accounts are billed on the new technology. It takes time to switch to the new process because Utility Customer Service and our I.T. departments are continuously doing quality assurance checks verifying the accuracy before switching an account over. That work continues with our vendors to get a new, more accessible online portal in place. Our target date for the new portal is the end of Q1 of this year. Once completed, it will connect with the new meters and allow customers to access detailed information usage to better monitor and control their electric and water usage.
Beyond that, the portal will support automatic outage notifications and will provide other tools and enhanced service to the customer, including payment options and other programs. Next, I want to briefly give us an update on our Sales and Use Tax report. As you know, Edmond is almost entirely dependent on sales tax and use tax. And so this is a critical aspect for us. We just received our Sales and Use Tax report from the Oklahoma Tax Commission. This latest report covers sales from November of 2023, which is reported to the OTC in December and collected by the city this month. Our year-to-date sales tax collection are up 0.45% over this time last year, even though our January 2024 numbers are down 0.29% compared to 2023.
Our year-to-date use tax collections are up 3.16%. January 2024 collections came in at 7.5% higher than this time last year. According to this report, our year-to-date combined sales and use tax collections are $62.7 million, which is up over this time last year by 0.88%. All this to say we projected a 2% sales tax and a 5% use tax for this fiscal year. So we seem at this point a little bit under our targets. However, the most critical month of reporting will be next month's December report. Holiday sales and use tax figures will give us a much clearer picture of where the City will end the fiscal year.
Based on these trends and as a city sales tax dependent city, we must and we will continue to be cautious with our spending for the rest of this fiscal year and will need to be judicious in our plans for the upcoming fiscal year. I want to be careful to say this. This is not doom and gloom. We're just being cautious. We still see good sales tax and use tax numbers. We just want to be prudent on how we spend. The last thing I wanted to mention is our process improvements. This year, the City will be undertaking an effort to improve our internal and external processes, to enhance our customer service and turnaround times. I was reminded of this when I was reading about Domino's Pizza about ten years ago when they were going through a reputation crisis within the organization. Domino's was getting a reputation for poor-tasting pizza, which is pretty dire for a pizza company. The interesting thing is, instead of hiding that feedback, denying the issues and trying to internally make improvements, Domino's instead embraced the feedback, seeking additional pointed feedback, and then sharing the feedback with its customers.
This feedback was then used to focus on what was most important to improve for the customer Taking a slice from them, we're going to do the same in a couple of minutes. You caught that. That's good. That's good. Great. In a couple of minutes, we're excited. Randy and Molly will will share some more details about this effort, but we will share a planned effort to solicit direct feedback from our development community. We know from them antidotally that we are not meeting expectations, and we know we have improvements to make. Hence this effort to invite our development community in to work with an external facilitator to identify what is working and what isn't working, what are those causes and what could be the solution or solutions to those issues. We're excited and hope our development community will decide to participate and you'll hear shortly about this. Mr. Mayor, as Mr. Cronkite used to say at the end of his newscasts, ‘And that's the way it is.’.