By Yvette Dela Torre, Deputy Local Registrar
We see it all the time at College Station City Hall – a weary mother toting a newborn and a toddler into the City Secretary’s Office after waiting until the last minute to get her newborn’s birth certificate.
Many of us have been in her shoes. It’s never fun or convenient to tow fidgety youngsters on a tedious errand.
In 2019, the City of College Station implemented its first online ordering service for birth and death certificates through a third-party vendor called VitalChek. We hoped it would help relieve those young moms of some of their burdens. Unfortunately, it didn’t work as well as we imagined.
Don’t get me wrong – the service was a tremendous asset when our offices closed during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing us to continue providing vital record services during those challenging times. But it was also expensive for customers to use and generated no revenue for the city.
We had to find a better way – and we did. Deputy City Secretary Ian Whittenton took my idea and developed the form and workflow through existing in-house technology.
As a result, we’ll move to a new online ordering platform on May 12 that significantly reduces user costs. For example, it usually takes VitalChek 24-48 hours to approve and forward orders. Our convenient new system is much faster and allows us to contact customers immediately if an issue arises.
You can order a birth certificate online and pick it up at your convenience when grandma or a friend stops by for a visit. Will-call orders will be processed within two hours, and you can pick up your document from 8 a.m.-5 p.m., Monday through Friday.
Best of all, you’ll no longer pay a $12.95 service fee when you retrieve the order in person at city hall.
You can access the online ordering platform any time of day and can also have your records delivered by certified mail or next-day UPS.
For more information, go to cstx.gov/certificates.
If you liked this post, share it!
