AMHERST — A long-standing practice of not offering all services to the public on Thursday mornings at Amherst Town Hall ended this week.
Town Manager Paul Bockelman recently announced that, beginning Thursday, every office at Town Hall will be open daily from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The decision comes after he heard frustrations from residents and observed people dropping by the building during the four hours certain offices were closed.
“My experience is people waiting to be served, and feeling like we weren’t serving the public as well as we could,” Bockelman said.
“It didn’t seem to make sense to me to not have Town Hall open on that morning,” Bockelman added.
While the building is open and some offices, including the town manager’s, can assist the public, the central services counter, where a variety of transactions occur, the town clerk’s office and the Planning and Inspections Department window have remained closed until noon.
The practice started July 1, 2007, at a time when the town was facing a budget crunch, according to the town’s fiscal 2010 budget book, and was designed to “allow remaining staff to continue to complete billing and other critical reconciliations and back office functions in a timely manner.”
Bockelman said there has been a benefit to this practice, as staff meetings and Town Hall-wide trainings, such as a recent one focused on active shooters, can be held at a time all employees are working. But he said the negative outweighed the positive, especially if someone needed to pay a parking ticket so a driver’s license could be renewed or to apply for a passport.
“Our job is to inconvenience the public as little as possible,” Bockelman said.
He is not expecting that there will be any additional costs from the change in hours.
Board member Alisa Brewer said that was one of the considerations a decade ago.
But in a memo to the Select Board in October 2008, then-Town Manager Larry Shaffer wrote that there were, in fact, no measurable financial impacts over the first year.
“That time allows for the effected departments (Finance, Assessing, Town Clerk, Building, Planning and Conservation) to hold staff meetings, conduct training and to focus upon projects that require some quiet time,” Shaffer wrote. “From that perspective, the changes have been wildly successful.”
Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.