City hall hours change Aug. 6

On Aug. 6, Ober­lin City Hall will change hours in an attempt to bet­ter serve res­i­dents and con­trac­tors doing work in the city.

Cur­rently the office hours are 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., but after the change the hours will be from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

“The (city’s) finance depart­ment brought this up ini­tially because the finance office staff works closely with our water and elec­tric util­i­ties staff with ser­vice orders every day. Because of the hours the util­i­ties work, they real­ized that if the two offices were more closely aligned they could coor­di­nate a lit­tle bet­ter and that would be a pos­i­tive for them,” said city man­ager Eric Norenberg.

The more the city staff dis­cussed the idea, it was real­ized that many cus­tomers come to the doors of the finance office between 8 and 8:30 a.m., accord­ing to Norenberg.

“They’re try­ing the door and real­iz­ing nobody is there and then they stick their pay­ment in the slot,” he said.

Fur­ther dis­cus­sion also brought to light that the office is usu­ally pretty quiet dur­ing the last half hour of the day, Noren­berg said.

In a memo from the city’s finance direc­tor Sal Talarico to city coun­cil, he agreed.

“After con­sid­er­ing this pro­posal for sev­eral weeks and review­ing past work­load analy­sis, it seems appar­ent that the slow­est half-hour of the work day is 4:30 to 5 p.m.,” Talarico said. “In the past, City Hall admin­is­tra­tive staff have tracked cus­tomer calls and vis­i­tors for other pur­poses. We have found that morn­ings are gen­er­ally busier as con­trac­tors come in seek­ing per­mits and inspections.”

Noren­berg also said that non-city hall divi­sions of the city’s work­force gen­er­ally begin the work­day between 7:30 a.m. and 8 a.m. The feel­ing of city staff is that align­ing the work hours between city hall and the rest of the staff will offer more time for coor­di­na­tion and still be able to serve walk-in traffic.

Addi­tion­ally, city staff researched other gov­ern­ments and insti­tu­tions in the area and found that many oper­ate on an 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. sched­ule. Accord­ing to Talarico’s memo they include the main offices of Lorain County, state offices — includ­ing the dis­trict ODOT dis­trict in Ash­land and the Ohio Depart­ment of Devel­op­ment in Colum­bus — Lorain County Health Depart­ment, and Metro Parks.

The memo fur­ther stated that Mercy Allen Hos­pi­tal and Ober­lin Col­lege also have sim­i­lar office hours.

The city is plan­ning on get­ting the word out to res­i­dents about the change through a num­ber of dif­fer­ent ways. Noren­berg said the web­site will be updated with the new hours, door signs out­side the build­ings, as well as a notice being placed in the August util­ity bill.

“So far we haven’t heard any neg­a­tive com­ments about the change,” Noren­berg said.

Posted by Scott Mahoney on Jul 19 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.