The entrance to the joint lobby at the Clark County Public Service Center. Changes in open hours made this year seek to save money and make county offices more efficient in processing requests.
Some in-person Clark County services will have a slight tweak on operation times in order to save funds in response to a budget crunch from balancing the county’s biennial budget.
As of Jan. 3, the Clark County Public Service Center’s second-floor joint lobby will adjust walk-in business hours, a release from Clark County last month stated. The lobby provides services for the county Assessor’s and Treasurer’s offices as well as the recording department of the Auditor’s Office.
Hours will be 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday starting this year, the release stated. Hours previously were from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday except for Wednesday which was 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The GIS Storefront near the joint lobby will also have the new hours apply to its operation, the release stated. Online transactions will continue to be processed within the 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday timeframe.
Marriage license applications will be processed from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, the release added. Telephone hours for the joint lobby will also change to mirror the new lobby hours.
The change in hours “will enable the county to offer the public optimum efficiency and effectiveness within the 2017-2018 budget while providing maximum staffing at the busiest times of day,” as stated in the release.
Though enacted mainly as a response to the funding shortfall the county faced in forming the 2017-2018 biennial budget, changing the hours of the lobby is not necessarily a new idea. Clark County Auditor Greg Kimsey explained the idea of reducing hours has been talked about for several years, but with the budget shortfall, making the change now made sense.
Kimsey said the reduction in hours will largely impact the amount of overtime payment for county staff. Last-minute transactions can have staff working past the time the lobby closes to the public, with those doing the work racking up hours the county has to pay for.
The times to be cut were based on an analysis of citizens using the lobby at different times of day over the span of several years. The analysis provided to The Reflector by Kimsey showed that from 2012 through April 2016, the amount of citizens coming in at the 8-9 a.m. hour only accounted for 5 percent of traffic. The amount of traffic in the 4-5 p.m. hour was 6.4 percent, however only one-third of that traffic was estimated to occur in the 4:30-5 p.m. timespan. Only a little more than 7 percent of traffic occurred in the hours to be cut.
In total, nearly 36,000 in-person and 38,000 over-the-phone customers are served by the lobby annually, the release stated.
Both the Auditor and Treasurer’s offices were expecting five-figure budget reductions. The change was expected to impact the Auditor’s budget by about $10,000 for the 2017-2018 biennium, while the Treasurer’s budget was projected to save more than $63,000 in the hours cut.
For the Assessor’s Office, the decision to cut hours was less about cost savings than about dealing with increased volume. Clark County Assessor Peter Van Nortwick said in an email that fewer lobby hours would allow the same staff more time to process senior property tax exemptions. The income threshold for those exemptions increased from $35,000 to $40,000 for taxes payable in years 2015 and onward, according to information from the Clark County Assessor’s Office website.
Kimsey also said an important aspect of the hours reduction was allowing for staff to be able to handle work behind the counter related to the transactions across it.
From the recording department Kimsey gave an example where after a document is recorded and indexed in the county database it then needs to have that index verified. Although staff can keep up with the indexing, the speed of verification has been lacking which is something the new hours are intended to fix.
“Having that one hour, solid chunk of time in the morning … there’s no interruptions from doing transactions with customers. It gives us a better ability to catch up on back office work,” Kimsey said.
Although it’s fewer hours for Clark County, Kimsey said a number of counties in the state have service hours fewer than Clark County will even with the reduction. Kimsey acknowledged the hour change could be an inconvenience to the public.
“Any time to reduce services to citizens, there’s going to be someone who’s not happy with that,” Kimsey said, “but I also think people realize that government has to live within its means, and this is one of the ways of doing that.”
