Every Other Friday Closed Policy

City of Ukiah
City Council Discussion
1/18/06

The Ukiah City Council discussed the city's practice of closing its offices every other Friday. ECMC presented our case as to why we believe the City should reverse that policy. This report is to tell you why we take that position, and what the results of the discussion are.

In short, our reading of the Council is that there is significant support for going back to providing services on Fridays. The City Manager will bring one or more alternatives for providing Friday service back to the Council in early March. ECMC intends to work with Council members and City Staff on these alternatives.

Immediately after the failure of the first Sales Tax Measure that would have increased the tax to pay for Safety Programs during the city's hard budget times, the City Council decided to close City Hall every other Friday as a cost saving measure. Full time city employees were still to work 80 hours each two weeks. The 8 hours taken from the Friday closing were spread out over the other 9 working days.

Several months ago City staff estimated they saved about $11,000 a year because of being closed every other Friday.

ECMC has heard from a number of members that they have lost time and money because of this policy, and that their customers have experienced significant delays. Most of these comments came from construction and real estate related firms.

ECMC partnered with the Ukiah Chamber of Commerce and North Coast Builders Exchange to conduct a poll of our members in the area as to their attitudes about the Friday Closed policy and the effect it has had on them. Those two organizations had also received a number of complaints from members.

The Chamber faxed a survey to 413 member businesses. ECMC Exec Dir (me) analyzed the results. 104 responded, a 25% response rate. We basically asked two questions.

• Attitude About Friday Closing Policy: 54% prefered City Hall be open all business Fridays, 43% had no objection to the Friday Closing policy, and 3% didn't respond to this question.
• Inconvenience: One third of respondees indicated their firm had experienced some form of direct inconvenience because of the policy.

We called most of those who indicated they had been inconvenienced to find out more. It turns out that "inconvenience" means a range of things. One on end were expressions such as "I really think they should work on Fridays, and because it bothers me they don't I'm inconvenienced." On the other end of the spectrum were several examples of companies losing very significant amounts of money because of delays in projects, projects in fact being lost, and literally hundreds of hours of wages lost to construction laborers because of project delays from the Friday Closing policy.

We offered these critiques of the policy to the City Council:

1. Justification For Policy No Longer Exists: The original reason the city adopted the "every other Friday closed" policy was because the first Sales Tax Measure had failed and the City's revenue was way down. Things are totally different now. The third Sales Tax Measure passed, and city tax collections are way up. The conditions that led the Council to adopt this policy no longer exist.
2. Insignificant Savings: We had a number of issues with how the $11,000 estimate was derived. However, the main point is even if this number were accurate, we're talking about less than $925 a month! This is 2–100's of 1 per cent of the City Budget – a very small amount relative to the size of the Budget especially when compared to the following concerns.
3. Cost to Industry, Employees, Clients and Customers, and Community: Our survey and followup discussions convinced us that a number of firms, mostly in construction and real estate, had suffered very significant costs and delays because of the Friday Closing policy. Construction laborers lost hundreds of hours of work because of project delays. Clients and Customers in some cases suffered significant delays in their projects. While we didn't make an estimate, it seems clear that the total would be far, far greater than the $925 a month savings estimated by the City in its budget. And, while we focused on our business membership, it seems likely that other segments of the community would suffer various losses as well.
4. Cost to the City: We pointed out that when construction projects are delayed, it takes longer for those properties to get on the property tax roles. And, if businesses were going to occupy new or refurbished buildings, many would begin to produce sales tax support for the city. Again, we didn't estimate these numbers, but we firmly believe the City itself suffers many multiples of lost revenue because of the Friday Closing policy than the $925 a month utility savings that is the most they could be saving.
5. Aggravation to the Public: Two City Council people described themselves forgetting about the policy and arriving at City Hall on a Friday to find the doors locked, AND a number of other citizens standing outside aggravated because they came to do business with the City and the door was closed. In addition, many people might expect business owners and managers to be aggravated by the Friday Closing policy. But many ECMC members reported their employees were offended that city employees were getting frequent 3 and even 4 day weekends (given the number of city holidays) when they had to report to work. It does not feel fair to many private sector workers.

The Council discussion pointed out that while having City Hall open earlier and later each business day is a nice benefit to the public, it does not overcome the significant problems posed by the Fridays Closed policy.

Given all these reasons, we firmly advocate that the City go back to providing service to the public during all regular business days, excluding official holidays of course.

We will report back as this issue develops.