More appointments possible Bonn’s citizen services to open earlier in future

Bonn · The Staff Council and the Lord Mayor of Bonn have reached a compromise on the citizens’ services opening hours. Doors are to open to the public half an hour earlier than before. Nevertheless, not all wishes will be fulfilled.

The city of Bonn wants to extend its service opening hours from March. Top city officials and the Staff Council have agreed on a compromise to open the doors to the service centre (DLZ) in the city hall to the public half an hour earlier at 7.30am on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the so-called short service days.

This means Lord Mayor Ashok Sridharan’s idea of also opening the service centre on Saturdays is among those things off the table. Employees were to have volunteered for this and would have also received additional compensation for their work. “Saturday opening is not possible with us,” Staff Council representative Christoph Busch told the GA.

The Lord Mayor can apparently live with this, as with the additional hour and a half opening time during the week “up to 800 additional appointments per month can be offered. This will enable citizens to make appointments at the DLZ before work in future, so Saturday openings can be dispensed with,” explained Sridharan. The Lord Mayor’s idea of offering additional opening times on an ad hoc basis during bottlenecks is also redundant. Said Busch: “We did not think this was a good solution because it would only have unsettled citizens.”

Citizens annoyed about long waiting times

As reported, there has constant criticism after the conversion of the city’s citizen services to a digital appointment system in May 2015. Citizens not only sometimes had to wait many weeks for an appointment for a request but were also annoyed about the long waiting times in the citizens’ services office itself. After an evaluation of the service centre’s work, carried out by the Staff and Organisation Office from March to August 2018, the city leaders suggested, among other things, extending the opening hours to before 8am daily and to Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday afternoons, currently closed to the public. The allocation of appointments should also be closely monitored in future and, if bottlenecks occur again, an early warning plan come into force under which employees could also volunteer to come to work.

The result now is agreement only to an earlier opening time, which Busch describes as a “good compromise”. The Staff Council representative is convinced that, “This will definitely contribute to citizens getting an appointment for their requests in the service centre more quickly than before.” No additional staff will need to be taken on for the time being. The extent to which additional permanent staff will be required to carry out work outside the opening hours will be determined in the second half of the year.

Original text: Lisa Inhoffen. Translation: kc

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