The Staffing Cost Nobody's Counting — How a Bad Municipal Website Drives Phone Calls, Walk-ins, and Repeated Emails
There's an expense buried in your municipal budget that doesn't have its own line item. It doesn't show up in a capital plan or a technology assessment. It doesn't get flagged by the auditor. But it's real, it's recurring, and in many municipalities it adds up to tens of thousands of dollars a year in staff time.
It's the cost of answering questions that your website should be answering for you.
When a resident can't find the tax payment deadline on your website, they call the clerk's office. When a permit application PDF won't open on a phone, someone walks into the building. When the zoning ordinance is buried three levels deep in a navigation menu that doesn't make intuitive sense, the planning department gets an email. When a form can't be filled out online, a staff member walks someone through it over the phone — or prints it, fills it out by hand, and scans it back into the system.
None of these interactions get categorized as "website failure." They get categorized as constituent service. They're treated as normal workload — the kind of thing municipal staff just handles because that's part of the job. And they are part of the job. But a significant portion of them shouldn't need to happen at all. They exist because the website isn't doing what a website is supposed to do: give residents the information and tools they need without requiring a staff member to intervene.
This piece is about that hidden cost — what it actually looks like, how to estimate it, and why fixing your website is a staffing decision as much as it is a technology decision.
The Phone Calls That Shouldn't Need to Happen
Ask any municipal clerk in New Jersey what they spend their day doing, and a substantial portion of the answer will be fielding phone calls and emails from residents looking for basic information. What time is the office open? Where do I pay my taxes? How do I get a copy of a vital record? When is the next council meeting? Where do I find the meeting agenda? How do I file an OPRA request?
These are entirely legitimate questions. Residents have a right to ask them, and staff should answer them courteously and completely. But these are also questions that a well-functioning website answers instantly — without consuming a minute of anyone's time.
The issue isn't that residents are calling with unreasonable questions. The issue is that the website has failed to provide the answer first. And when the website fails at that basic function, it creates a cascade of small costs that add up in ways most municipalities never quantify.
Consider the math on a single type of call. A resident phones the clerk's office to ask when the next council meeting is and whether the agenda has been posted. The call takes three minutes. The staff member who answers it is being paid — let's say $22 an hour, a reasonable midpoint for a New Jersey municipal clerk. That call cost the municipality about $1.10 in direct labor. Trivial, right?
Now consider that this call happens ten times a week across a municipality of 10,000 to 15,000 residents. That's 520 calls a year, at $1.10 each — about $572 in direct labor for a single category of question. Scale that across all the routine informational calls a clerk's office handles — meeting schedules, office hours, tax deadlines, document requests, form locations, permit procedures, recycling schedules, snow emergency routes — and the annual cost starts to look very different.
Municipal clerks in small to mid-size New Jersey municipalities routinely report that 30 to 50 percent of their inbound phone calls are for information that is, or should be, available on the website. For a clerk's office that fields 40 calls a day, that's 12 to 20 calls that a better website would have eliminated. At three minutes per call, that's 36 to 60 minutes of staff time per day. Over a year, that's 156 to 260 hours — roughly four to seven full work weeks of a staff member's time spent answering questions that a functional website would have handled.
Put a dollar figure on that. At $22 an hour including benefits, 200 hours of redirected calls costs the municipality about $4,400 a year in one office alone. Across all departments — tax collection, building and zoning, public works, recreation, administration — the aggregate number is considerably higher.
And that's just phone calls.
The Walk-ins Nobody's Tracking
Phone calls at least have a log. Walk-in traffic is harder to measure, but it's often a larger time sink because walk-ins take longer to serve and are harder to manage alongside other work.
When a resident walks into the clerk's office because they couldn't figure out how to file an OPRA request online — or because the OPRA form on the website was a scanned PDF that wouldn't fill in — the resulting interaction takes ten to fifteen minutes, not three. The staff member stops what they're doing, helps the resident find the right form, explains the process, potentially fills out the form with them, and then returns to whatever they were working on — having lost not just the interaction time but the context-switching time on either side of it.
Walk-ins driven by website failures tend to cluster around a few predictable categories. Residents who need a form that doesn't work on their phone. Residents who can't find information about a specific service. Residents who tried to use the website and gave up. Residents who don't trust the website because the last time they used it, the information was outdated.
That last category is particularly expensive because it represents a permanent loss of the website's value as a communication channel. Once a resident learns that the website can't be relied on, they default to calling or showing up in person for everything — not just the thing that was wrong. A single outdated meeting schedule or a single broken link doesn't just cost you the staff time to answer that one question. It costs you the resident's confidence that the website is worth checking at all.
For municipalities with limited counter staff, walk-in traffic driven by website failures also creates bottleneck effects. When three residents are waiting at the counter for help with things the website should have handled, the fourth resident — who has a genuinely complex issue that requires staff attention — waits longer. Service quality drops across the board, not just for the interactions that shouldn't have been necessary.
The Repeated Email Problem
Email creates its own distinct cost pattern. When a resident emails a department with a question the website should answer, the staff response time is typically longer than a phone call — not because the answer takes longer, but because emails queue up and compete with other work.
A staff member who gets fifteen emails a day and needs to respond to each one might spend five to ten minutes per email — reading it, looking up the answer, composing a response, and sending it. If half of those emails are for information that's readily available on a well-designed website, that's 37 to 75 minutes of staff time per day spent crafting individual responses to questions that could have been answered by a web page that takes zero minutes of staff time to serve.
Email also creates a particular risk for municipal staff: the written record. A phone call that gives slightly imprecise information is usually harmless. An email that gives imprecise information about a tax deadline, a permit requirement, or a public hearing date creates a documented communication that the municipality may need to stand behind. Staff members know this, which is why email responses tend to take longer — they're being careful, as they should be. But carefulness takes time, and time that's spent carefully answering a question the website should have answered is time that isn't being spent on work that actually requires human judgment.
The Accessibility Dimension
Everything described above is amplified for residents with disabilities when the website isn't accessible.
A resident who uses a screen reader and encounters a municipal website with missing alt text, broken heading hierarchy, and inaccessible PDFs doesn't have the option of "figuring it out" the way a sighted user might. The information isn't just hard to find — it's not available to them through the website at all. Their only option is to call, email, or visit in person. Every interaction they have with the municipality requires staff involvement. They cannot self-serve, not because they lack the ability or desire, but because the website excludes them.
This creates a compounding cost. The municipality is already spending staff time answering avoidable questions from residents who can use the site but can't navigate it effectively. For residents who can't use the site at all because of accessibility barriers, the municipality is providing what amounts to full-service concierge support for every interaction — not because it chose to, but because the website left no alternative.
Under the ADA, this also creates an accommodation obligation. If a resident with a disability requests information that's on the website but inaccessible to them, the municipality must provide it in an alternative format or through an alternative channel. That alternative channel is almost always staff time — someone reading the information over the phone, sending it in an accessible format, or walking the resident through the process in person. The cost of that accommodation is borne by the municipality's operating budget, indefinitely, until the website is fixed.
An accessible website doesn't just serve residents with disabilities. It reduces the staffing cost of serving them. That's not the primary reason to make your website accessible — the primary reason is that it's required by law and it's the right thing to do — but for a CFO or administrator evaluating the business case, it's a real and recurring cost that an accessible website eliminates.
Quantifying the Hidden Cost
Most municipalities haven't tried to measure this, and that's understandable — nobody's asking them to. But the exercise is worth doing, even roughly, because it reframes the website conversation from "how much will a redesign cost?" to "how much is the current site already costing us?"
Here's a simple framework for estimating the hidden staffing cost of a website that isn't working well.
Start with your highest-volume public-facing departments — typically the clerk's office, tax collection, building and zoning, and recreation. Ask the staff in each department to estimate, for one week, how many phone calls, emails, and walk-ins they handle that are seeking information or services that a well-functioning website should provide. They don't need to track every interaction — a reasonable estimate is fine.
Multiply the weekly count by 50 to get an annual estimate. Multiply each interaction by an average time — three minutes for phone calls, seven minutes for emails, twelve minutes for walk-ins is a reasonable starting point. Convert the total minutes to hours and multiply by the average loaded hourly cost for the staff handling those interactions. "Loaded" means including benefits — not just the salary line, but the actual cost to the municipality of that employee's time.
For a municipality of 10,000 to 15,000 residents with a website that's several years old and has significant usability or accessibility gaps, this calculation routinely produces a number between $15,000 and $40,000 per year in staff time spent on interactions that a better website would have eliminated or significantly shortened. For larger municipalities or those with particularly outdated sites, the number can be substantially higher.
That number doesn't include the indirect costs — the work that didn't get done while staff were answering avoidable questions, the reduced quality of service for residents with genuinely complex needs, the overtime that results from a workday consumed by routine inquiries, or the staff frustration and turnover that accumulates when skilled employees spend their days answering the same questions on repeat.
Compare that annual hidden cost to the cost of a website redesign. A $40,000 redesign that cuts avoidable contact volume by 40 percent in a municipality with $30,000 in annual hidden staffing costs pays for itself in about three years — and continues generating savings every year after that. The website doesn't depreciate in the way that the staffing cost recurs. A good site, properly maintained, keeps answering questions for years without asking for a raise.
What a Good Website Takes Off Your Staff's Plate
It's worth being specific about what changes when a municipal website actually works.
Residents find answers without calling. When the meeting schedule is current, prominently placed, and easy to find on a phone, the calls asking about meeting times drop. When office hours and department contacts are on every department page, the calls asking "who do I talk to about X" drop. When the tax payment process is clearly documented with deadlines, the seasonal surge of calls to the tax office drops. None of these calls go to zero — there will always be residents who prefer to call — but the volume decreases meaningfully.
Forms work without staff intervention. When a permit application can be filled out and submitted online — on a phone, with accessible form fields, with clear instructions — the resident completes it independently. Nobody walks in to pick up a paper form. Nobody calls to ask which form they need. Nobody emails because the PDF wouldn't open. The form does its job, and the staff member's first interaction with that application is when they're reviewing a completed submission rather than helping someone figure out how to submit one.
Information stays current without heroic effort. A well-designed CMS with an intuitive content management workflow makes it easy for staff to keep information up to date — meeting schedules, office hours, public notices, deadlines. When updating the site is simple, it gets done. When it's cumbersome or confusing, it doesn't, and the information goes stale, and the calls start again. The CMS isn't just a technology platform. It's a workflow tool that either supports your staff or works against them.
Documents are accessible without manual accommodation. When PDFs are tagged, structured, and readable by assistive technology, residents with disabilities access them independently — just like everyone else. The phone calls and emails requesting alternative formats decrease. The staff time spent providing manual accommodations decreases. The website serves all residents equally, which is the point of accessibility and also happens to be more efficient than the alternative.
The Staffing Argument for a Website Redesign
Municipal governing bodies and budget committees evaluate spending proposals based on need, cost, benefit, and urgency. A website redesign is usually presented as a technology project — and it is — but it's also a staffing efficiency project, and framing it that way can change how decision-makers see it.
The staffing argument goes like this: our current website is generating a measurable volume of avoidable phone calls, walk-ins, and emails that consume staff time in every public-facing department. We've estimated that cost at roughly $X per year. A redesigned website that makes information findable, forms functional, and content accessible will reduce that cost by a meaningful percentage. The redesign pays for itself within Y years through reduced demand on staff time — and it also addresses our legal obligation under the DOJ's Title II rule, reduces our litigation exposure, and improves the quality of service for every resident.
That's a different pitch than "we need a new website because the old one looks dated." It connects the technology investment to operational outcomes that every governing body cares about: staff efficiency, cost control, risk management, and resident satisfaction.
What This Means for Small Municipalities
The staffing cost of a bad website hits small municipalities hardest, precisely because they have the least capacity to absorb it. A borough with a three-person clerk's office can't afford to lose 200 hours a year to avoidable phone calls — that's nearly 10 percent of one full-time employee's annual hours. In a small municipality, every hour of staff time matters, and hours spent answering questions the website should handle are hours not spent on the substantive work that only staff can do.
Small municipalities also tend to have the most outdated websites, the least accessibility compliance, and the fewest resources to address either. It's a compounding problem: the municipalities with the smallest staffs have the worst websites, which generates the highest per-capita demand on those small staffs, which leaves the least capacity to improve the websites.
Breaking that cycle doesn't require a massive investment. As we've discussed in previous posts, a phased approach — starting with an accessibility statement, a document checklist, and a free audit using tools like WAVE and Lighthouse — can begin reducing the most obvious barriers at little or no cost. But the staffing argument strengthens the case for the bigger investment: a municipality that's losing $20,000 a year in staff time to a broken website can justify a $30,000 to $40,000 redesign as a decision that pays for itself in under two years.
The Real Question
The question most municipalities ask is: can we afford a new website? The question they should be asking is: can we afford not to have one?
The current site isn't free. It costs staff time every day, in every department, in ways that nobody is measuring. It costs resident confidence every time someone can't find what they need. It costs accessibility every time a resident with a disability encounters a barrier and has to pick up the phone. And it will cost legal exposure if the DOJ's April 2027 deadline arrives and the site doesn't meet the standard.
A good website doesn't just present information. It handles inquiries. It processes requests. It serves residents at three in the morning without overtime. It answers the same question a thousand times without getting tired. It works on a phone, with a screen reader, in English and in Spanish, for a resident who just moved to town and for one who's lived there forty years.
Your staff can do all of that too. But they shouldn't have to — not when the website could be doing most of it for them.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Do We Actually Measure How Many Calls Are Caused by the Website?
You don't need a precise count — a reasonable estimate is enough to make the case. Ask your front-desk staff in two or three departments to keep a simple tally for one or two weeks: how many phone calls, emails, and walk-ins were for information that should be available on the website? Categorize them loosely — meeting schedules, office hours, form requests, payment questions, permit procedures. Multiply the weekly count by 50 for an annual estimate, and multiply by the average time per interaction and the loaded hourly rate of the staff handling them. The resulting number won't be exact, but it will be directionally accurate and almost always large enough to reframe the conversation about whether a website redesign is worth the investment.
Our Staff Says the Phone Calls Are Just Part of the Job. How Do We Reframe That?
They're right that constituent service is part of the job — and it always will be. The reframe isn't that staff should stop helping residents. It's that many of the interactions they're handling are avoidable with a better website, and eliminating those interactions frees them to spend more time on the work that genuinely requires their expertise. A clerk who spends an hour a day answering routine questions about meeting times and office hours is a clerk who has one less hour for complex records requests, election preparation, or ordinance management. The website handles the routine. Staff handle the complex. Both get done better.
Will a New Website Actually Reduce Call Volume, or Will People Keep Calling Anyway?
Call volume won't drop to zero, and it shouldn't — some residents will always prefer to call, and the municipality should always be available by phone. But the evidence from municipalities that have invested in well-designed, accessible websites is consistent: routine informational calls decrease meaningfully. The reduction varies, but municipalities that have tracked it typically report a 25 to 40 percent decrease in routine calls within the first year after a redesign that prioritizes usability and findability. The key is that the website has to actually be better — not just newer. A redesign that reorganizes content around what residents need, makes forms functional online, and keeps information current will change behavior. A redesign that just updates the colors won't.
Does Online Payment Capability Reduce Walk-in Traffic?
Significantly. Tax payments, utility payments, permit fees, recreation registration fees — these are some of the highest-volume in-person transactions at the municipal level. When residents can pay online, a substantial portion of them will. Municipalities that have implemented online payment systems consistently report reductions in counter traffic for payment-related visits. The upfront cost of integrating payment processing into a website redesign is real, but the ongoing reduction in counter traffic, cash handling, and manual processing creates measurable operational savings. If your municipality doesn't currently offer online payments, including this capability in a redesign scope makes the staffing efficiency case even stronger.
How Do We Factor This Into the Budget Conversation With the Governing Body?
Lead with the cost you're already paying. Present the estimated annual staffing cost of avoidable interactions — the number you calculated by tracking calls for a week or two. Then present the cost of the redesign. Show the payback period. Frame the redesign as a staffing efficiency investment that also addresses a legal compliance requirement, not as a technology expense with intangible benefits. Governing bodies respond to concrete numbers and operational impact. "Our clerk's office spends approximately 250 hours a year answering questions the website should answer — that's about $6,000 in direct labor, and it's time our staff could be spending on election administration and records management" is a more persuasive statement than "we need a modern website."
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