LEWISTON — Residents will have an hour less to do their business at City Hall beginning Tuesday, when the city’s new fiscal year begins.

“It has to do with the general decline in the City Hall workforce over the past couple of years, due to layoffs,” Finance Director Heather Hunter said. “That is compounded by the actual work we need to accomplish while keeping overtime at a bare minimum.”

Fiscal year 2014-15 officially begins for municipal governments in the Twin Cities on July 1. That means the budgets both cities adopted this spring take effect.

In Lewiston, the $42.9 million municipal budget did away with four positions, including Recreation Director Maggie Chisholm, two maintenance positions and a floating clerk in the treasurer’s department.

Hunter said administrative staff layoffs, as well as past City Hall layoffs, convinced the city to reduce City Hall hours.

“It gives them time in the morning to answer phone calls and answer emails and get paperwork done,” Hunter said.

City Hall will open at 8:30 a.m. Monday through Friday and close at 4 p.m., opening 30 minutes later and closing 30 minutes earlier.

“Then they get half an hour in the afternoon so we don’t run into overtime problems, like we have in the past,” Hunter said.

Overtime is key, she said.

“The issue is losing a position would have impacted the overtime budget,” Hunter said. “I would have had to put significant money back in the overtime budget if we did not reduce hours. We would not reap the full savings of losing the position because we would have needed more overtime.”

The city is also ending extended hours at the landfill on Saturdays, beginning this week. City councilors added three hours each Saturday last summer on a trial basis. Hunter said the city didn’t see more use by residents.

“So we didn’t see the use counts we expected to warrant the cost on overtime,” she said.

Hunter said an adjustment of city fees and fines, adopted by councilors this spring, also takes effect Tuesday.

In all, 154 fees increase across several departments. They include police fines for parking, false alarm calls, dangerous animals and records look-ups. For example, the first offense municipal fine for keeping a dangerous animal goes from $500 to $525. The hourly rate for police clerical research goes from $12 to $15.

Fees for documents in the City Clerk’s office go up as well: Junkyard permits go from $50 per year to $75, genealogy research goes from $5 to $6 and outdoor entertainment event permits go from $11 to $50.

“Those changes were mostly in business licensing and so forth, and they were approved before budget deliberations,” she said.

Auburn ambulances

Residents of Auburn won’t see the biggest change to their budget until October, when the city’s new ambulance service begins. Councilors approved creating an emergency medical response service in June when they adopted their $37.9 million municipal budget.

Fire Chief Frank Roma said he expects to have three leased ambulances on hand later this summer.

“There is quite a bit of work we need to do on the front end,” Roma said. “In terms of equipment training and protocols and policies and procedures, those have all been put into a plan and now we need to work that plan a little more aggressively.”

That new service is estimated to cost the city an additional $635,468 but generate $987,000 in revenue — a $351,532 bonus for the city.

City Manager Clinton Deschene said that new revenue is how the city avoided most other budget cuts this year.

“Absent that, we would have had to look at other items,” he said.

Councilors did consider $335,000 in staffing cuts, but instead chose to reduce staffing costs by $178,000. Deschene said those cuts will be realized through staff attrition.

“If we needed to hit that budget number without that revenue, there would have been more cuts,” Deschene said.

Auburn will end city-run recycling collections in favor or hiring a private contractor beginning in August, but services should not change.

“They won’t notice a reduction in services and they might actually see some enhancements, hopefully,” Deschene said.

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