Budget 2027: serving residents better while freeing up room in the budget

By Dominique Péré, CEO of HelloSpot, which supports more than 700 local authorities in their relationship with residents.

In brief:

• A municipality receives about one request per resident per year, and almost none of them know how to count them. This invisible time is the biggest room for maneuver in the 2027 budget.
• It can be won back at every stage of a request’s journey: before it arrives, at the point of entry, during processing, in finding the right answer, in follow-up and in management.
• A cautious order of magnitude: 5 to 20 euros per resident per year, with 10 as a benchmark. Without cutting any jobs: teams that absorb more requests.

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Depending on your role: at the front desk, read Before the request and At the point of entry. In a department, Processing, The right answer and Knowing what to handle first. In senior management, Real-time management and What this represents. Elected officials, AI, a copilot on every floor.

How many requests did your municipality handle last year? I often ask elected officials and senior management this question. Almost nobody can answer. That is not a criticism: there is nothing that lets them be counted.

Yet it is the question I would ask first this year. Local authorities’ operating expenditure will not be allowed to grow faster than inflation in 2027 (La Gazette des communes, in French). The effort demanded of municipalities and intermunicipal authorities is estimated at 6 to 7 billion euros, after the efforts of 2025 and 2026 (Maire info, in French). And when payroll accounts for more than half of operating costs, the cuts always end up in the same place: shorter opening hours, departures that are not replaced.

I believe the most important room for maneuver is not there. It lies in those requests nobody sees going by. And it can be found at every stage of their journey: before they even arrive, when they arrive, when they are processed, when someone looks for the right answer, when they are followed up, when the service is managed. That is the journey I invite you to follow, step by step, from the counter to the mayor’s office.

An invisible activity cannot be managed

A municipality receives about one request per resident per year. A birth certificate, a school canteen registration, a pothole, a room to book, a complaint to the mayor. They come in through the counter, the phone, e-mail, the post. Online channels remain marginal in most town halls. And each department has its own spreadsheet, its own inbox, its own binder, all the way up to the mayor’s office.

Everyone has seen what this leads to. In a municipality in Brittany, Mrs. D., 74, asks the front desk for a compost bin. The request goes by e-mail to the technical services department, which asks for proof of address by post. The letter never arrives. Three weeks later, she calls back. The switchboard looks into it, calls, calls back. Four people, six exchanges, no compost bin.

Multiplied by thousands of requests, these minutes add up to entire jobs. The staff member who spends Monday morning sorting the weekend’s e-mails. The file stuck between two departments, which ends up landing on the desk of the director general of services. But this time appears on no budget line. So the cuts fall on what can be seen, not on what costs money.

Run the numbers for your municipality

The usual responses shift the workload without reducing it

Cutting opening hours does not cut requests. They move to the phone and e-mail, often twice over.

Not replacing a departing employee does not make the work disappear. It is spread across those who remain, with the same tools.

As for going digital, it has often been done in silos: one portal for the civil registry, another for family services, a third for planning. Residents do not know where to go, so they call. Forms were digitized. The relationship was not.

Before the request: answering without picking up the phone

A good share of calls are not requests. They are questions. What time does the town hall open? What documents do I need for a passport? Is the recycling center open on Mondays? Each one takes a few minutes at the front desk, and they come back every day, at the same times, while the line at the counter grows longer.

An assistant for residents, on the municipality’s website, answers them at any time of day. It relies on the same reference information as staff, and it points to the right procedure when there is one. For the busiest services, ID documents for example, a voice responder can do the same over the phone, including for people for whom written channels do not work.

For the front desk agent, that is the same question twenty fewer times a day. For the head of department, it is a switchboard that finally picks up when a resident really needs a person. Counting a single avoided call per resident per year is cautious. At five minutes a call, that comes to more than 800 hours for a municipality of 10,000 residents.

At the point of entry: not dropping the ball

Everything starts with how a request comes in. Drop the ball at that moment and you miss the request. Then a resident follows up, gets annoyed, and ends up writing to the mayor. A town hall has four entry points, and a fifth that is often forgotten. Let us take them one by one.

Mail: automating the sorting room

The chief of staff of a town in Brittany once told me that opening the mail was their sorting room. Everything goes through it, everyone waits for what comes out of it, and nothing must get lost there. Today, this sorting is done by hand. You open, read, stamp, photocopy, put it in a tray, carry it to the department. A tray left on a desk during someone’s vacation, and a request waits two weeks without anyone knowing.

Automated, it looks like this. The staff member scans the morning’s pile in one go. The letters land in a folder that the software picks up. The AI reads each letter, even handwritten ones, identifies the sender, recognizes the procedure, and creates a qualified request, with the letter attached, assigned to the right department. For sensitive procedures, the mayor’s office or senior management are copied automatically. No more trays, no more photocopies, no more lost letters. In a small town hall, that is up to five hours a week given back to the town hall secretary, who spends them at the front desk.

E-mails: the generic inbox has become a spam box

E-mail works almost the same way, with one extra problem. The town hall’s generic address is displayed in plain text on the website. Bots harvest it, and it becomes a spam box. So an ever stricter spam filter gets installed, sometimes the kind that asks the sender to prove they are human. The resident thinks they have sent a complete file. Three days later they discover the confirmation request, which itself landed in their junk folder. Meanwhile, the front desk sorts by hand whatever got past the filter.

One Monday morning, in a town in northern France, forty letters and e-mails had arrived over the weekend. An uncollected bin, three birth certificates, the swimming pool’s opening hours, a pothole, an incomplete after-school file. Everything has to be read, routed to the right department, forwarded, answered. The whole morning goes into it.

Sorting is exactly what AI does well. Recognizing a resident, recognizing the reason for a known procedure, setting the rest aside. Genuine requests become tracked requests, sent to the right department, with an acknowledgment of receipt that tells the resident what was understood and who is handling it. An acknowledgment of receipt that the law requires anyway (article L112-3 of the Code des relations entre le public et l’administration, the French code governing relations between the public and the administration). All that is left in the inbox is the few percent nobody knows what to do with. The staff member has finished sorting by about 9:30 a.m., and the rest of the morning goes to the people who came to the counter.

The counter and the phone: three letters for the resident, two for the reason

At the counter and on the phone, everything depends on how fast information can be entered. Today, the staff member jots it on a sticky note, or writes an e-mail to the department concerned, summarizing from memory. The address is spelled out over the phone and written down wrong.

With a well-designed screen, three letters are enough to find the resident, two to find the reason. The request is time-stamped and assigned to the right department and the right person without anyone having to think about it. The staff member adds a few words, scans the document the person hands over, and it is on its way. It is faster than writing an e-mail. And they can see right away that a request is already in progress for this person: instead of creating a duplicate, they tell them where it stands.

In towns of more than 25,000 residents, a kiosk at the entrance does the first sorting. Visitors indicate why they have come, are directed and called when it is their turn. The front desk agent no longer has to repeat all morning where the civil registry office is, and the manager sees live who is waiting, for what, and for how long.

The fifth channel: real online services, the kind that lightens all the others

A resident who e-mails the town hall wants to complete their procedure from their computer or phone. They are often offered a PDF to download. It has to be printed, so they need a printer. Or filled in on their phone, which takes some computer skills. Then sent back by e-mail, with a photo of a supporting document too large to go through. For the staff member, it is no better: one more e-mail to sort, and everything to re-enter. That is not going digital. It is a letter in a different envelope.

Online appointment booking showed what real online services change. Many town halls adopted it after Covid, in the middle of the passport crisis. Calls were cut in half fairly quickly, then fell further and further as habits changed. The time no longer spent on the phone saying there were no slots available, or looking for an appointment for a distressed resident, went into processing the files themselves.

Why stop at passports? Civil registry documents, civil partnerships (PACS), weddings, reports of problems, school enrollments: all these requests benefit from being submitted online, through a form that arrives already qualified. The applicant, the reason, the documents, nothing to re-enter. Take school enrollments, still often a PDF file sent by e-mail, concentrated over a few weeks: moved to a tracked form, the peak is handled without the usual extra staff.

Every request submitted online means one fewer call, e-mail, letter or visit to the counter. Traditional channels remain open: it is a question of equal access. They become the minority, and those who need them are better served because the counter is no longer overloaded.

An intermunicipal authority in Corsica already works this way. Letters, e-mails, forms: everything arrives in the same place and goes straight to the department that handles it, with an acknowledgment of receipt. A complaint about a water bill, an uncollected bin: these hardly go through the front desk anymore. What still does is the phone.

Put together, that is a quarter of an hour saved on every letter or e-mail that no longer has to be sorted, photocopied, forwarded. Nearly ten minutes on every call entered directly. And more than twenty minutes on every request submitted online, because there is nothing left to re-enter.

Appointments: the slot without the phone call

Setting up an appointment over the phone takes a good five minutes. Finding a slot, spelling a name, noting a number, calling back to reschedule. When residents book online themselves, those minutes disappear, and staff receive a person who already knows which documents to bring.

That leaves missed appointments. Without a reminder, about one in fifteen is not kept. That is half an hour of staff time lost each time, and a slot another resident was waiting for. A text message the day before prevents most of them, and the freed-up slot can be rebooked online.

For the head of department, calendars are managed instead of endured: slots are opened where demand is rising, and the week’s workload is visible. And for the mayor, it is a sentence heard less often at the market: “I can’t get an appointment at the town hall.”

The same logic applies to municipal rooms and events. Availability, rates and photos online prevent the “just checking” calls and the visits to see the room. Registrations take themselves, the capacity limit closes itself, and nobody keeps a list by hand anymore.

Processing: a file, not a mailbox

Once the request is in, it has to be processed. Here too, time is lost in back-and-forth.

Everything is in one place: the request, the documents, the history, the exchanges. Staff find it, assign it to themselves in one click, and see whether a colleague is already working on it. Everyone knows who is doing what, since everything is logged.

If a document is missing, illegible, incorrect or too old, the staff member writes to the resident from within the file itself. The AI helps phrase the message. The resident receives it in their online tracking page, with an e-mail notification. It is exactly what they know from an order placed online: their habits are not disrupted. Their reply comes back into the same file.

Without this, the staff member calls, calls back, sends an e-mail from their own inbox. When the answer arrives, if it arrives, the file has to be found to put it back in. Often, it gets lost. And if the staff member is away, nobody can move the request forward. In a municipality in Occitanie, a planning officer goes on three weeks of sick leave. Her files are in her inbox. To pick them up, you either have to wait or share her inbox.

But shared inboxes and shared access are a security problem. The day of a cyberattack, the town hall grinds to a halt. Residents’ trust is lost, and a considerable amount of time with it: understanding what was lost, assessing the consequences, answering worried residents. In a centralized file, each authorized staff member logs in with their own credentials and two-factor authentication. Continuity is ensured without sharing anything other than the file.

This continuity is going to matter. If contract staff are not renewed and retirements are not replaced, file handovers will multiply. Better that they take a single click.

Then there is re-entry. Many requests end up in specialized business software: civil registry, planning, family services, technical services. When the file is transmitted to it directly, staff no longer have to copy what the resident already entered. A few minutes per request, and no more typos in a name or an address.

The right answer, without disturbing anyone

Processing a request also means knowing how to process it. What is the procedure? Is there a decision by the municipal council that settles the question? What do the regulations say?

The answer is often in someone’s head, or in a binder. So people go and ask a colleague, the head of department, sometimes the director general of services. These interruptions appear on no dashboard, and they are costly.

A knowledge base brings this information together and makes it searchable in plain language. It stacks the reference sources: those of the State and public services, then those of the region, the département, the intermunicipal authority, and finally the town itself, with its council decisions and internal procedures. A staff member asks which rate applies to a twelve-square-meter café terrace: the answer cites the council decision that sets it.

For a recently arrived staff member, or one returning after a long absence, it is the difference between a week of asking questions and an answer in a few seconds. And the same question gets the same answer, whichever staff member asks it.

AI, a copilot on every floor

AI replaces no one in this story. It saves time on every floor, from staff to the mayor.

For staff, it reads the request and the documents, summarizes the file, finds the procedure and prepares a draft reply. The staff member rereads, corrects, decides. Over a day, that is about an hour given back to each staff member who uses it, for the front desk, case processing, or the files that really require thought.

For the head of department, it summarizes what has come in since the day before, what is stuck, and who is overloaded. They spread the workload in a few minutes, instead of going from office to office.

For the mayor, it is even more telling. In a town in the Rhône area, someone told me with a laugh that half the town had gone to school with the mayor. It is true everywhere: an elected official is well known, that is why they were elected. So at the market square, people stop them. “I voted for you, Mr. Mayor, but I filed a complaint about my planning application, and I still haven’t had an answer.”

Today, the mayor replies “I’ll look into it.” The question goes down to the director general of services, then the deputy director general, the head of department, the staff member. The answer comes back up the same path, a few days later. Everyone has spent time on it.

With direct access, the mayor replies “I’ll check and get back to you in five minutes.” From their phone, they ask the assistant where this file stands, what has been done, what is holding it up. The AI checks the file in real time. A staff member is handling it. It is an appeal against a refusal of a prior declaration of works. A document was requested ten days ago, and the resident has not replied: perhaps they did not see the message. The mayor can tell them on the spot. And if the department is the one running late, the mayor flags the request in a single message. The department sees it immediately, senior management is copied, and nobody had to go all the way down the ladder.

You must not drop the ball at the point of entry. You must not drop it during processing either. Provided this AI is hosted in France, GDPR compliant, and everyone sees only what their access rights allow: residents’ data is not up for negotiation.

Knowing what to handle first

A request has a life cycle. It is new, in progress, waiting for a reply from the resident or another department. It is sometimes blocked. It is on time, soon to be late, or late: against the quality commitments the municipality has set itself, or against the legal deadline after which the town hall’s silence counts as a decision (the principle that silence means acceptance, in French law).

When these statuses are visible, staff no longer have to work out what to do now. They take requests in order of their real priority, the one senior management has defined. And if a request is not moving, it goes up to the head of department, then to senior management only if the head of department could not unblock it. Urgent matters reach the right level, instead of all landing on the same desk.

Real-time management, not year-end reporting

For senior management, the remaining question is knowing what is going on. What is the activity? What are the current problems? Today, people wait for the end-of-month report, sometimes the end-of-year one. Compiling the figures is tedious for a head of department. Waiting for them, then interpreting them, is even more so for a director.

Having the data at hand, for any period, in tables and charts, is priceless. It is even better when you can query it in plain language. How many planning requests this month? How many are late? Is a staff member struggling with theirs? These are simple questions, and they are crucial for running departments.

The data arrives directly, without being filtered by an intermediary. And it arrives while the problem is there, not after it has passed. At a time when work will be done with reduced headcount, this is what makes it possible to put resources in the right place.

A deputy director general of a municipality in the Essonne département sums up what has changed for them. Before, a request was an address spelled out over the phone, an e-mail to sort, an attachment to track down. Today, the switchboard finds the request in a second and can start processing it live. “We don’t go digital to go faster, we go digital to serve better.”

What this represents, and what it does not mean

The assumptions are deliberately cautious. About one request per resident per year. A quarter of an hour saved on average on each request tracked from start to finish. 20 euros an hour for a staff member, including employer charges. 1,607 hours for one full-time equivalent.

A few orders of magnitude. In a village of 2,000 residents that does not issue passports, tracking requests alone frees up about 400 hours a year: a quarter of a position, 8,000 euros. In a municipality of 10,000 residents equipped for passports, with online appointment booking on top, it exceeds 3,000 hours, or two full-time equivalents. If half of the administrative staff are equipped with AI, it approaches 8,000 hours, nearly five positions. In a town of 30,000 residents, request tracking and online appointments alone represent nearly 9,000 hours.

Per resident, the range is 5 to 20 euros a year. It depends on two things: the town hall’s digital maturity at the start, and the scope of what it chooses to equip. I use 10 euros per resident as a benchmark, to stay on the cautious side.

Every municipality is different. So I have put the calculation online, with the assumptions shown. You choose your municipality, the departments concerned and what you would like to equip, and you read the result in hours, positions and euros: run the numbers for your municipality.

This figure does not mean cutting jobs. It means no longer paying twice for the same work. Better organized, better equipped teams, with a touch of AI, absorb more requests without anyone being replaced. They manage without extra staff during peaks. And they find time again for what was waiting: the deputy director general in the Essonne mentions funeral services to digitize, support for local associations, staff training.

This project does not call for a multi-year plan. One high-volume procedure to start, appointments for ID documents for example. Count the calls before, count them after, then expand. This summer, a municipality in the Yvelines département started with its heatwave register. It counted. It is now including its entire relationship with residents in its 2027 budget.

The 2027 constraint is real. It can also be an opportunity to finally look at where teams’ time goes, and to give some of it back to residents.