Kudos to the city administration for its decision to offer public service at hours convenient for the public rather than only for city employees.

At long last, three strategically located satellite city halls — at Windward, Ala Moana and Pearlridge shopping centers — will remain open until 8:30 p.m. Wednesdays in a pilot program that will extend through the end of June.

Fewer people wanting to renew their driver's licenses, register their vehicles or conduct other city business will need to crowd the counters over their lunch hour.

This is a much-needed change and one that could be refined even further. For starters: Extended hours should be made permanent. Mayor Mufi Hannemann said the extended hours are expected to cost an additional $53,000 for the rest of this fiscal year.

But if the added cost is a concern — and it should be — the answer should not be to revert to the old 9-to-5 schedule. To make the change affordable, the daytime hours could always be trimmed in favor of evening hours, at least at selected locations.

The county's 10 satellite offices shoulder a heavy load — more than 821,000 transactions each year — so it would improve efficiency if so much of the customer-service duty isn't crammed into the midday or weekend "rush hours."

It's good to see that the city has been able to work out this concession with the employees' union, the Hawai'i Government Employees Association. Taxpayers — for whom those government employees work, after all — can applaud this measure of flexibility, and they have every right to expect it to stretch even further in the future.