El Paso County Clerk and Recorder Bob Balink’s staff stopped answering the phones in his three offices last month, and two elected officials who’ve been hammered with the overflow with no warning aren’t happy about it.

Balink couldn’t be reached for comment, but several county workers said the clerk’s office stopped answering the phones because of budget cuts that reduced his 2009 budget to 1995 levels, resulting in the layoff of 19 employees last year.

County Assessor Mark Lowderman said the phone boycott is a bad move because some people aren’t online and don’t drive, leaving them no way to find out about voter registration, elections, land transactions, motor vehicle registration and marriage licenses.

“I just don’t agree that cutting off the most basic avenue for asking us a question is in the best interest of the public that we serve,” Lowderman said in an e-mail to The Gazette.

Treasurer Sandra Damron said her 17 employees have been “slammed” with calls at a busy time, considering tax bills were mailed last month and payments are starting to roll in.

“We didn’t know he wasn’t answering the phones,” she said.

Lowderman confirmed that Balink didn’t give his colleagues a heads-up that voice messages on the clerk’s phones would refer people to the assessor’s and treasurer’s phone lines.

For several days, Lowderman’s staff referred people back to the clerk’s office, because the questions dealt with clerk and recording issues and he didn’t know about the phone cutoff. But soon, callers would again call his office “understandably upset,” Lowderman said.

He then discovered the clerk’s Web site listed direct-line numbers for Balink’s department managers, so Lowderman told his staff to refer people to those numbers.

“That worked for about two days,” he said. “Then they put the endless recording on those extensions as well.”

Here’s how one call played out:

An elderly man who couldn’t get the information he needed finally called the Area Agency on Aging, housed with the Pikes Peak Council of Governments, which e-mailed Lowderman, asking him to get a message to Balink to call the man.

“He doesn’t own or have access to a computer. He doesn’t drive anymore. He simply had a question of Bob’s office,” Lowderman said, who didn’t know how the matter was resolved, or if it was.

Noting that all county offices have made changes in response to budget cuts, Lowderman said, “If we make it so difficult to ask a question of those that we’ve elected to govern, we’ve lost track of those people that pay our salaries.”

Air Force goalie Andrew Volkening between the pipes against Rochester Institute of Technology forwards Jesse Newman (10) Matt Crowell (9) at the Cadet Field House Friday, Dec. 5, 2008. Photo by KEVIN KRECK, THE GAZETTE

Kevin Kreck