The Tauranga City Council's customer service centre was closed for just over an hour this morning due to a power failure.
Spokesman Marcel Currin said the power cut happened at a more inconvenient time than usual with rates due this week.
He said staff were able to serve around 25 the waiting customers in the arcade in front of the closed doors, but most transactions have needed to wait until the systems came back on at 10.10am.
Service were back to normal for the rest of the day.
The power failure only affected the council buildings.