My contract requires that I maintain a certain number of office hours a week where I am available to meet with students. In practice this time is rarely entirely taken up by student meetings however.
Recently I have joined some relatively large university committees that (not surprisingly) have a hard time arranging meeting times. I have historically indicated that I am unavailable to meet during my office hours but I am not sure if this is the appropriate position to take.
The solutions that I see are:
Consider this time booked and unavailable.
Consider this time flexible and reschedule office hours as needed (this would likely be somewhat frequent and could also just create more downstream conflicts).
Cancel the office hours as conflicts arise.
What is the appropriate way to deal with responsibilities that conflict with office hours?
Answer
It seems to me that you need to generally be available for students a certain number of hours per week, without scheduling appointments. That's because scheduling an appointment is somewhat of a barrier, making it less likely students will avail themselves of your assistance. Office hours are largely intended to be for students who may have a hard time asking for help; those students may have a hard time getting help otherwise. (Of course, whether this works in practice is another question...)
As such, if it's a rare thing, it's probably fine to just cancel the hours; but if it's as frequent as your question makes it out to be, you should keep the office hours as set. If the committees often like to use that time for meetings, I would (permanently) move your office hours, but not reschedule them frequently - that leads to confusion over what hours you hold that particular week.
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