Six Jax post offices studied for possible closing

[urbanlibertarian]

Arlington may be consolidated into Monument, JIA into North Jax, Baldwin into Murray Hill or Maclenny, Cecil Field into Murray Hill, Lake Shore into Westland and Springfield into Kings Rd.

From news4jax.com:

6 Nearby Post Offices May Be Closing
Post Office Facing $7 Billion Loss This Year

POSTED: Tuesday, August 4, 2009
UPDATED: 4:14 pm EDT August 4, 2009
Post Office
The Arlington post office on Merrill Road may be closing.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Blue mail boxes and even a post office branch in Arlington could become scarce now that the post office is thinking about making big cuts.

People using the Arlington post office on Merrill Road are very surprised to learn this could close.

"Yeah, it's very busy usually when you come here," resident Ken Chatham said. "All the spaces are full. There is a line inside. It really needs to be made bigger, not closed down."

But it is one of six local post offices that are on the block.

"Those are just a study that we are doing," said Lindy Green, of the U.S. Postal Service. "There is nothing definite that we will be closing those offices. We are looking at where we can consolidate offices that would have the least impact on our customers."

The post office is facing a $7 billion loss this year, and the latest 2 cent stamp increase isn't helping.

"We have seen a decline in mail volume due to Internet," Green said. "Our first class mail volume, which is first class mail, has continued to drop. It's been a real problem for us."

At this point, they are not talking layoffs, but the post office is not hiring anyone. Some of the facilities that could close in Jacksonville are very small and are operated by one or two people.

But those like the one in Arlington are very busy, and more than likely, service there will be moved nearby or consolidated with another branch.

No final decision has been made about what will close or what will consolidate, but Channel 4 was told nothing will happen before Sept. 30.

[Sigma]

The post office is facing a $7 billion loss this year, and the latest 2 cent stamp increase isn't helping.

but hey! let's model our health care just like this anyway!

[Deuce]

Our first class mail volume, which is first class mail, has continued to drop.

Wat? No wonder they are in losing money.

I wouldn't mind if the Springfield one closed down (I'm assuming they are talking about the historic district location). Whenever I actually need to use the post office, I use the one on King's Rd. because of the extended hours. I don't think our delivered mail originates with that location either. Once it did close, then the property could be redeveloped into something else. Get the bank out and that block and the adjacent block where the Quality Foods was would be ideal to turn into a shopping area like the one in Riverside anchored by Publix.

[Timkin]

Well...  its coming...  Someone I know well , serving 38+years with the Postal Service was forced into retirement... along with many others..  It is not surprising at all that the reduction in workforce, plus other methods of shipping available , is resulting in the closing of some post office locations.

[JeffreyS]

The post office is facing a $7 billion loss this year, and the latest 2 cent stamp increase isn't helping.

but hey! let's model our health care just like this anyway!

These two programs operational models have nothing in common.  You believe the post office has been a failure for this country?

[ChriswUfGator]

The post office is caught in a vicious cycle of having responded to falling demand by jacking first-class postage rates through the ceiling, which greatly worsened the problem by exacerbating the demand drop-off. It was obvious that your average household would almost entirely cut out using mail back in 2000/2001 as E-mail and online banking were replacing the need, but business-to-business (external, not internal) mail was relatively steady and they've now even managed to kill that off by charging $.50/letter.

There is really no way out of it for them at this point, whatever they do will simply make the problem worse, as they continue to become less relevant. Two of my neighbors would quit receiving mail entirely if it were up to them, they do all their banking and business online, the daily trip to the mailbox to get a bunch of junk coupon fliers and advertisements is an annoying waste of time.

IMHO, closing post offices is the wrong way to go, though. Every time I go, it's packed with a line often out the door, with people shipping packages, buying or cashing money orders, etc. Their other services besides for just letter have grown a lot, they need to find a way to play on their strengths. For example, why does Amazon.com, Buy.com, etc., all the big online retailers, usually use UPS or FedEx? Because they will negotiate rates with them, which USPS won't. Their problem really is their cost structure, that was designed around processing a huge volume of letters. Closing post offices will make their problems much much worse, as it will close out growth in their package shipping and financial services businesses, which have been growing. Seriously dumb idea.

[mtraininjax]

Their problem really is their cost structure, that was designed around processing a huge volume of letters.

It's actually the same issue that forced GM into banktuptcy, the pensions. Eliminate the pension issue, going to 401ks or self-directed plans, and you eliminate most of the issue.

[urbanlibertarian]

Their problem really is their cost structure, that was designed around processing a huge volume of letters.

It's actually the same issue that forced GM into banktuptcy, the pensions. Eliminate the pension issue, going to 401ks or self-directed plans, and you eliminate most of the issue.

It's actually not the same.  All new federal employees starting in about 1987 were put into the newly created Federal Employee Retirement System which is Social Security enhanced with a 401K.  The only employees still covered by Civil Service Retirement System (a defined benefit pension) are the ones hired before then.  When it comes to retirement USPS has a pretty good case that they have been required to greatly overpay their projected liabilities.  Quite the opposite of GM.

On the other hand, USPS should be sold.  The government should not be delivering mail.

[buckethead]

The Constitution of the United States of America might disagree.

[urbanlibertarian]

The Constitution requires a Postmaster General, not a government post office.

[urbanlibertarian]

From Reason.com:

http://reason.com/archives/2011/04/13/the-post-postal-society

The Post-Postal Society?
The U.S. Postal Service struggles to stay self-sufficient.

Greg Beato from the May 2011 issue



In 2006 the nation's vast army of postal clerks, letter carriers, and facer-canceler machines processed and distributed 213 billion pieces of mail. By 2010 that number had dropped to 170 billion, and according to forecasts commissioned by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), the total will sink to 150 billion by 2020. In March 2010, postal administrators announced that the USPS could run up a cumulative deficit as high as $238 billion during the next decade. To cut expenses in the face of eroding revenues, the postal service floated the idea of reducing delivery to five days a week and stepped up its efforts to shutter underperforming post offices and branches. This year, it hopes to close as many as 2,000 of its approximately 32,000 outlets

When this sort of thing happens, the locals typically express…well, "outrage" might be too strong a word for it, but they definitely get mildly annoyed. In December 2010, for example, the USPS closed a post office located on the campus of the University of Oregon in Eugene. "I don't even know where I would go if it closes," a student told the campus newspaper. (There are seven other post offices in Eugene, including one less than a mile away from the university.) "I would never find another postal job as fun as this one," exclaimed a postal employee faced with moving to a new location.

All across America, in the small towns politicians like to iconize as citadels of self-sufficiency and can-do spirit, the lack of easy access to Pottery Barn catalogs and utility bills is threatening to tear things asunder. "This is how towns get broken," the author Bill McKibben wrote in a 2008 New York Times article when the USPS temporarily shut down the post office in his tiny hometown of Ripton, Vermont.

"We don't have much left in our small town…so it is nice to go up there and run into people that you wouldn't see otherwise," a resident of Tallula, Illinois, told the Associated Press in February 2011. "We have been hoping and praying [the postal service] doesn't close it," a resident of Crescent City, Illinois, lamented to USA Today the same month. "If we lose our post office, we're just about lost."

Closing a small-town post office, or even a couple thousand small-town post offices, isn't going to put much of a dent into the $8.5 billion deficit the USPS recorded in 2010 or the $3.8 billion deficit it racked up the previous year. The postal service's most pressing fiscal crisis arises from a provision in the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act that requires it to prefund its Retiree Health Benefits Fund at the rate of approximately $5.6 billion a year from 2007 to 2016; the agency has not been able to make those payments without running up huge deficits.

But if thousands of underperforming post offices are a relatively tiny albatross around the postal service's neck, they will no doubt continue to serve as a point of controversy as the agency tries to retool itself for a reduced role in the Internet age.

Forty years ago, on July 1, 1971, the Post Office Department evolved into the United States Postal Service, a federal but independently operating entity that sustains itself with no direct support from taxpayers. (To cover years in which it operates at a deficit, it has a $15 billion credit line with the U.S. Treasury.) If the USPS wants to maintain its self-sustaining status in the face of declining demand for its most lucrative monopoly, first-class mail, it must shed personnel, streamline infrastructure, and cut services.

Every time the postal service resorts to such measures, it jeopardizesâ€"or at least appears to jeopardizeâ€"its commitment to making the postal system as accessible, comprehensive, and democratic as possible. But if the USPS has a longtime mandate to serve the public interest, it also has a longtime mandate to make its own ends meet. Neither George Washington nor James Madison imagined that the government's general treasury would underwrite America's emerging mail system, the Columbia historian Richard R. John argues in "History of Universal Service and the Postal Monopoly," a 2008 paper commissioned by Congress. "Indeed, it was far more likely that they presumed, with Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, that the postal system might one day transfer a substantial surplus to the government as the British postal system had in Great Britain, and as the American postal system would for several decades after 1787."

The postal service's mandate of self-sustainability is often scorned by advocates who believe the government is failing any citizen who has to travel more than a mile to ship a batch of cookies to grandma at Christmas. But self-sustainability and serving the public can also be viewed as interdependent motives. If you aren't meeting the public's needs and expectations in some substantial way, you won't be self-sustaining for long. If you aren't self-sustaining, your ability to serve the public interest becomes contingent on the whims of politicians.

In the case of the postal service, it seems pretty clear that the infrastructure it developed to serve 19th-century America isn't quite as necessary in the 21st. In 1901 there were 76,945 post offices in the United States. Today there are 32,000, and if the postal service had free rein to purge as many as it saw fit, who knows how many would remain? But how many people would argue that it's harder for us to communicate with friends and family or to pursue long-distance business interests than it was for our forebears in 1901? Who would claim that we have less access to information than they did? The idea that the postal service's efforts to streamline its operations in pursuit of ongoing viability might somehow leave even small numbers of Americans in an information void is preposterous. We are the most tightly connected civilization in the history of humanity, and even an organization capable of deploying inefficiency on the scale achieved by the USPS can't change that.

Even postal preservationists end up undermining the utilitarian importance of post offices. In his 2006 book Preserving the People's Post Office, Christopher W. Shaw, a project director at Ralph Nader's Center for Study of Responsive Law, says the USPS serves as a symbol of "our nation's democratic aspirations by serving everyone equally" and provides a vital "community hub" where neighbors can bump into each other and trade small talk for a few minutes. In a similar vein, "A Framework for Considering the Social Value of Postal Services," a 2010 white paper prepared by the Urban Institute on behalf of the Postal Regulatory Commission, winds up arguing that post offices benefit communities in ways that have nothing to do with collecting or distributing mail. "Post offices bring increased foot traffic for nearby businesses," it reports in one section. "Some post offices are drop-off points for recycling cell phones and other goods," it advises in another.

So post offices are homey but high-minded emblems of democracy, bustling third spaces for towns too bucolically correct to tolerate a Starbucks (which are still outnumbered by post offices by a more than two-to-one margin). In the same way that Filson hunting jackets and chambray utility shirts have been recast as urban fashion, the post office is turning into a lifestyle prop, an authentic, old-timey example of "heritage" communications. And, of course, the most democratic place in the land to recycle your old cell phone when you upgrade to a Nokia E5 and its superior messaging capabilities.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato (gbeato@soundbitten.com) writes from San Francisco.