Some Progress Happens Quietly

Out on the West Plains where a steady stream of jets roars into the clear summer sky, construction crews are putting final touches on a little-noted, $41 million building that will serve every resident of our region.

Today the building is an empty shell. A few lonely workers pace back and forth, polishing its vast 10-acre floor. Brand-new parking lots and freshly seeded lawns warm quietly in the sun. Brightly colored steel posts jut toward the high ceiling, waiting for the arrival of mechanical tracks that soon will carry a river of envelopes and packages to destinations all around the world.

This is the U.S. Postal Service’s new regional processing center. When fully operational early next year, it will make mail service faster and more efficient and provide the Inland Northwest with a valuable economic development tool.

Some people may suspect that mail is going the way of the Pony Express. Not quite. In fact, e-mail and other competition merely reduces the growth rate in postal volume. But growth continues. Trendy businesses of the new Internet economy rely on the sturdy legs, and the computerized handling systems, of the U.S. Postal Service.

Walking through the new Spokane facility with Ken McArthur, the plant’s senior manager, I asked who, out of all the postal patrons in Eastern Washington and North Idaho, is the biggest single customer.

His answer? Coldwater Creek, the Sandpoint company that sells specialty clothing and household items via mail order, stores and the Internet. During the first quarter of 1999, Coldwater Creek sent out 36 million catalogs and its sales totaled $65 million. This summer it opens a new plant in West Virginia.

“My goal is to make them very happy,” McArthur said.

He also aims to please the entire region - the businesses and residents of today, and those who may locate here in the future.

The Spokane Area Economic Development Council hopes the new postal facility will attract new jobs. Credit card billing centers. Catalog companies. Internet-based sales operations. EDC President Mark Turner says he’s already courting firms that handle high volumes of mail and might want to locate here.

This facility will make Spokane unique. It will be among the 20 most modern mail-sorting centers in the nation. It will be the only state-of-the-art mail center located on the edge of an airport runway. Its design includes considerable expansion space. In many cities, airport-fronting industrial sites simply aren’t available, McArthur said. In Spokane, the airport industrial park has more sites available for businesses that would benefit from a runway at the front door - or a regional Postal Service center as a neighbor.

That adjoining runway means greater efficiency for the Postal Service and its customers.

Today, the regional sorting center for North Idaho and Eastern Washington is at the Terminal Annex, just east of downtown Spokane. The annex is cramped. Trucks must shuttle mail back and forth between the annex and the airport.

When the new processing center opens, those shuttle trucks - a costly, time-consuming step - will disappear. Customers wanting to drop mail directly at the center can get there in minutes, via the freeway, on roads better able to handle traffic. For in-town mail drops, McArthur said the Postal Service plans to announce additional dropoff locations.

Not only will the new facility serve as a modernized interchange connecting our region to the world. Also, it will process mail that stays within our region. Send a letter from Bonners Ferry to Wenatchee, and it, too, will pass through the new facility’s sorting machines.

These machines, now packed into the Terminal Annex and destined for an upgrade in the new facility, are a marvel. Scanners read the address on each piece of mail and stamp it with a bar code. The bar code tells machines where to send the item next. Machines sort the mail into trays, which ride conveyers through the plant like cars on a freeway. One off-ramp takes trays destined for Denver. Another takes trays headed for Pullman. Some of the machines sort mail into the delivery order of local letter carriers’ routes.

What about those of us who address letters by hand? Machines read them, too, with human help. Down in Twin Falls, Idaho, Postal Service employees sit in front of computer screens, reading the addresses on hand-lettered mail as it passes through the sorting machines in Spokane. These employees order the Spokane machinery to brand each item with an appropriate barcoded address.

Does it work? According to Postal Service data, 94 percent of the first-class mail that stays within Eastern Washington and Idaho gets delivered overnight. That gives the district served by Spokane’s Terminal Annex the highest customer satisfaction rating of any postal district within the 11 western states.

The new facility, if all goes well, will improve that record.

Perhaps it seems odd to write about a postal project on the same weekend downtown Spokane celebrates the opening of the River Park Square retail project, developed by this newspaper’s corporate owners.

However, this is the way a community keeps moving forward: Business by business, agency by agency, project by project. Modernizing. Expanding. Building capacity for growth.

Some projects become political footballs. Some happen quietly, as people like McArthur and his team work to improve services that seem mundane only to those who take them for granted, forgetting how essential they are.

Change is contagious. Downtown is stirring with renovation. So is the airport. On the site of the Terminal Annex, Gonzaga University’s campus will expand. A region that keeps building for the future has better days ahead.