Postal chief hears firsthand small towns’ worry over cuts

INGOMAR, Mont. – The top U.S. Postal Service official on Thursday took his case for rural post office closures straight to those it will hurt most, telling residents in Montana’s capital and in one of its smallest towns that thousands of post offices nationwide must be shuttered to cut costs.

Rural residents answered right back, saying cuts should be made elsewhere because their post offices provide a much-needed lifeline.

One woman from the southwestern Montana town of Basin told Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe she has no Internet access and relies on the mail. But like many other rural residents, she does not receive mail delivery.

DeDe Rhodes said if her post office closes, the next one is more than 10 miles away, making her regular trip to pick up mail much more costly.

“I need you to really consider what we are saying. People need their rural post offices,” Rhodes told Donahoe at a morning gathering in Helena.

Some 3,600 small post offices are up for closure. In Montana alone, about 80 small post offices are slated to be shuttered, from Alzada to Zurich.

Donohoe’s Montana visit is his first to a local community specifically to hear their concerns about the impact of the proposed closings.

The agency needs to reorganize in part because of a 60 percent decline in the number of people paying bills through the mail and the cost of paying into its employee retirement benefits, Donahoe told the gathering in Helena, which is facing the loss of its mail processing center.

Last year, postal losses totaled $5.1 billion, and those losses are projected to grow.

“We are in a heck of a financial situation. That is why it is so important we move ahead with some of the changes we need to make,” Donahoe said.

The trip comes as the Senate prepares as early as this week to take up legislation that would slow, if not stop, the Postal Service’s plans to close roughly half of the nation’s 460 mail processing centers beginning this year. The move would slow first-class mail delivery and, for the first time in 40 years, eliminate the chance for stamped letters to arrive the next day.

In Ingomar, residents said losing their post office could be a deadly blow to the tiny eastern Montana town that began to decline even before the railroad was abandoned in 1920.

Worried residents from small towns as far away as Wyoming swelled Ingomar’s numbers to more than double its normal population of about 80. They packed the town’s gymnasium and greeted Donahoe with a picnic table piled with home-cooked goods, treating him as a visiting dignitary while urging him to change his mind.

Several tried to persuade him to consider an alternative, including a suggestion that the federal agency charge an annual fee for mail delivery like people pay for a post office box.

Donahoe said that idea had been considered internally, and that a $5 annual fee would raise an extra $800 million in revenue.

At the request of Congress, the mail agency previously agreed not to close any facilities before May 15. Donahoe said the agency has to consider competing requests to preserve certain aspects of its services, like six-day delivery, as it weighs a whole slate of reductions that include the closures.

In a report released Thursday, federal auditors stressed that “dramatic changes” were needed to stem the Postal Service’s mounting debt and that the agency’s proposal to close mail processing centers, estimated to save roughly $3 billion a year, was an important part of accomplishing that goal.

Donahoe said communities on the final closure list will be notified in July and there will be a comment period afterward.

The Postal Service projects its loss this year could be more than $14 billion, and without changes could rise to over $21 billion by 2016.