After nearly a year of bitter opposition to a plan to close more than 3,700 rural post offices, the United States Postal Service announced last week that rather than close offices to cut costs and reduce a ballooning deficit, it plans to reduce the hours of operation at 13,000 rural post offices from a full eight-hour day to between two and six open hours per day, a move that the struggling mail service claims will save about $500 million per year.
Three local post offices, Dowelltown, Liberty and Alexandria, are scheduled to have hours of operation reduced.
Both locations will decrease business hours from eight-hours-per-day to six under the plan.
The new plan replaces a controversial proposal intended to fix the grave financial situation the postal service, which lost $3.2 billion last quarter, finds itself in.
Without any reforms, postal officials say USPS would lose $14 billion this year alone.
Last week's plan will, instead, reduce hours at some 9,000 of the nation's 13,000 rural post offices to between two and four hours a day.
Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe says that the plan should benefit everyone involved.
“This is a win-win,” Donahoe said at a news conference Wednesday. “The bottom line is that any rural community that wants to retain their post office will be doing that.
“If we can shrink the labor cost we can keep the building open, that’s not hard to do, and ensure that customers have access.
“We think this is the responsible thing to do,” Donahoe said. “Any company that listens to their customers would come up with a good solution like this.”
Under the new proposal, about 9,000 current full-time postal employees will be reduced to part-time and lose their benefits after the offices where they work go to reduced hours.
Another 4,000 full-time employees will see their hours reduced to part-time, but will retain their benefits.
These workers will be at post offices whose hours are reduced to six hours per day.
The new plan drew praise from National Newspaper Association as well.
NNA President Reed Anfinson said the new plan is a step in the right direction and that NNA looks forward to learning more details.
"There is a widespread feeling in small towns that the Postal Service is poised to abandon rural America,” Anfinson said. “From reduced delivery times to the ending of Saturday mail to the post office closings, it seemed as if we were running a gantlet of bad news on mail service.
“Although NNA did not oppose post office closings in general, we recommended a different approach,” he continued. “Our thought was that many of these offices could remain open if USPS used a ‘circuit-rider’ approach for postmasters, staffed the offices with lower-level clerks, and simply kept the offices open for fewer hours. That idea came from our Postal Committee Chairman Max Heath, who testified on it before the Postal Regulatory Commission.
“Although NNA is pleased with Postmaster General Pat Donahoe’s willingness to work with rural communities to keep their post offices open, of continuing and greater concern is the plan for closing more than half the mail processing centers around the country,” Heath said. “The proposed cuts would have a devastating impact on the delivery of mail, including newspapers, prescription drugs and packages across rural America. The mail is more important in rural America than in many other spots around the country. For newspapers, it is the key to helping us fulfill our roles as the tribunes of civic engagement."
Steve Hutkins, founder of savethepostoffice.com., is not happy about the move, however.
Hutkins said that cutting post office hours would not dramatically cut into the deficit, and would save only about $500 million a year, a mere fraction of the shortfall.
"I think they're still committed to dismantling the postal service and putting it on a footing for privatization. When people start to realize the amount of hours these post offices are going to be open is so minimal, it's going to be a real headache," Hutkins says.
Opponents of the plan say the real problem for the postal service is the funding of pre-retiree health benefits.
The post office is lobbying Congress to allow it to reform the law mandating that it set aside billions of dollars for health benefits every year.
Bills to that effect are inching their way through Congress, and the post office can do little to institute deep reforms until Congress makes a decision.