The future of two area post offices was spared following an announcement from the United States Postal Service last week.
The Mizpah and Birchdale Post Offices will remain open, however, according to Pete Nowacki, Postal Service spokesman, the daily window hours at both facilities will be reduced from four hours to two hours.
Keeping both facilities open is part of the Postal Service’s new strategy developed to keep the nation’s smallest post offices open for business, while providing a framework to achieve significant cost savings as part of the plan to return the agency to financial stability.
The Postal Service announced last year that it was looking at closing up to 252 mail-processing centers and 3,700 post offices as part of a plan to save some $6.5 billion a year. It backed off the plan to close the 3,700 post offices last week, saying it would no longer close thousands of rural post offices, but would keep them open with shorter hours.
A release said the new plan would keep existing post offices like those in Mizpah and Birchdale in place, but will have modified retail window hours to match customer use. Access to the retail lobby and to PO boxes would remain unchanged, and the town’s ZIP code would be retained, the release said.
Details are still in the early stages, and Nowacki told The Journal no changes would take place until “at least after Labor Day.”
“The entire program will be phased in over two years,” he added.
Dave Kramer, Birchdale Post Office postmaster, said the community of about 30 people will be “tickled” to have the post office remain open.
“It would have been a long way to travel to the office in Baudette or Loman,” Kramer said. “Either way is 20 miles and that would have made it a 40-mile round trip.”
Sylvia Fleming, postmaster in Mizpah, declined comments relating to the new plan.
Currently, the Birchdale Post Office window hours operate from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Saturday. In Mizpah, the window hours are 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, and from 9 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. Saturday. Nowacki did not have details on what times the hours would be reduced to.
In a statement, Postmaster General and Postal Service CEO Patrick Donahoe said, “Meeting the needs of postal customers is, and always will be, a top priority. We continue to balance that by better aligning service options with customer demand and reducing the cost to serve. With that said, we’ve listened to our customers in rural America and we’ve heard them loud and clear — they want to keep their post offices open.”
To echo Nowacki’s comments, the statement continued that the new strategy would be implemented over a two-year, multi-phased approach and would not be completed until September 2014. Once complete, the strategy is expected to save the postal service about $500 million annually, Nowacki said.
Overnight mail
The Postal Service’s new strategy also eliminated Bemidji’s sorting facility from the first-round closure list.
According to a Bemidji news source, mail processing centers in Bemidji and Duluth, both targeted to lose mail sorting centers, were left off a list of first-round closures.
A second round of consolidations, impacting 89 centers, is scheduled to begin in February 2014, according to the news source.
Last year, the Postal Service said it planned to cut more than 260 mail processing centers nationwide, including five in Minnesota, to save billions of dollars.
The closure of the Bemidji facility would have lost the commitment of overnight, first-class mail. The Postal Service said last week it would keep overnight local mail service at least through 2013.
