No danger of office closing, says USPS official

By Mike Lange
Staff Writer
    ABBOT — A group of residents accepted an invitation by the U.S. Postal Service to speak out on a decision to reduce the operating hours of Abbot post office last week.
    While the reduction seemed to be a foregone conclusion, they had an opportunity to voice their opinion on the proposed schedule: 8:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. and 2:30-4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8 a.m.-noon on Saturday.
    While most of the 15 to 20 people who attended the informal session didn’t seem to be thrilled about the cutback, they also appeared to understand the reasons.

    Michael Mitchell, the central Maine district manager of postal operations, said that decisions on service had to be made based on the volume of business “that comes through the front window.”
    Some operating hours at Maine post offices have been cut down to as few as two hours per day, some were reduced to four and some hours were even increased, he explained.
    Mitchell, who was accompanied by Guilford Postmaster Susan Molley, gave a brief recap of the agency’s financial crisis dating back to 2005.
    Following a study by the General Accounting Office, it was discovered that USPS was “overfunding our retirement program by about $5 billion a year,” Mitchell said. But the following year, Congress passed what was supposed to be a “reform” and mandated that USPS had to pay its retiree health care benefits in advance “for the next 75 years. And we had to make those payments over the course of the next 10 years.”
    This decision, along with a 25 percent drop in first-class mail revenue during the past five years, nearly drove the agency to bankruptcy, Mitchell said. “We hit our borrowing cap almost two years ago … and we defaulted on our last two payments,” he said.
    So in order to close the deficit gap, USPS has eliminated 200,000 jobs through attrition, reduced some levels of management, consolidated processing operations and embarked on new ideas to generate revenue like selling advertising on its delivery vehicles.
    Two years ago, a plan was announced to eliminate as much as 15,000 post offices. “Needless to say, our customers were not happy at all; our employees were not happy and Congress was not happy,” Mitchell said.
    As an alternative, a program called Post Plan was implemented: an assessment of postal operations based on the workload needed to manage the amount of revenue earned in each office. The total savings are anticipated to be $500 million a year, Mitchell said.
    However, some Abbot residents like Walter Boomsma said that basing the operating hours of the post office strictly on revenue was “fundamentally flawed. The sales of stamps at the window don’t necessarily reflect what happens at that post office.”
    Boomsma also said that the two-and-a-half hour “gap” in the afternoon would be a problem for his mail order business, since United Parcel Service has a cooperative agreement with USPS. “If the office is closed, they can’t leave the package there,” Boomsma said. Mitchell agreed, and said that problem “is being addressed.”
    In response to a question about the future of the post office, Mitchell stressed that the agency has no intention of closing it. However, he acknowledged that Postmaster Shelley Knowlton’s salary will be reduced due to her reduced working hours.
    This didn’t sit well with many attendees, who praised Knowlton’s commitment and work ethic. “On a scale of one to five, Shelley is a six,” said one man.
    Abbot Selectman Basil Patterson noted that “when Abbot lost our school, we lost part of our identity. If the post office ever closes, we’ll lose all our identity as a town.”
    The exact date of the new operating hours hasn’t been determined, but Mitchell said they’ll go into effect no later than Jan. 10, 2015.