Towns go dark with post office closings
Postal officials were blunt in December when they stood before 120 residents in Dedham Iowa to tell them why their town’s post office has to close. The Internet officials said was killing the U.S. Postal Service.
Well I have no Internet resident Judy Ankenbauer said at the meeting. Like many of Dedham’s 280 residents Ankenbauer said she still relies on the post office to buy stamps and send letters and packages.
Dedham is hardly alone in its dependence on the Postal Service. Some of America’s poorest communities many of them with spotty broadband Internet coverage stand to suffer most if the struggling agency moves ahead with plans to shutter thousands of post offices later this year a analysis found. Nearly 80 percent of the 3830 post offices under consideration are in sparsely populated rural areas where poverty rates are higher than the national average demographic data analyzed by shows.
Moreover about onethird of the offices slated for closure fall in areas with limited or no wired broadband Internet found.
We’re not the ones in the big cities who are just emailing everything to everybody. We’re the ones that are actually still sending our Christmas cards and our birthday cards said Sarah Clyden who runs a feed store in Oakwood Okla. where the agency is considering closing the post office.
Federal law requires the Postal Service to provide a maximum degree of effective and regular postal services to rural areas and small towns. Today with 32000 retail locations and 150 million delivery points the Postal Service has a larger footprint in the U.S. than McDonald’s Starbucks and WalMart combined according to its website.
Even so the rise of email a dropoff in firstclass mail onerous labor costs and the growth of shippers such as UPS and FedEx have left the Postal Service hemorrhaging money. By fall postal officials have warned they may not be able to borrow money.
The Postal Service is not studying the economic impact on communities where post offices are slated to close spokesman David Partenheimer said. But in the 3004 rural communities across 48 states where post offices may close many residents fear the impact will be pronounced.
About 2.9 million people live in the rural communities where the post office that may close is either the only one or one of two post offices serving their zip code area. For many rural residents that would translate into longer drives to mail packages pay bills or buy stamps.
Like all of the post offices on the closure lists the post offices in Dedham and Oakwood wouldn’t close until midMay thanks to a temporary moratorium on closings put in place in December. The moratorium was intended to give Congress a window to pass legislation offering the Postal Service some relief. But with lawmakers still deeply divided over how to address the Postal Service’s financial woes state and local government officials worry thousands of closings are on the way.
The Postal Service is supposed to be a universal service available to people wherever they live in America said Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad who pushed hard for the moratorium. What they’re doing is going against that premise.
‘DROP IN THE BUCKET’
The Postal Service chose post offices for possible closure based primarily on revenue. Twothirds of the 3830 post offices slated for closure earned less than 27500 in annual sales postal data show. Nearly 90 percent of these post offices are located in rural areas where shrinking populations and dwindling businesses mean the post offices simply cost more to operate than they earn.
These offices are decreasing in revenue year after year after year said Dean Granholm the Postal Service’s vice president for delivery and post office operations.
Despite a request under the Freedom of Information Act the Postal Service declined to provide data on revenues for individual post offices. But the Postal Service did provide
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