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Highlands Today

Local post offices cutting back

JASMINA MEYER, Highlands Today

Maria Benitez delivers mail to homes on Sunset Pointe Drive in the Lake June Pointe neighborhood on Wednesday in Lake Placid. Benitez has worked as a postal carrier for 10 years and recently became a full time employee.

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By GARY PINNELL

Highlands Today

Published: October 29, 2009

SEBRING - It's a fact: the U.S. Postal Service is a troubled business, and it's downsizing.

What's more, as anyone can see if they've been inside their post office lately, it's happening in Highlands County, too.

"I'm looking at my lobby camera," Lake Placid Postmaster Robi Gore said Wednesday. "There's only two people in the lobby at 10 a.m. My lobby stays pretty empty. When I first got here, three and a half years ago, I had three to five clerks on. Nowadays, even at lunch, I can run with two."

At one of Highlands County's smallest post offices, Eric Bonk is in charge. On Wednesday, he was running the place all by himself. He had to set down the phone when a customer came in.

"There's been a dramatic decrease in volume," Bonk said. "Revenue is down as well. That's not a secret."

As a public-private corporation, USPS releases its quarterly results. From April 1 though June 30, the postal service lost $2.4 billion. Expected losses this fiscal year: $7 billion.

"Ongoing electronic diversion and the widespread economic recession continued to reduce mail volume," a news release said.

E-mail helps, hurts

Ongoing electronic diversion - that's the Internet. An estimated 200 billion e-mails zoom around the planet every day. The computer generation also texts, videos, dials cell phones...

"How many letters do you write to people?" asked Tad Perry, currently the station manager at Sebring's downtown post office, where revenue is down drastically. "The elderly, once they're gone, I don't know."

In the past year, the post office experienced the largest single drop in its history. Its own projections show a freefall of 11 billion pieces of mail a year - from 213 billion in 2006 to 170 billion in 2010.

At Lake Placid, Gore measures mail by trays. Carriers used to deliver six two-feet long trays a day. Volume is down by a third or a half.

They used to sort all that mail. Not anymore, Gore said. "Now, we've got automation. It comes in sequence, in the line of travel that the carrier drives."

Isn't that good news for the carrier? Not really, Gore says. Carriers get paid by a complex formula that includes the volume they deliver. Less mail means smaller paychecks. Which is why Gore has combined some auxiliary routes, so the regulars could keep working at least 40 hours a week.

Nationally

This year is a squeeze play for the postal service, said Postmaster General John Potter.

"So how did we respond?" he rhetorically asked the National Press Club in a Washington speech three weeks ago. "We stepped up cost cutting, trimming an unheard of $6 billion dollars from our expenses. We reduced our career workforce by 40,000 positions, and we cut almost 115 million work hours."

"This isn't a one-time reaction to the demands of today's economy," Potter said. "It's part of a process of continuous improvement. Today, we're down to 618,000 career employees. That's about 160,000 fewer than when I became Postmaster General in 2001 - more than 20 percent."

At Sebring's main post office, two clerks are retiring. After they leave, Perry can petition to replace them, but he knows it's a hard sell when other post offices are also losing people and hours, too.

Volume at Lake Placid is off 18.5 percent, Gore said. At Lorida, even E-Bayers - folks who sell goods on the Internet Web site, have decreased their mail volume, said Bonk.

The good news: he's not worried about the Lorida post office closing. Like Venus, it covers such a big geographic area, the post office seems forced to allow it to stay.

The post office did examine 3,600 stations and branches, but those were mostly in urban and suburban areas, Bonk said, and most were in relatively close proximity to one another. If the Lorida or Venus post office closed, people would have to drive more than 10 miles to Lake Placid or Sebring.

Instead, the postal service has partnered with 56,000 supermarkets, drug stores, and other retailers to sell postage and perform selected postal services. Nearly 18,000 ATMs dispense sheets of stamps. Postage can be purchased usps.com and printed on personal computers.

With computer software available from the post office, Gore pointed out, people can even print out stamps with their own images.

Elvis 'Dropped in the mailbox'

Even the familiar blue mailbox is disappearing. The postal service has uprooted 200,000 underperforming collection containers in the past 20 years.

Sebring has lost a dozen, Perry recalls. As for Lorida, well, they only ever had the one; Lake Placid has two.

But the bottom line, asks the postmaster general, is whether the post office is obsolete.

"I don't think so," Potter replied. Third quarter mail volume totaled 41.6 billion pieces. "Our annual revenue is still higher than 95 percent of the companies in the Fortune 500."

Highlands Today reporter Gary Pinnell can be reached at gpinnell@highlandstoday.com or 863-386-5828

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