By Tim Cox, Editor
From The Caroline Progress
SPARTA - U.S. Postal Service officials held a meeting in Sparta about potential plans to close the local post office, and they got an earful.
The meeting, held Thursday evening at Salem Baptist Church, came the same week that the Postal Service reported a net loss of $5.1 billion for the 2011 fiscal year and warned it could run out of money by September 2012 without action by Congress. The meeting was organized by the Postal Service, which announced in August that it would study nearly 3,700 post offices to determine which ones it may close in a cost-cutting move. The list includes the Sparta Post office, which occupies a small nook in a building on Sparta Road that houses a country store and is staffed by postmistress Charlotte Loving.
Kris Lydon, a retail specialist with the Postal Service in Richmond, led the meeting, held to solicit public comments from people who would be affected by the closing. Lydon was joined by Loving and two other Postal Service officials. The study will look at the savings to the Postal Service and the impact on service and employees, said Lydon. If the Postal Service eventually decides in favor of closing the Sparta branch, the decision may be appealed, she added. The Postal Service will continue to solicit public comments until Jan. 11, Lydon said. People may submit comments to Loving at the Sparta Post Office.
A number of people at the meeting pointed out that the local post office plays an important part in the life of the rural community, as does Loving, and others questioned the wisdom of potentially closing the rural outpost. Some residents of the community are illiterate, noted Janice Mundie, and rely on Loving to help them read some of their mail and respond to it. "They're not going to have somebody like Charlotte," she observed, if the post office is closed and they have to put up a mail box. Security is an issue, too, added Mundie. If people must put up a mailbox instead of retrieving their mail from the post office, mail could be stolen, she suggested. "That flag," she said, referring to the flag on a mailbox that is raised to signal to carriers to pick up mail, "...it's a flag for anybody who wants to go through your mail." In addition, Mundie said she is disabled and doesn’t want to have to drive to Bowling Green to retrieve mail if she got a post office box there.
The post office is part of the culture of the community, suggested Kevin James, pastor of Salem Baptist Church. People regularly have contact with others in the community through the post office, he noted, because they "all funnel into one spot" every day. Other speakers noted that Loving is a notary, which provides another service to the community, and that Sparta is home to a good number of elderly residents. Others questioned the savings to the Postal Service, arguing the closing would just create more work for the Bowling Green Post Office. Closing the Sparta branch would save the Postal Service $239,000 over 10 years, according to Lydon, an amount that did not impress James. "This is really small potatoes to the Post Office...but to the community, it's a big deal," he said.
Steve Lohr suggested the Postal Service should consider the nature of the rural community's roads, too. Some communities are "conducive" to mail delivery because of their better roads, he argued. Sparta, however is served by roads with no shoulders and where the speed limit in many places is 55 mph, noted Lohr. "People here use the Post Office," said Lohr. "I would think you would want your branches," he added, in communities where the Postal Service has loyal customers. Supervisor Jeff Sili, whose Bowling Green District includes the Sparta area, attended the meeting and also made a few remarks. If the Sparta Post Office is closed, Milford likely would be next, he suggested, eventually creating the need for a large post office in Bowling Green - a possible chain of events he called a "shell game."
It is cheaper for the Postal Service to increase deliveries of a rural mail carrier to serve Sparta residents than it is to keep the Sparta branch open, said Lydon. The Postal Service also is considering other options to reduce costs, she said. Lydon said she would compile the comments from speakers as well as others she receives later into a report to be forwarded to Postal Service officials. The Postal Service may provide alternative service if a rural post office is closed, according to the agency. A stand-alone post office could be replaced by a village post office, which would be operated by a local business, such as a pharmacy or grocery store. The study will take about five months, and the Postal Service is not expected to make a decision until sometime in 2012.
"It's possible the offices on the list may not be closed," Michele Martel, district communications coordinator for the Postal Service in Richmond, said earlier, "so we really don’t know at this point." Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said in a statement last week that the agency needs to cut $20 billion by 2015. The agency has proposed a strategy for trimming costs but has said it needs congressional action for more dramatic measures. Besides reviewing post offices and hundreds of processing facilities for possible closure, the Postal Service temporarily halted payments into a retirement fund, and it plans to increase stamp prices by one cent in 2012. The agency has previously said it may need to cut more than 220,000 of its about 550,000 career jobs by 2015, many through layoffs. The increased use of e-mail and online bill payments, combined with the recession, has eroded mail volume, which declined by 3 billion pieces, or 1.7 percent, during 2011. Revenue from First Class Mail, the Postal Service's most profitable product, fell 5.8 percent