Here's a postal counterproposal to post

The Postal Service made a special delivery to Kalispell last week, and we think Kalispell should mark it “return to sender.”

It seems the Postal Service is going to study whether or not it would be a good idea to close the mail-sorting facilities in Kalispell and Missoula and send the work to Spokane.

We don’t know how much the study will cost, but we can save the Postal Service at least that much. Even without a study, we already know it is a bad idea.

The presumed benefit, of course, is consolidation of the work force, but the downsides are numerous.

Let’s face it, the problem with the post office isn’t that mail processing takes place in the community where the mail originated, but that the delivery system is not entirely competitive.

Moving mail sorting from Kalispell to Spokane is not going to make delivery more efficient, but less so, as you are going to be adding a huge amount of dead time onto each delivery when packages are simply in transit to or from Spokane.

Maybe that’s why the Postal Service is also proposing to slow first-class delivery from a one-to-three-day window down to two or three days.

It makes sense that they will promise less when they are making delivery less efficient, but can you think of any business that has been able to get more business or charge more by promising to do less?

But that’s what the Postal Service seems to have in mind. Heck, they are even talking about cutting back by eliminating Saturday mail delivery. No way.

But even if consolidation were the answer to making mail delivery more competitive, the Postal Service is going about it the wrong way. We propose that if you are going to combine mail processing in one location, it should be Kalispell, not Spokane. After all, Spokane is a much larger city and would be able to absorb the loss of the jobs much more easily. Yep, we know Spokane had an unemployment rate of 9.2 percent in August, which sounds pretty bad, but Flathead County had unemployment of 10.2 percent, which to our ears sounds quite a bit worse.

If you think the mail sorting facility ought to go to Missoula, forget about it. Missoula County already has an enviable unemployment rate of 7.1 percent. They can afford to send jobs north.

Plus, we are confident that the Kalispell work force measures up to the best anywhere. We will do the work better, and give the workers a better quality of life by far than they could get in Spokane. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe should visit here before he makes any rash decisions. We are sure he will like what he sees.

And with all those new jobs available in the Kalispell post office, we have another proposal. Put a bunch of our current local letter carriers to work in the expanded sorting facility — and let the Daily Inter Lake deliver the mail along with the morning newspaper. It will be more efficient than the current system — and cheaper — and you will be able to read your mail with your morning coffee instead of after dinner.

Now that would be refreshing, wouldn’t it?