Kalispell mail sorting targeted for closure

Mail-sorting operations at Kalispell’s main post office are slated to be closed and moved to Missoula, the U.S. Postal Service said Thursday.

Kalispell’s mail sorting center originally was targeted to be consolidated along with Missoula’s in Spokane.

The Postal Service instead decided to keep Missoula open and look at consolidating Kalispell’s sorting operations there.

That consolidation study has not yet been completed or released.

But the Kalispell mail processing center appeared Thursday on a list of 140 processing centers that the Postal Service wants to close by February 2013.

“Kalispell is on the list, but that decision is still being finalized,” Postal Service spokesman Pete Nowacki said. “That’s all the info I have at this point.”

Forty eight of those 140 mail processing centers will close in August. The rest will close early next year — after the election and holidays — the Postal Service said.

The closures are expected to reduce the Postal Service work force by about 13,000 employees and generate annual cost reductions of about $1.2 billion.

The Postal Service presently has 461 mail processing centers around the country and has said declining first-class mail volumes do not justify maintaining such a large processing network.

Another 89 processing centers are slated for closure in February 2014 unless the Postal Service’s dire financial outlook improves. That round of closures would eliminate another 15,000 employees and generate another $900 million of annual cost reductions.

The nearly bankrupt Postal Service is projected to lose $14 billion in fiscal year 2012 and possibly default on an $11 billion payment to pre-fund its retiree benefits as required by Congress.

U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., vowed to fight the closure of Kalispell’s mail sorting operations and said the facility is on the chopping block to be closed this summer.

“We stopped them from shutting down Missoula, Butte, Helena and Wolf Point mail processing facilities — and I’ll fight tooth and nail to protect Kalispell and the 20 jobs that are on the line,” he said in a statement released Thursday.

Baucus said the postal reform bill the Senate passed would solve the Postal Service’s problems without unfairly targeting rural Montana. That legislation has stalled in the House.

After this first round of mail processing center closures, approximately 80 percent of first-class mail  still will be delivered overnight, the Postal Service said.

That percentage will continue to shrink as the Postal Service works to reduce its service standards and rural areas farther away from mail processing centers stand to lose overnight delivery.

Nowacki said the Postal Service looks forward to seeing comprehensive postal reform coming out of both houses of Congress.

“That doesn’t change the fact that this size [processing] network just isn’t needed any more,” he said. “With the falloffs in mail volume, we just don’t need as many facilities as we once did.”

Reporter Tom Lotshaw may be reached at 758-4483 or by email at tlotshaw@dailyinterlake.com.