4 area post offices threatened

Post offices from Brothers to Sunriver received bad news this week: They’re on a list of offices the United States Postal Service will study for possible closure.

Paulina and Post are also among 41 offices in Oregon the postal service will study.

With both Post and Paulina on the list, Jodie Fleck is caught in the middle. Fleck lives between the towns and uses both post offices.

If both post offices are shuttered, the next closest one would be in Prineville. For people who live east of Paulina, that could mean a drive of 60 miles or more to do something like send a certified letter, Fleck said.

In Sunriver on Wednesday, Allen Hammermann said it would hurt his carpet cleaning business because he invested thousands of dollars in business cards and invoices printed with his post office box address. Stan’s Carpet Cleaning had the same post office box since 1980.

“We’ve been chatting about this the last couple days, and people are upset,” Hammermann said. “Everyone understands the government needs to trim, but is this where they need to trim?”

The postal service cautioned this week that just because a post office is on the list does not mean it will close.

The next step will be for the postal service to announce when studies of individual facilities will begin, which will be different for each location, said postal service spokesman Peter Hass. Residents who use the post offices will receive notice of the study, and there will be a 60-day public comment period. The process will take approximately 180 days, and the earliest any office could close is December.

The post offices selected for the study made the list because of the amount of revenue they take in and their proximity to other mail facilities, Hass said.

A decline in demand for mail services spurred the postal service to consider closing approximately 3,700 retail offices.

The postal service has relied on sales revenue to fund its operations since 1982, when it stopped receiving tax dollars, Hass said.

“Over the past four years, the postal service has seen a decline in mail volume of 20 percent,” Hass said.

In some cases, the postal service might replace their offices with “village post offices,” which could offer stamps, flat-rate packaging and other services at small businesses and local government offices. Some of these might also have post office boxes, Hass said.

In Sunriver, residents already have an alternative to the post office at the postal unit inside the Sunriver Marketplace.

The postal unit is open longer hours and more days of the week than the Sunriver post office. The postal service picks up and drops off mail at the unit. It also offers UPS and FedEx dropoff and pickup, and there are private mailboxes for rent. Lorna Turner is the manager of the postal unit.

“We kind of fill a right handy nitch here, I think,” Turner said Wednesday morning.

Yet Turner said the Sunriver Marketplace unit probably could not absorb the large group of people who currently have boxes at the United States Postal Service office.

Aside from the distance to services, losing a post office damages rural communities in a broad way, Fleck said. In places like Post or Paulina, the post office serves as a social center. Without that center, Fleck said, people may come into town less often and spend less money on quick errands.

“Everything that ties you to that post office then goes away,” she said. “The whole economic center of these small communities goes away.”