Residents of Bend must now send their utility payments to a post office box in Seattle. There are two reasons for the change.

The city previously paid Bank of the Cascades to process the payments, but the bank stopped offering this service, said city Budget and Support Services Manager Sharon Wojda. Bank of the Cascades began using a company called Retail Lockbox Inc. in Seattle to process payments, and the city also switched to Retail Lockbox Inc. in March.

The company used a courier to pick up the payments from the city’s post office box in Bend and send them overnight to Seattle. However, after the U.S. Postal Service closed the Bend mail processing center earlier this year, it took too long for payments to travel to the Portland processing center and back to the city’s local post office box, Wojda said. As a result, the city rented a post office box in Seattle, so the payments travel directly to the processing company.