Paul Bass File Photo
The mural in Westville station.
As the Postal Service sizes the Westville post office up for the chopping block, a would-be aldermen is trying to rally the neighborhood to save it.
The U.S. Postal Service this week announced that it will begin studying the viability 0f 3,700 post offices nationwide, to see which ones might be suitable for closure.
Three of those slated for study are in New Haven: the Kilby station on Washington Avenue in the Hill, the Amity station on Whalley Avenue, and the Westville post office at 95 Fountain St.
In response to that news, Westville aldermanic candidate Adam Marchand Wednesday issued a press release calling on his neighbors to “join me in supporting our local post office.”
“The Westville post office serves an important function in our community. Like the Mitchell Library or Edgewood School, our post office is an important public institution, and it offers services that add to our quality of life,” Marchand wrote. “Upholding institutions such as the Westville post office is an important role for elected officials, and it’s one of the reasons I’m running for the Board of Aldermen in Ward 25.”
Thomas MacMIllan File Photo.
Marchand.
Christine Dugas, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Postal Service, said neighbors will have a 60-day window to offer public comment on the station closing, beginning in about two weeks. The service will also be holding “public town meetings” at each one of the locations under study, Dugas said.
The information gathered will lead to decisions in about six months on which offices will close, she said. There will be no closures before December she said.
This week’s news about the threat to Westville and Hill post offices was a reprise of a scare in 2009, when the Postal Service considered closing those and other stations. Last time, the Postal Service considered closing some 1,400 offices and ended up closing only 228, Dugas. The New Haven stations avoided the ax that time.
But this time the Postal Service is considering more than twice as many stations. It’s time for tough decisions, since the agency lost over $8 billion last year, Dugas said.
She offered some other numbers. Five years ago, the U.S. Postal Service handled 213 billion pieces of mail. That number is down to 176 billion. It’s still the largest postal organization in the world, “but that’s a big drop,” Dugas said.
In the age of email and online banking, more and more people are finding they have no need to visit the post office. “People under 30 almost never visit the post office,” Dugas said.
Most people who do visit their local post office are there just to buy stamps which can be purchased at many other locations, Dugas said.
In order to stay viable, the Postal Service is looking at a new model, away from “bricks and mortar,” Dugas said. “The new concept is the village post office.” Postal products will be sold at “approved postal providers,” which could include supermarkets, pharmacies, or any small business, Dugas said.
The Postal Service is also considering other cost-cutting measures, like five-day delivery, Dugas said. But letter carriers will still make deliveries by mule to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and by snowmobile in remote Alaska, Dugas said.
Meanwhile, some customers in Westville are already concerned that cutbacks have led to a worsening of services in their neighborhood. One Independent reader said he’s seen mail coming later and in lesser quantities in recent weeks.
At the Westville post office on Wednesday, the manager was away on vacation and no one else was authorized to speak.
Dugas said all the mail is still being delivered, regardless of any route changes in Westville. She said delivery times can vary if carriers retire or are transferred. She said it’s usually not an issue except in neighborhoods with a lot of seniors who expect the mail at a certain time each day.
“People just don’t like change,” Dugas said.
Although I hope none of the post offices have to be closed, of the three , I think the Westville one is the most important due to it being older, and located in an architecturally significant building as well as being much better connected to the surrounding urban fabric. Losing the Westville branch would create a pretty sizable void in the Westville Village to a more severe degree than in the other locations where the buildings are less significant and part of a coherent place.