West Chester Post Office to close Oct. 7

The West Chester Post Office will close its doors next week on Friday, Oct. 7. United States Postal Service spokesman Richard Watkins said West Chester residents will have rural addresses. They will receive mail service via a rural carrier who will take the mail to a cluster of box units in the town. Each address will be assigned its own locked compartment, he said.

Earlier in the year, Watkins said there was a possibility that West Chester?s post office could be consolidated into Keota?s post office. He said Friday that there is no need for West Chester residents to travel to Keota for their mail, although the Keota Post Office will serve as the administrative post office for the area.

The postal services district in Des Moines recommended consolidating West Chester?s post office into Keota?s post office as a way to save money early in 2011. West Chester had a town meeting in March to discuss the matter, at which 27 people were present. On June 30, the postal service headquarters in Washington, D.C. considered the proposal. The United States Postal Service ruled on July 8 that it would accept the proposal to eliminate West Chester?s post office.

Watkins said that the closure is an effort to save money. He described the U.S. Post Office?s financial difficulties as ?severe.?

?Post Offices are beginning to close nationwide and will continue as the USPS matches its workforce and facilities with a declining workload,? he said. ?With the dramatic decline in mail volume and the resulting excess capacity, maintaining a vast national infrastructure is no longer realistic.?

Watkins said that the USPS has closed 186 mail processing facilities since 2006. Over that same period, he said the USPS has cut employment by more than 110,000 through attrition and has reduced its costs by $12 billion.

He said the USPS hopes to have the authority to transition to a national five-day per week delivery schedule as a further cost-saving measure. He said the USPS is studying 252 mail processing facilities for potential consolidation.

In June, Watkins said the post office had to make cuts because of a drop in mail volume. Watkins said mail volume rose every year until 2006, when it peaked at 213 billion parcels delivered. First class mail had been declining for years prior to that, but it was not until 2007 when total mail volume dropped for the first time.

?Before that, real estate was booming and there was a lot of growth,? said Watkins in June. ?We were adding 1 million new delivery points per year. That?s an impossible business model to sustain. We can?t deliver to more points while losing revenue.?

The Internet is responsible for much of the postal service?s economic troubles. Watkins said companies have gone to billing their clients electronically, and their customers pay them electronically, too. From its high in 2006, the postal service?s mail volume is down 25 percent to 171 billion parcels in 2010.

Iowa has a much higher ratio of post offices per person than other states. Iowa has 900 post offices, which Watkins said represents about 3 percent of all post offices in the nation, even though Iowa has about 1 percent of the country?s population.

He also said the consolidations are not limited to small towns such as West Chester. The postal service has recently consolidated offices in Des Moines, Cedar Rapids and Iowa City.