| DEATH OF THE SMALL
By Bob Weaver
The United States Postal Service is closing and consolidating about 2,000 post offices beginning in March.
It was closing at least 500 post offices at the end of 2010.
About 16,000 more are being evaluated for closure.
The Wall Street Journal says a disproportionate number of the thousands of post offices under review are in rural or smaller suburban areas.
The Creston Post Office, which was already closed and moved to Big Bend, is on the closure list again, unclear what that means.
CRESTON POST OFFICE ON EDGE OF CLOSURE
FAMOUS CRESTON POST OFFICE CLOSING
CRESTON POST OFFICE GONE, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
Other regional post offices on the March closure list, according to a US Postal list: Exchange, Exchange WV 00266; Reedy, Spencer WV 25276 (not Spencer PO); Coxs Mills, Troy WV 26443, among about 25-30 WV offices.
The closure news is crushing to rural and remote communities where the post office is a link to the country, with closures putting a burden on the elderly who find it difficult to drive to neighboring towns.
Closure, consolidation, merging, centralizing and globalizing should be well-known terms to people who have treasured their communities.
The Hur Herald has frequently written about the value of the small, a community where people live and are connected.
Government has continued to apply an economies-of-scale business model to merge and consolidate everything from schools to jails, including towns and counties.
Virtually all tell the public it will save them money. There is little, if any, evidence it ever has.
US Postal has cut its' staff by one-third since 1999.
The postal service dates to the founding fathers, with Benjamin Franklin serving as the first U.S. postmaster general and the Constitution explicitly authorizing Congress to establish post offices.
The independent Postal Regulatory Commission has been investigating complaints, like those raised in Creston, whether the USP has used lease problems to close small, underused offices.
Communities that lose post offices will still get deliveries, either at home or at cluster mailboxes, but that too is subject to change.
Under U.S. law, mail delivery is a "basic and fundamental" government function meant to "bind the nation together" by providing service to "all communities" at a reasonable price. The nation's philosophy of universal postal service has resulted in stamp prices that are among the lowest in the industrial world.
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