Hundreds of U.S. Postal Service workers in Petaluma likely will face the choice of quitting or relocating as the agency closes mail processing centers nationwide - a move that also will mean delays in delivery of local mail that will be trucked to Oakland before being brought back to the North Bay.
Both mail processing sites in Petaluma, the main plant on North McDowell Boulevard and an annex on Southpoint Boulevard, will cease sorting operations by 2014. The North McDowell site will remain open for retail- and business-mail services.
About 350 workers are employed at the sites, mostly full-time, career workers. The offices process letters and packages from Sonoma, Mendocino, Lake and Marin counties.
At a news briefing in Washington, D.C, Thursday, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said the agency's mail processing network had simply become too big, given declining mail volume and mounting debt. As planned months ago, it will consolidate about 240 sites, including 48 this summer and the rest through 2013 and 2014.
The moves come as the Postal Service tries to cut $1.2 billion in spending by consolidating operations and reducing staff. Closing the two Petaluma sites would save about $2.5 million.
About 140 mail processing centers will be consolidated by February - the first four dozen by August and about 90 in January and February, with closings suspended during the Postal Service's busy election and holiday mail season. Ninety closings would occur in a second phase in early 2014.
Once fully implemented in 2014, the moves are expected to cut $2.1 billion in spending and reduce postal staff by 28,000 nationwide.
In phase one this summer, processing and sorting operations will be moved from the Southpoint facility to the North McDowell plant, Postal Service spokesman James Wigdel said. The Southpoint plant will close within nine months.
Outgoing mail that is now handled at the Petaluma processing facilities will be rerouted to Oakland by this summer.
That means a letter mailed from Petaluma to Santa Rosa will take a 120-mile detour to the East Bay before returning to a local mailbox. A local first-class letter is usually delivered overnight now.
With fewer sites and mail traveling longer distances, the Postal Service intends to change the boundaries of what is considered overnight-delivery territory.
In the second phase, processing of mail now done at North McDowell also will move to Oakland. The processing plant will close in 2014, Wigdel said. The retail lobby, where customers can send letters and packages and buy supplies, will remain open.
The postal workers' union has a no-layoff clause in its contract. The approximately 350 workers at Petaluma's two plants would be offered transfers, but that would likely be out of the area, said Dot Henderson, president of the National Postal Mail Handlers Union North Bay branch.
Many will have to give up their careers, she said.
"They know if they do offer them a job it will be far away," she said. "If your wife or husband has a good job, you can't very well turn around and leave."
Wigdel said many of the reductions likely will come through attrition and early retirement incentives.
"The Postal Service has reduced the size of the workforce by 244,000 since 2000 without resorting to layoffs, either through attrition or retirements," Wigdel said. "We continue to be a good employer in that respect."
Several workers contacted on Thursday said they were near retirement, so the move may not affect them so drastically.
Others, like Edwin Acorda, said they may take advantage of a retirement incentive.
"I was hoping they were going to offer early retirement. I have two college kids," he said. "If they do offer it, I may take it and get another job somewhere else."
Rod Lambright of Petaluma has worked for the Postal Service for 28 years.
"I only have a couple years left," he said. "But it would be rougher for the people with 10, 15 years in."
Lambright and fellow employee Randy Roberts, who has worked for the Postal Service for 42 years, suspect the closures are at least partly politically motivated.
Both noted a 2006 Congressional requirement that the Postal Service prepay its pension obligations for future retirees is a huge part of the agency's debt.
"That's what really put it in a tailspin," said Lambright, that coupled with the drastic reduction in first-class mail as consumers flock to the Internet to send communications and pay bills.
Mandatory prepayment of $5.5 billion annually into the pension fund at the start the year is a deep hole to climb out of, Wigdel said.
"We're the only federal agency that has to do that," he said. "We've asked Congress for relief on that."
Contact Staff Writer Lori A. Carter at 762-7297 or lori.carter@pressdemocrat.com.
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