The Springfield postmark we see on mail sent from just about anywhere in the Valley is there because mail in this area is sorted at the U.S. Postal Service’s Processing and Distribution Center on Fiberloid Street in Springfield.
That’s one reason first-class mail within the Valley, or from the Valley to Worcester, Boston or Hartford, usually gets where it’s going in one day.
But Valley residents and businesses may lose that one-day service now that the USPS is planning to close or consolidate yet more of its processing centers, including the one in Springfield.
In 2006 there were 673 such centers nationwide; now the Springfield center is targeted along with others in a proposal to scale the number back from the current 487 to 235. Post Office officials think they can save $13 million a year by having the Valley’s first-class mail sorted in Hartford. That would mean that what is now one-day service for letters, checks and other mail will become two-day service at best.
Nationally, the Post Office says that 41.5 percent of its first-class mail gets to its destination overnight. A tentative estimate offered by a knowledgeable source is that 60 percent of mail canceled at the Fiberloid Street facility in Springfield is one-day mail.
“Now,” this source said, “if you mail a letter in Northampton and you expect to get it to Boston, you’ll get it there overnight. If it goes to Hartford first, it will be a two-day or longer service to anywhere in the state. If you mail a letter in Barre and you want it to go to East Brookfield, it’s going to take two days or more.”
And if you mail a letter from Barre to East Brookfield, or from Amherst to Northampton, or even from Greenfield to Shelburne Falls, your letter will have to be trucked all the way to Hartford to be sorted and to get, on a letter traveling within the same county, an out-of-state postmark (unless you take your letter to your post office and specifically request a local postmark).
The proposed elimination of first-class service in Springfield raises questions on more than one level, questions about whether the continued downsizing of the Post Office is a move in the right direction. It’s so easy to say that the Post Office is semi-obsolete in the digital age—easy for those of us who are in the digital age—but keep in mind that 28 percent of Americans (many more in rural areas) don’t have Internet access. Even for the rest of us, the memory of “snail mail” reaching our homes when the recent power outage had darkened our computers should be cautionary.
One concern about the elimination of first-class service in Springfield involves the USPS itself. People and businesses that can now depend on one-day delivery may either see their paying and receiving processes slowed down, or be pushed away from dealing with the Post Office and forced to use commercial carriers for their first-class mail, taking yet more business away from the beleaguered agency.
And no one could claim that the change would be good for the Valley’s economy. It would eliminate 169 jobs, most of them union jobs that carry benefits. It’s ironic, at a time when near-poverty-level casino wages are being touted as the road out of unemployment, to see the Valley losing jobs that start at $14 an hour (for mail handlers) and $19 an hour (for carriers), salaries that don’t rise and fall with every whim of the market. Career postal employees on average earn $60,000 a year.
And the move is hardly pushing the Post Office down the road toward energy efficiency, since some 120,000 items a day will have to travel farther—some much farther— to be sorted. The USPS is taking public comment on the proposal; comments must be postmarked no later than Nov. 23, 2011 and sent to Manager, Consumer and Industry Contact, Connecticut Valley District, 141 Weston Street, Hartford, Conn. 06101-9631.
