NOW THEY WANT TO TAKE AWAY YOUR POST OFFICE

AMERICAN POSTAL WORKERS - From Waterbury to Waco, from western Pennsylvania to Pacific Palisades, public officials, consumers, and local businesses are expressing alarm at wide-ranging plans to consolidate "some operations" at postal facilities around the country.

In Waco, TX, approximately 250 jobs are in jeopardy because of the USPS plan to relocate the city's mail processing and distribution facilities 85 to 100 miles away to Fort Worth and Austin. "We serve a wide area," said Ruby Harrison, vice president of APWU's Waco Local in an interview with the Waco Tribune-Herald. "If you're mailing a bill across town, that bill will have to be trucked to either Austin or Fort Worth to get postmarked and then be trucked back to Waco and delivered."

In Freeport, IL, Gregg Voiles, president of APWU's Rockford Area Local, was puzzled by the plan to move processing to Palatine, about 90 miles away. "Everything would go to Palatine, even though our production numbers are better," he said. "It doesn't make any sense at all."

U.S. Rep. Don Manzullo (R) showed his concern about the move of the Freeport sorting operation and the closing of small, rural post offices by meeting with postal officials. "It wasn't a very pleasant meeting," said a Manzullo spokesman. Manzullo did extract a commitment to postpone plans, the spokesman said, so that concerned citizens could gather evidence to support a no-move proposition.

The Iowa Senate on Jan. 18 passed a resolution to keep a [distribution center] in Sioux City, IA, rather than send processing, the postmark, and jobs nearly 90 miles west to Sioux Falls, SD. The resolution, which passed unanimously, noted that this is not just a "Siouxland" issue, but an all-Iowa issue.

Current arrangements, the resolution said, result in "one-day service locally and national service in two days. [The loss] would degrade service to two days for the Siouxland area and to three days for other parts of the country."

In Pacific Palisades, CA, residents have been complaining for months about the effects of a consolidation that has already occurred. In an interview Jan. 18 with the Palisadian Post, Community Council Chairman Kurt Toppel expressed exasperation with high-ranking postal officials: "For over three months now, we have tried unsuccessfully to have post office management address our council, and thus our community, to respond to specific problems."

Toppel said that he had been told by the staff of U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman (D) that "so many complaints have been received that Waxman has started an official inquiry into the matter."

As a Postal Service public affairs spokesperson said in an Aberdeen American News story about an Area Mail Processing study of the Aberdeen (SD) facility. "There is no community component with the study. It's just an internal look at mail processing and network operations. The study is being conducted by postal officials, and does not call for public comment."

For a look at a way to fight consolidation plans with what the Bloomington (IN) Local APWU calls "all available means," visit (An AMP study of Bloomington mail processing is likely to result in the shift of operations to Indianapolis, 45 miles away.)

HOW BLOOMINGTON IS FIGHTING FOR ITS POST OFFICE

MIKE CAUSEY, DC EXAMINER - As Americans become increasingly mobile, moving from state to state, and as the population mix becomes more diverse, some people suffer from an identify crisis. The result: We owe our allegiance not to race, religion or region, but to our ZIP code. In fact, the pickup line (I have been led to understand) in trendy D.C. nightspots is no longer "Hi there. I bet you're a Libra, right?" It has been replaced (again, so I have been told) by "So, what's your ZIP code?". . . ZIP codes and postmarks are important and have a definite meaning for many folks. I know people in the Washington area who live in one place but who drive out to Potomac or McLean in hopes that their outgoing mail will get the high-class postmark those addresses confer. And there are businesses located in the suburbs that either have a Washington, D.C., post office box or other mailing address so they can create the illusion of having a corporate office in the nation's capital. . .

The importance of postmarks and ZIP codes may help out hundreds of U.S. Postal Service employees whose jobs may be moved, or abolished, thanks to consolidations. The USPS, for example, is considering moving more than 200 jobs from Waco, Texas, to either Austin or Fort Worth. Similar consolidations are in the planning stage in California, Connecticut, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Illinois. The American Postal Workers Union is using our affair with postmarks and ZIP codes to fight proposed consolidations