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Closing post offices
The identity of many towns is marked by having their own U.S. Post Office. A five-digit number, a ZIP code, is proof that a population center exists. A post office provides one or more local jobs and a gathering place where people can have a reason to interact with their neighbors. Three thousand-seven-hundred of those post offices, most in small towns, will be gone if the U.S. Postal Service is not prevented from closing them. The pain of the loss will be like a death to some while others may take it as a challenge to pull their citizenry together to show that the town is still alive and kicking. I'm not opposed to small towns having a post office. I am not opposed to small, low-population counties continuing to exist as they were drawn at statehood. I am opposed to government spending money to maintain something that is inefficient and obsolete only because it is politically too painful to change it. The reality of rural America is that we've had a great deal for a long time and it's become an entitlement in our minds. Rural Free Delivery started in 1902 across most of the United States. It cut the number of post offices by two thirds but added a lot of jobs for rural letter carriers, and a valuable service for farm families. The system worked so well that it endeared the "mail carrier" to those who saw the car or truck stop at their mail box each day. What most people don't see is the massive infrastructure behind the letter carrier and the incredible cost of transferring mail across the country so that each of us gets ours in our box, six days a week. Serving everyone, everywhere has plagued the U.S. Postal Service for decades. The rising cost of stamps is the public indication that the whole system is in trouble. I met a Postmaster General of the 1990s, "Carvin' Marvin" Runyon, who tried to treat it like the car companies and federal agencies he had led. His goal was for the postal service to operate as a for-profit enterprise. He was tough but he could not reduce the bureaucracy to the point that the system could support itself. We have brought a lot of the postal problem on ourselves. Email has eliminated most first class letters. I don't average sending one letter per month but I handle about 100 emails every day. Billing now can be done electronically, as well as banking, so the volume of stamped mail has declined. At the same time the number of third class, unsolicited publications, seems to have grown enormously. The high value overnight shipments are much more easily sent by FedEx or UPS. The post office has the volume but they don't have the income, so something has to give. I spent Labor Day at a parade and tractor-pull in Diagonal, Iowa, a small town whose post office is on the list for closure. This community-centered little place is fighting back as best it can. A recent town meeting produced about half of the 350 residents and a very convincing letter was drafted to defend the premise for keeping the post office open. Walking in the parade were members of the Lions Club passing out the letter in a stamped envelope, with a pen to sign it, and addressed to the district discontinuance coordinator. The town states that it has grown by 6 percent in the first decade of the new century and that 32 new jobs have been created. Their Main Street is vibrant with over a million dollars in sales in the last measured quarter. The community has kept its school and is progressive, but the final decision may be more about losses in Washington, D.C., and less about gains in Diagonal, Iowa. Some towns have just given up and begun stringing mailboxes in a central spot where the carrier can deliver each day. Some have found a merchant to sell stamps and shipping boxes. Some can't bear the thought of losing the office but are doing nothing to plead their case or develop a contingency if it happens. The question in this debate is as much about the future of small towns as it is about the future of the post office. Most towns across the Plains and Midwest have demographics that indicate they are dying. Those who live there resist change and just want to live out their lives without disruption. They lament the loss of businesses and services but do nothing to slow or reverse the trend. Reality, as I see it, is that the quality of life in rural America is good and has the prospect of getting better. We have to ask ourselves what services we want and how we are going to pay for them. The culture of going to the post office with a letter can be replaced by broadband (high-speed Internet) and the local town may have enough business to support a multi-service convenience store that sells postal supplies. The community center may be the only gathering place but it can be a good one if the people support it. The final element in success or failure of rural America is roads and bridges. If you can't get there, you won't do much business. That is our next challenge as deficient transportation may well make your town more anonymous than losing your ZIP code. Editor's note: Ken Root has been an agricultural reporter for 37 years. Root now does daily radio and television programming and is a columnist. He can be reached at kenroot@gmail.com.
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