“When people get their mail, it won’t say Dayton, Ohio,” said David Van Allen, Ohio spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service. “If you are mailing from Dayton to Dayton, it is going to say Columbus.”
Although the initial sorting process heads to Columbus, mail will return to Dayton for further sorting so items can reach their destinations. The switch affects four local workers, who have been reassigned to other roles, Van Allen said.
Items mailed in Dayton will have Columbus postmarks, unless customers specifically ask postal clerks to create a Dayton hand stamp.
“You can still get one if you come in and ask for it … like if you have wedding invitations and you want to have Dayton on them,” Van Allen said. “But through the automated system, it will say Columbus.”
Mail sorting and processing in Dayton is moving to Columbus as part of the U.S. Postal Service’s plan to consolidate about 140 mail processing plants.
The Dayton Processing and Distribution Center, which is located at 1111 E. Fifth St. and employs about 432 workers, is expected to close sometime this summer, and local operations will be transferred into a facility in Columbus.
The closure of the local plant is expected to save about $7.5 million the first year, and about $7.9 million annually after that, according to an Area Mail Processing study by the postal service. The Dayton plant handles about 1.9 million pieces of mail daily.
The postal service said it wants to cut about $20 billion out of its budget to address declining mail volumes and large deficit spending.
At the end of the last fiscal year, the postal service had a deficit of $15.9 billion, and the financial problems mostly stem from a 50 percent decline in first-class mail since 2006, Van Allen said.
“We are pursuing every avenue we can to bring the postal service back to profitability,” he said. “We simply have more processing capacity than we need.”
Many people believe the Dayton post office is being eliminated, but that is not accurate, Van Allen said. Retail postal services will remain the same, and only the sorting and processing will move to Columbus. Dayton operations are expected to be consolidated sometime over the summer.
About 13 processing facilities in Ohio are closing and will be consolidated into other plants. Ohio has more facilities facing closure than any other state.
Postal officials said the consolidation should not affect mail service.
But mail delays will occur because of the change, since mail will have to travel farther to reach its destination, said Karen Byars, president of the American Postal Workers Union Dayton Area Local .
“To send a letter across the street it now has to go to Columbus and then be rerouted back to Dayton, which is ridiculous,” she said. “Those are the types of things we’ll experience.”
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