The Dayton Processing and Distribution Facility, which employs 432 workers, will close sometime in early 2013, and local operations will be transferred to Columbus.
The closure of the facility will result in a first-year savings of $7.5 million, and an annually savings after that of $7.9 million, according to an Area Mail Processing study by the Postal Service.
The announcement comes as the Postal Service will move forward to close dozens of mail processing centers, saying it can no longer wait for Congress to decide how to cut postal costs.
Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe says postal operations are simply too big given declining mail volume. The agency will consolidate 140 mail processing centers within the next year, including 48 of its 461 mail processing centers in August. Most will occur next January and February, after the busy election and holiday mail season.
The official closure list will be released later Thursday. But the Dayton mail processing center is among eight such centers in Ohio that the Postal Service is considering for consolidation with other mail processing centers.
Dayton and other local communities across the nation are fretting about the economic impact and tens of thousands of layoffs, drawing the concerns of lawmakers in an election year.
The first-round of closures will impact about 5,000 workers, while another 13,000 will be affected by February 2014 when a total of 140 will close.
The financially strapped service first announced last July that it was considering such a move with the Dayton center.
A study determined that there was no significant opportunity to improve efficiency or service through consolidation of mail processing operations at the Cincinnati Processing and Distribution Center. No changes will be made at the Cincinnati Processing and Distribution Center at this time.
Another 89 closings would occur in 2014.
The Postal Service had previously planned to close 252 mail processing centers beginning this summer but was awaiting congressional action.
With Congress stalled over a bill, the mail agency say it is moving forward, but now over a longer time frame.
On April 25, the U.S. Senate passed legislation that sought to prevent many rural post offices and about 100 mailing processing centers from closing anytime soon and remedy some of the budget woes of the Postal Service.
The bill would have resulted in the postal service receiving an $11 billion refund for overpayments made to a federal fund to pay down debt and finance buyouts to 100,000 postal employees.
The postal services Board of Governors said that requiring unneeded post offices to remain open and scrapping its request to adopt five-day-a-week delivery would not stem the flow of red ink. “If this bill were to become law, the Postal Service would be back before the Congress within a few years requesting additional legislative reform,” Donahoe said.
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