USPS: Rural post offices will not be closed

The financially struggling U.S. Postal Service sought today to tamp down concern over wide-scale cuts, revealing it will seek to keep thousands of rural post offices open with shorter hours. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe says the mail agency is backing off its plan to close up to 3,700 low-revenue post offices—most of them in rural areas and the only USPS facility in the immediate area—sometime after May 15. Citing strong community opposition, Donahoe says the agency will whittle down full-time staff but maintain a part-time post-office presence in rural areas, with access to retail lobbies and post-office boxes. Under the emerging strategy, no post office would be closed. But more than 13,000 rural mail facilities could see reduced operations of between two and six hours. The Postal Service intends to seek regulatory approval and get community input, a process that could take several months. The new strategy would then be implemented over two years and completed in September 2014, saving an estimated half billion dollars annually. Along with the move to winnow rural post offices, closure of some 254 processing facilities as a cost-saving measure was also previously announced. Among them was a New Orleans mail-sorting facility, which was said to be slated for consolidation with another in Baton Rouge. It is not yet clear whether today’s announcement has any bearing on that plan. Read the full story by The Associated Press here.