More Than A Post Office

Last week, the U.S. Postal Service announced that it was more than $10.5 billion in the red. Much of its costs are for health care and pension obligations. The Internet has also driven down the volume of first-class mail, a major source of revenue.

Postmaster General Patrick Donahue says he wants to cut costs by $3 billion a year and has already begun downsizing by closing offices and reducing work hours. Those cuts will have a big effect on rural towns in Texas.

About 3,700 post offices across the country are being reviewed for closure; 220 of them are in Texas. Most are in rural areas, like Wharton County, southwest of Houston, where the landscape is a patchwork of rice fields dotted with towering metal rice dryers.

Lissie, Texas, is a cluster of ranch-style homes lined with tractors, one church, and a post office. Just 200 people live there.

Joyce Hodde is one. She says the post office is much more than just a place to buy stamps. "This is kind of a community center for us," Hodde said. "We get our mail, talk to our friends and go home."

It's also where residents pay bills and pick up retirement checks.

"I enjoyed the post office mostly because I got to see all the people every day," said Janie Crane, who was Lissie's postmaster for 27 years. "I was used to talking to everybody, listening to their problems and helping them out when they could."

A month ago Crane received a notice that her post office might close. The Postal Service says its network of rural post offices was established decades ago and is no longer needed.

People in Lissie disagree.

The Lissie post office lost $64,000 in 2010. The Postal Service is considering closing the branch and moving boxes to other post offices six to 10 miles away. Thirty-eight Lissie residents met at the church recently to let officials know what they thought of that. Jay Cooper was there.

"Y'all have advantages up in the big city that we don't have, because we have a number of senior citizens that can't drive, but they can walk to this post office," Jay Cooper said at the meeting. "But also you have the advantage, you have Internet just like that." He snapped his fingers. "I get my email by UPS, it's so slow out here. So we depend on this post office."

Many older folks in town, like Crane, who is 85 and cares for her disabled husband, don't use the Internet.

"If you don't keep up with what everything that's going on, and all the technology and everything, then you get left behind, and that's what's happening to us," she said.

A village post office is another option on the table. That's when a local store such as a gas station is contracted to provide postal services.

"I assume everybody got one of those little letters that said, do you own a store that we could put our post office in," Cooper said at the meeting. "And none of us do, but we own a post office that you could put a store in." His comment drew laughs.

People at the meeting asked if there weren't other options, such as cutting the hours, even laying off the current postmaster, who sat quietly at the meeting.

Rice farmer Dan Gertson had another suggestion. "We see the post office go up a penny at a time. Why don't they for a change, if it takes a dollar a letter to handle a letter, charge it?" Gertson said. "We penny ourselves to death going up on postage. But we're going to cut down to — we won't have a post office if you don't start charging. Anywhere. It'll be a private industry."

As the meeting ended, people spoke about asking their congressman (and Republican presidential candidate) Ron Paul to help stave off the closure. They haven't heard back yet. And it'll be about six months before Lissie residents hear what the Postal Service decides. But in the meantime, they have plenty more ideas.

"We're going to start an Occupy Post Office group," Cooper said.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• United States Postal Service
• Rural
• Texas