It may already be too late, but local arguments must be made to preserve postal services

Local residents and elected of- ficials have only three weeks to put together their most persuasive arguments for why keeping post offices open and maintaining post services are important to the Mahoning Valley.

That’s not much time, and as of now not much is known about a public forum that was mentioned by David Van Allen, a U.S. Postal Service spokesman. The forum is tentatively set for Dec. 28, right in the middle of the week between Christmas and New Years. That’s not exactly prime time for people to voice their concerns about the future of the Youngstown processing center, which employs 500 people in downtown Youngstown, and local post offices that continue to provide services their communities and neighborhoods find important.

But if that’s the day the forum is held, people are going to have to make the time to advocate for the postal service to take a scalpel rather than an ax to Youngstown area operations.

Certainly Youngstown’s loss of $500,000 in income tax revenue if the processing center were closed is a concern to the city, but the postal service can’t be expected to maintain unneeded facilities for purposes of municipal revenue. Facilities should be maintained because they are needed by the people who live here, and this is one time when the area’s aging population should be counted in the plus column. Quite frankly, people in Youngstown depend on their post offices and their letter carriers more than, say, people who live in San Jose, Calif.

We dare say they’ve also been more loyal to the postal service than some other populations, and that loyalty should be worth something.

Some changes inevitable

As we acknowledged just a couple of months ago, changes are going to have to be made, and the nation can survive without Saturday mail delivery. But drastic restructuring, the kind that will eliminate the jobs of tens of thousands of postal employees and drop one of the world’s best mail-delivery systems to second- or third-tier status is too high a price to pay.

While local officials — city, county, township and state — are going to have to make their voices heard, it falls to Congress to provide alternatives to the dismantling of the postal service. About 200 members of Congress, including U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Niles, are cosponsors of legislation that would re-examine some of the financial demands included in the 2006 Postal Accountability Enhancement Act, which requires the USPS to fund retiree health-care benefits 75 years in advance. But there are clearly others in Congress who see the post office, which is unique among quasi-government agencies because it is specifically mentioned in the Constitution, as just another service that would be better off privatized. Why, we wonder, didn’t Ben Franklin, the first postmaster general, think of that.

Millions of letters are obviously being replaced by email. The postal service competes with scores of private companies for package delivery. And nothing is forever. But there are certainly hints that the postal service is proceeding with plans to drastically dismantle its operation while publicly saying that nothing will happen until the Postal Regulatory Commission meets in March.

Communities that wait until March to mount a counteroffensive will surely be on the outside looking in as the doors to their post offices and service centers are locked.