aboessenkool@bakersfield.com (Antonie Boessenkool Californian Staff Writer) The Bakersfield Californian
Thu, 23 Feb 2012 12:02:49 PST
The U.S. Postal Service announced Thursday that it is closing the Bakersfield Processing & Distribution Center and moving those mail processing operations to Santa Clarita.
About 300 people work at the Bakersfield facility on Pegasus Drive near Meadows Field Airport, and 136 positions would be cut with the closure, said James Wigdel, a spokesman for the Postal Service in San Francisco.
Wigdel said he didn't know how many of those 136 positions at the Pegasus facility are currently filled.
All of the employees who will be affected by the closure would be offered positions elsewhere in the system, though not necessarily in their current line of work, he said.
"We would do our best to place our employees in positions they're qualified in doing," he said, though some employees may choose to change positions, and retraining would happen in those cases.
Mail from the Bakersfield facility -- which processes 12 million pieces of mail a week -- will be processed through the service's Santa Clarita facility, about 80 miles away. That would apply, for example, to a letter sent from one person in Bakersfield to another person in Bakersfield.
Wigdel said the closure won't happen before May 15 of this year, a date agreed on by the U.S. Postal Service and Congress to give Congress members time to work out an alternative plan to save the Postal Service money.
The service has said it needs to cut costs by $20 billion by 2015 in the face of a 25 percent drop in first-class mail since 2006 and other financial pressures.
Bakersfield's is among about 250 facilities of the 487 nationwide that the service is considering closing or has closed.
A press release about the Bakersfield facility didn't specify a date for the closure, and Wigdel said it's too early to say exactly when the process would start, but he said the service is hopeful it would begin in the next year. The closure process would take several months, he said.
In late December, the Postal Service held a community meeting in Bakersfield that about 75 people attended, many of them pleading with Postal Service representatives not to close the facility.
Wigdel acknowledged the outcry, but added, "We're facing a new reality with the Postal Service. It's about saving money ... and also rightsizing the system. ... So we're adjusting for that to keep the Postal Service sustainable for the long term."
The closure is contingent on the Postal Service approving a change in delivery standards. Whereas the expectation has been that first-class mail will be delivered overnight, that would change to a two- to three-day standard.
I just read a very interesting article at Bakersfield 661411 that I thought you might find interesting. It's called 'Postal Service closing local distribution center': http://bit.ly/xJAhgB.
The article was recommended via my Blackberry® Bakersfield 661411 application. Download the app from http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/44358?lang=en today.
