MOUNT VERNON — The U.S. Postal Service will be making some changes at the Mount Vernon Post Office — among others — that are designed to eliminate duplication of efforts and increase the efficiency of mail delivery. According to Victor Dubina, spokesman for the USPS Cleveland/Columbus area, bar code sorting machines will be removed from the Mount Vernon Post Office.
“Generally, as an overall national strategy, we are taking what we call our delivery bar code sorters into centralized plants,” Dubina said. “This is largely driven by our continual decline in mail volumes. If we can do the work in one centralized area to get the mail out, why do the work twice?”
According to the USPS, mail volume has dropped 20 percent since 2007, and in the third quarter of the 2010 fiscal year alone it dropped 1.7 percent.
Most, if not all, of this decline is due to electronic delivery of information such as e-mail, Dubina said.
“The bar code sorter in Mount Vernon is scheduled to be removed Nov. 17,” Dubina said. “It’s two machines. At the moment we don’t know specifically the effect on [employees]. In early December we will run an audit on that. We have contractual processes with our unions on how to handle this. But there are a couple of vacant positions in Mount Vernon. So if people who work the machines are affected by this we have positions they could move into.”
Dubina said the public will see no real change in the operation of the local post office.
“From the customers’ perspective they won’t see any changes at all,” Dubina said. “They won’t see any of this. Their mail will still be delivered. There’s no change with that. And the Columbus plant is one of the leaders nationally in overnight service. If you look back over the last couple of years you’ve seen a steady improvement in service.”
The process as it stands now, before the change, is that all mail goes in bulk from the Mount Vernon office to Columbus to be sorted by destination. Mail comes back to Mount Vernon to be sorted by route at the local office. The change in the procedure will be that mail will still go to Columbus for sorting but it will be sent back to Mount Vernon already sorted and ready to go directly to the different routes.