Activists stage a sit-in following a rally to protest plans to close the Gateway mail processing center, which employs 169 people
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SPRINGFIELD — Seven activists were arrested Monday at a protest against the pending closure of the Gateway mail processing center.
Holding signs aloft and using a megaphone, the protesters staged a sit-in on the processing center’s loading dock and refused to leave when asked to do so. Arrested by U.S. Postal Inspection Service police officers, the protesters were cited for blocking the loading dock, a federal misdemeanor charge, and quickly released.
Among those arrested were Bart Bolger, a part-time rural letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service; Jamie Partridge, a retired letter carrier from Portland; and Peg Morton, a longtime Eugene peace activist.
The sit-in followed a rally outside the adjacent Gateway post office attended by about 40 people — including processing center employees, activists and local elected officials — on what is typically the busiest day of the year for the Postal Service.
The Springfield processing center, which has 169 permanent employees, is on a list of facilities set to be closed sometime after February, although no closure date has been set. Similar mail sorting centers in Bend and Pendleton are in the same situation. Salem’s processing center was closed in June.
The closures are a cost-cutting strategy by the Postal Service, which has run annual deficits of $5 billion to $16 billion in recent years. All in all, the quasi-governmental agency, which is not taxpayer-supported, closed more than 100 processing centers nationwide between 2012 and this year, and plans eventually to close another 65, providing a total savings of $2 billion a year while eliminating about 13,000 permanent jobs through attrition.
While no post offices or retail locations in the Eugene-Springfield area are slated to be closed, closing the processing center would slow the overall pace of local mail delivery, particularly for rural areas.
The Gateway processing center handles the vast majority of mail coming from ZIP codes starting with 974, which includes Lane, Douglas, Coos and Curry counties. If it closes, all that mail would be shipped to Portland and processed there. Over the last year, for the first time, some local mail has been processed in Portland, with mixed results, according to Gateway processing center employees.
Should the closure occur, no processing center employees would lose their jobs, because most postal workers nationwide have “no-layoff” clauses in their union contracts. The Postal Service estimates that the closure would still save the agency $4.4 million a year.
Protester Bolger said the processing center closures “are slowing the whole postal system down, and that ultimately trickles down to the customer experience.”
Partridge said he believes the closure of the Gateway processing center can still be prevented.
“If there’s any place that could stop this death spiral, it might be Eugene … with its history of activism,” he said.
“When people really fight back (against cuts), the Postal Service decision-makers seem to back off,” he added.
The Postal Inspection Service did not immediately reply Monday to a request seeking the names of the other protesters who were arrested.
In a prepared statement about the protest, Postal Service spokesman John Friess said the agency “is committed to providing the type of service our customers have come to expect and deserve.”
“We are evaluating the facility consolidation schedule while we pursue comprehensive legislative reform that ensures the long-term viability of the Postal Service,” he said.
Opponents of the closures say the Postal Service’s financial crisis is largely manufactured, because of an unusual congressional mandate that the agency pre-fund 75 years’ worth of future health care benefit payments to its retirees — at a cost of $5.5 billion a year for the agency.
If that requirement were rolled back, the agency’s finances could be shored up in other ways to make up for the declining volume of first-class mail, they say. For example, the agency could be given freedom by Congress to increase its own rates or to explore other revenue-generating services it could provide, as many postal services in other countries do.
“It’s about more than saving the jobs” at the processing center, protester Leah Bolger said at Monday’s rally. “It’s about saving the system. Congress is trying to privatize everything.”
Braden Pelkey, vice president of the American Postal Workers Union, local 679, which represents the permanent processing center employees, said there’s been a lot of confusion among workers because of the lack of concrete information they’ve received about the impending closure.
The union would get 90-day notice of any prospective closure, Pelkey said, but it has not received such notice yet.
Pelkey said he believes that, in addition to slower mail delivery, there would be logistical issues if the closure moves ahead. One example: Because of their “no-layoff” clause, permanent processing center employees can only be relocated to another Postal Service position within a 50-mile radius.
“There’s not enough landing spots within 50 miles for all the employees,” Pelkey said.
U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, the Springfield Democrat who in recent years has pushed for Postal Service reforms that could prevent facility closures, said he continues to be disappointed by Congress’ inaction on the issue.
Some lawmakers “seem hell-bent to destroy the Postal Service,” he said.
DeFazio said he hopes the issue can be tackled during broader budget discussions early next year — “this is one of the more important issues we should deal with,” he said.
“The Postal Service cannot serve Oregon well with just” two processing centers in Portland and Medford, he said. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”
While Congress hasn’t been able to agree on long-term reforms for the Postal Service, it has effectively blocked two other cost-cutting measures put forward by U.S. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe: doing away with Saturday mail and shutting 4,000 rural post offices nationwide — including post offices in Deadwood, Walton and Swisshome in Lane County.