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Jessamine post offices safe from cuts for now

May 23, 2012|By Benjamin S. Rossi | brossi@jessaminejournal.com

Nicholasville and Wilmore post offices are safe from the nationwide sweep of cutbacks and closures — at least for now.

According to David Walton with United States Postal Service government relations in Louisville, no post office is safe and many more cuts may come in the future. However, for the time being, the jobs of 40-plus employees at the Nicholasville branch and 12 at the Wilmore center remain intact.

Jessamine County's branches were spared cutbacks that came just a few week ago to shorten hours and window service and will remain at their current operating hours.

For the past couple years, the USPS has reported loses in the billions in revenue and has been scrambling for ways to save money just to stay afloat.

Originally, the USPS had planned on shutting down many of the rural and smaller post-office centers but on May 9 announced a strategy to preserve those stations.

The USPS’s new plan is to keep many existing post offices in place by modifying retail window hours to match customer use.

“We’ve listened to our customers in rural America, and we’ve heard them loud and clear — they want to keep their post office open,” said Postmaster General and CEO Patrick R. Donahoe in a released statement in May. “We believe today’s announcement will serve our customers’ needs and allow us to achieve real savings to help the postal service return to long-term financial stability.”

The new strategy will be implemented over a two-year, multi-phased approach and would not be completed until September 2014 at an estimated savings of a half billion dollars annually, the release states.

Of the 32,000 retail offices nationwide, the USPS has made a list of 3,700 to study for closure or hourly cutback; neither Jessamine facility is currently on that list.

Not all Kentucky facilities were spared, and those expected to close in the coming years include Bowling Green, Elizabethtown, Hazard, London and Somerset.

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