Ten San Diego County post office branches, including one Downtown, recently emerged on a national list of 677 facilities marked for possible closure or consolidation. And while early indicators show that a Point Loma \u00adfacility will be spared, the Downtown location is not out of the woods yet, according to postal \u00adofficials. The list was presented by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to the House of Representatives on July 30 and included the George Washington facility at 2692 C St. Downtown. Of those 677 facilities identified nationally, however, none will be subject to closure in the immediate future, according to postal officials. “It\u2019s customary. This process we\u2019ve had in place for many, many years,” said USPS spokesperson Don Smeraldi. “Like any business, we\u2019re always looking for ways if we have extra space. “With the financial situation we\u2019re in, it\u2019s becoming more important than ever,” Smeraldi added. “From a national level, they said out of all the 3,000 post offices that are in urban centers and cities are there any that we could possibly consolidate.” Smeraldi said the list is part of the postal service\u2019s regular review process. He said all affected parties, including employees, em\u00adployee unions, customers and city officials, would be notified well in advance of any possible consolidations or closures. “It\u2019s so preliminary, and all the stakeholders would all be kept informed,” Smeraldi said. “It\u2019s not something that can happen overnight.” According to Smeraldi, the review process will have started Oct. 1, the beginning of the new fiscal year. He said the beginning of the new fiscal year is not a deadline for any decisions to be made and that a timetable on closures is unknown. “It\u2019s about the extra facility space, and maintaining a retail presence in the area just depends on where that might be,” Smeraldi said. “We\u2019ve determined that about 30 percent of our retail revenue doesn\u2019t take place at a traditional post office anymore.” Smeraldi said more customers are using the USPS website, which allows customers to ship packages without leaving their houses. Other locations that offer similar services to the post office include contract postal units \u2014 stores that the Postal Service contracts with \u2014 and \u00adgrocery stores, warehouse stores and ATMs that sell stamps. “If you\u2019re looking at different possibilities, you probably want to go with the best possibility in that the floor space in this particular location when we consolidate with another one would be to our greatest advantage to do that. So that would probably be the first thing we\u2019d initiate,” Smeraldi said. Smeraldi said some of the potential closures and consolidations might not even affect \u00adcustomers at all. “We\u2019re talking about maybe consolidating some of the retail service with a nearby office or, totally transparent to customers, consolidating some of our carrier operations,” Smeraldi said. “We have facilities that are just letter carriers in the building. We may consolidate that building with another one and the customers wouldn\u2019t even notice any impact.” For more information, call (800) 275-8777 from 5 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and from 5 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays, or visit www.usps.gov.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ten San Diego County post office branches, including one Downtown, recently emerged on a national list of 677 facilities marked for possible closure or consolidation. And while early indicators show that a Point Loma \u00adfacility will be spared, the Downtown location is not out of the woods yet, according to postal \u00adofficials. The list was […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11556","_seopress_titles_title":"Downtown post office on national list of those facilities marked for closure","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11556,11551,11593,11550],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-297310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-downtown-news","category-news","category-no-images","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297310\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}