Rural post offices under threat

At post offices in Browns Valley, Smartsville, Dobbins and other small Yuba County burgs, residents stop in for their mail, and a chat.

Sometimes it's with the clerk, sometimes it's with neighbors. The topic can be the weather, where to get firewood, or general gossip.

But officials of the U.S. Postal Service, which continues to face financial woes and a mandate to cut costs, is mulling whether such post offices still make sense in a time when bills can be paid online and most people can't recall when they last sent a letter.

Beginning in March, the Postal Service will begin closing 2,000 offices nationwide, and postal officials are reviewing up to 16,000 more operating at a deficit.

U.S. Postal Service spokesman Gus Ruiz said that speculating on which offices may close, or when, is still premature.

"What we're doing right now is looking at current finances and revenues," he said. "But we have no 'going out of business' signs going up anywhere there."

But rural Yuba County postal clerks, who said they couldn't speak on the record, said their customers will frequently ask them how much longer the offices will be around.

Those who use them said the possibility of closures would be at best inconvenient, and at worst a blow to the sense of community.

"It would be very difficult," said Elaine Peters of Browns Valley as she picked up her mail Friday afternoon. "I understand the term 'They have to do something,' but they should've seen this coming." Peters, 49, said she worries about Browns Valley losing its post office because the population is heavily retirement age, and thus less likely to switch to paying bills by Internet.

"Can you imagine them going in the fog down to Marysville? And then the price of gas on top of that?" she said.

Higher fuel costs are one factor in Postal Service losses in recent years, and the recession is another. Mail volume fell by 20 percent between 2006 and 2010, and postal officials said they don't expect it to ever return to previous highs.

In Dobbins and Oregon House, the two post offices are only a few miles apart, though both have an established constituency of patrons, particularly in Dobbins, where post office boxes are the only way some residents can get correspondence.

After picking up his mail on Friday, Stan Jacobs of Dobbins said he often runs into familiar faces at the office. If the post offices in both Dobbins and Oregon House closed, he said, he'd probably only check his mail once a week.

"This is a pretty busy post office," he said. "We're all pretty spread out here."

To avoid closure, one clerk said she'll try to draw as much traffic as she can. Each office is considered independent for financial reasons, so one operating at a loss has a greater chance of being closed.

In fiscal 2010, the Postal Service had a record $8.5 billion in losses.

Those numbers led Jeff Todd of Brownsville to take a more philosophical stance on the idea of closing smaller offices.

"Times are hard," said Todd, as he mailed a letter in Browns Valley. "If you want to make things work, there's going to have to be cuts.

"But I like the post office. It provides something valuable."

CONTACT reporter Ben van der Meer at 749-4709.