Pickets oppose plan to close 2 post offices, East and South sides

Two part-time post offices here remain on the endangered list.

By Peter H. Milliken

YOUNGSTOWN — Closing conveniently located post offices would discourage people from using the Postal Service and further reduce its mail volume, said a Youngstown councilwoman.

About 30 pickets, most of them postal workers, marched on the sidewalk Friday in front of the main post office in downtown Youngstown in support of their demand that the city’s East and South side post offices remain open.

“That post office is convenient,” for elderly East Side residents and those who use public buses, Councilwoman Annie Gillam, D-1st, said of the East Side post office. Gillam’s ward is near that post office. “We don’t need to take those services away,” she added.

“I think they should keep all the post offices open,” Gillam said.

She and her husband, Artis, a former 1st Ward councilman, marched with the pickets, who were organized by American Postal Workers Union Local 443.

The East Side post office, 733 N. Garland Ave., and the South Side post office, 104 W. Hylda Ave., which are open only on a part-time basis, are on the U.S. Postal Service’s list of post offices threatened with closing in a money-saving and efficiency- improvement effort.

“It is the United States Postal Service, not the United States postal business,” and it has an obligation to provide universal service at uniform rates, said Terry Grant, statewide APWU president. “We think that everybody ought to have the same opportunity for that service,” he added.

If the East and South side post offices close, the clerks who work there will keep their jobs, but they could be transferred as far as 100 miles away, with the Postal Service paying their relocation expenses, said Dominic Corso, Local 443 president. The Postal Service will announce its decision on the fate of those post offices after Thursday.

The West Side post office, 2030 Mahoning Ave., was on the endangered list, but the Postal Service removed it from that list because postal officials determined they would achieve no significant efficiency improvements by closing that branch.

When the Postal Service put the East, South and West side post offices on the endangered list in July, a postal spokesman said they were among the least-frequented post offices in the Mahoning Valley.

milliken@vindy.com