Postal Service pauses plans to move processing centers, including Missoula’s
Stacks of boxes holding cards and letters are seen at the U.S. Post Office sort center December 15, 2008 in San Francisco, California. On its busiest day of the year, the U.S. Postal Service is expecting to process and mail over one billion cards, letters and packages. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Plans to move the U.S. Postal Service’s Missoula Processing and Distribution Center to Spokane are on pause until at least next year, as are similar plans across parts of the country, U.S. Postmaster Louis DeJoy said in letters released this week following pushback from both of Montana’s U.S. senators and two dozen others.
Both of Montana’s U.S. senators called the pause in the plans a positive development. DeJoy’s letter to U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Montana, dated Tuesday, said the change to move processing to Spokane “has not taken place, nor is implementation planned.”
“As I have advised Senator (Gary) Peters, and in response to the concerns you and your colleagues have expressed concerning movement of processing operations associated with the Mail Processing Facility Reviews, I will commit to pause any implementation of these moves at least until after January 1, 2025,” DeJoy wrote to Tester. “Even then, we will advance these efforts only at a moderated pace of implementation.”
Last Thursday, Tester and U.S. Sen. Steve Daines, R-Montana, joined a bipartisan letter signed by 24 other senators asking DeJoy to stop the planned changes to the processing and delivery network until the Postal Regulatory Commission could provide a “comprehensive advisory opinion” to study the effects of consolidating those types of facilities across the country.
The Postal Service is in the midst of reviewing about 60 mail processing facilities out of about 430 nationwide.
In late April, the Postal Service announced it had finalized the plan to move Missoula’s processing and distribution center to Spokane as part of the plan two months after postal workers and Montana’s senators first expressed concern that the review could lead to the relocation of the Missoula facility.
Missoula postal workers have been dubious about the plan, the Missoulian reported, saying it made little sense for local Montana mail to go 200 miles west to Spokane only to be sent back to Montana and that they worried non-career employees would lose their jobs.
When Tester and Daines pushed back against the review, the Postal Service responded that they were pushing “false narratives” and simply converting the Missoula facility into a Local Processing Center with a $10 million investment in new sorting machines and delivery vehicles, the Missoulian reported.
But when the plan was finalized, Tester and Daines said they remained concerned people would lose their jobs or have to relocate.
Tester on May 2 introduced the Protecting Access to Rural Carriers for Every Location (PARCEL) Act that would prohibit the Postal Services from consolidating processing operations unless they remained in state, underwent a geographic review beforehand, and the public supported the move.
After the bipartisan letter was sent last week, DeJoy spoke with Sen. Gary Peters, D-Michigan, who led the letter, and committed to pausing the plans until at least January of next year even if he disagreed with the pushback from the group of senators.
DeJoy said he would consider seeking an advisory opinion from the Postal Regulatory Commission and that he believed the pause would meet the requests of the senators last week. But he also warned that the Postal Service would not be able to realize the cost savings it associates with the changes, estimated between $133 million to $177 million a year.
“The dialogue we had yesterday was productive and it is my hope that this commitment to pause MPFR activity will work to restore confidence in the desired positive outcomes our modernization actions are meant to achieve from both a service excellence and cost saving perspective, and at a pace of network change that is acceptable,” DeJoy wrote to Peters.
In response to the announcement any moves are on hold, Sen. Daines said in a statement posted to X, formerly Twitter: “I am glad to see @USPS respond to my concerns regarding the Missoula post office operations and will continue to fight to ensure @USPS serves MTns in a timely and efficient manner.”
In a statement Monday, Tester said the change by the Postal Service was another sign that he was successfully fighting for rural Montana’s postal operations. Last summer, he helped secure a $230,000 annual funding increase for the post office in Big Sky. He called the Missoula move to Spokane “a complete nonstarter.”
“I’m proud to have put a stop to this consolidation plan that would have left Montanans with less reliable mail service and jeopardized the delivery of everything from hard-earned paychecks to life-saving medications,” Tester said. “I’ll continue to push for a permanent fix like my PARCEL Act to make sure USPS won’t be able to ever strip rural America of reliable service without public approval and legitimate justification.”
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