Thanks to the $7.4 billion in debt accrued by the United States Postal Service (USPS) last year, Boston College has been added to a list of post offices that are being considered for discontinuation. Nine other Boston-area post offices join BC on the USPS report, including the post offices of Babson College, Boston University, MIT, and Tufts University.
BC's post office, located in McElroy Commons, currently handles all of the campus' out-going mail. Should the office be closed, students would have to travel to one of three area post offices - the Chestnut Hill post office, the Brighton post office, and the Newton Center post office, all located about 1.3 miles from campus - in order to send letters, certified mail, and packages, and to purchase stamps.
The BC post office, which employs one full-time USPS employee, remains on the list of potential closures despite its profitability - walk-in revenues for the office amounted to $205,724 last year.
In fact, Bob Dempsey, vice president and treasurer of the Boston Metro Area Local 100 division of the American Postal Workers Union, said that the only Boston post office on the list of those slated to close that wasn't profitable last year was the office located at Logan Airport; he said that after expenses, the BC Post Office is expected to provide the USPS with $100,475 profit in the 2009 fiscal year.
Dempsey said that though the BC facility had a lower net income than some of the other university post offices on the list, "a six-digit profit is a six-digit profit."
"I've been baffled with that question. If that service isn't costing you anything, why would you stop the service?" Dempsey said when asked why he thought the USPS would consider closing profitable branches. "If you make that type of money, why would you look to inconvenience people like that?"
According to Charles Lynch, district manager for the USPS Greater Boston District, the USPS is focusing on closing smaller stations first. Because BC employs no mail carriers and rents no post office boxes to students, it qualifies as such a station. Lynch, who will be responsible for deciding which offices to close and which to maintain, said no decision has been made to close any Boston offices as of yet.
This could change at any time though: walk-in revenue at the BC facility was down 13.6 percent compared to the same period during the previous year. Customer visits were down by 6.5 percent, and total transactions decreased by 9 percent.
In a meeting with representatives from BC, Boston University, Tufts, Harvard and MIT, Lynch expanded on the USPS' financial woes. In addition to the fact that the USPS is mandated to pre-fund retirees, amounting to approximately $5.4 billion a year, the USPS has suffered a volume loss of 45 billion pieces of mail in the past three years and projects an additional volume loss of 10 billion for this year alone. "This is not a good prospectus for us," he said.
Lynch said that measures to recoup the loss, such as reducing delivery to five days a week, which would save an annual $3 billion, are a step in the right direction for cutting costs without cutting accessibility but still aren't enough. "We haven't abandoned our attempt to have a presence in every community and be accessible, but the financial situation is pushing us to this," he said. "Generally everything is on the table."
No date by which offices must be closed has been designated, but Lynch said the USPS is "sensitive to the needs of our customers." With that consideration in mind, those in attendance at the meeting decided to submit plans by Oct. 13 outlining ways in which their respective offices can be made more profitable. Once the plans are implemented, there is no predetermined date on which their effectiveness will be assessed.
Members of the BC community have expressed concern over the potential closure.
In a letter to James Holland, postal chairperson for the Greater Boston Postal Customer Council, Vice President for Governmental Community Affairs Tom Keady went on record in opposition to the closure of the facility with three objections.
The BC USPS facility, he wrote, currently provides postal service to approximately 15,000 undergraduate and graduate students and 3,000 faculty and staff during the academic year. "The daily operations of the post office have become an integral part of the fabric of the University and are heavily relied on," he said.
He also noted that due to the passage of BC's Institutional Master Plan, the school will be moving toward housing 100 percent of students in University-controlled housing. Because the on-campus students "represent the most active user group of the post office," he said, "we anticipate a major increase in activity and demand for postal services."
Keady also said that because few BC students have cars and because other local post offices are over a mile from campus and not easily accessible by public transportation, mailing of large packages would be "difficult at best during good weather."
Michael Jednak, director of Facilities Services at BC, said the potential closure of the BC USPS branch came as a surprise. "All I can say is that I've heard of the possibility of closing the post office, and BC's position is that we're against that."
Jednak also noted that all mail delivery and inter-campus mail is handled by the BC Mail Services, a separate entity from the USPS.
Vice President of Student Affairs Patrick Rombalski said that should the post office close, the administration would look into offering some of the services currently provided by the USPS. However, he said, people have different perceptions on whether the closure of the post office would cause a large problem for students. He noted that several students with whom he recently met said they didn't perceive the potential discontinuation of services as troubling, as they only use the BC USPS facility for buying stamps and mailing the occasional letter.
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