GRESHAM — Awaiting U.S. Postal Service representatives Thursday night in Gresham were passion, frustration, anger and questions, questions, questions.

Todd Case, a regional manager of post office operations for the USPS, calmly moderated the meeting and provided answers when he had them.

When asked essentially why the &%$ #*&@ country has been going to hell for years, he begged off. Obviously that question — though legitimate — fell far beyond his sphere of responsibility.

When asked if Gresham residents would be able to buy rural mail boxes and posts from the Postal Service in the event the community ends up with one planted along the street in front of every home, Case answered, “No. We don’t sell mailboxes.”

“Maybe you should,” said the lady who asked the question.

“You could get out of debt faster that way.”

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The crowd erupted in laughter during one of the meeting’s few light moments as Case, grinning widely as he acted like a light bulb had gone off in his head, declared it to be a great idea and feigned writing the suggestion down on a piece of paper.

Other than two or three similar moments of mirth the evening was overwhelmingly sober, but for the most part civil.

One who addressed the panel of three USPS officials, Wendy Wait, stepped up front, took the microphone and spoke for the local Presbyterian congregation, saying closure would be, “A great hardship on our church and community. There is still a need for rural postal service in America,” she said.

Wait said Gresham residents aren’t bristling with the latest high-tech communications gadgetry like their big city counterparts. An envelope in the mail remains significant to life in Gresham.

Her own church, for example, “has no computer. We need our post office here in Gresham until we can catch up with the rest of the world.”

Asked from an audience member about proposals now in Congress that deal with the terrible financial mess the USPS finds itself in, Case said, “There are a lot of things going before Congress,” then repeated that happenings in Washington, DC lie over his horizon.

Generally, he said, “There are constraints we have ... laws we have to follow, regulations, contracts and such” that hold great power over what the agency can and cannot do.

“Could the Postal Service management have done things a little differently” in the past?

Case answered his own question, admitting mistakes have been made. For one, he said, the service was slow to pick up on the massive societal changes that technology brought to communication for nearly the entire population.

The issue of economic development in a town with no post office was brought up, to which Case replied that the USPS is not in the economic development business.

He suggested the community ought not hang its growth hat on a post office anyway. He said Gresham has much to offer in other ways.

The discussion included numerous questions and answers about the details of how a wide variety of things would be handled should the post office close.

Case said the choice in Gresham itself would be either cluster boxes or a single box on the street for each resident. He promised to take the village’s temperature first if that decision must be made.

How receiving and mailing packages, certified mail and medicine delivery will be handled were all taken up by the standing-room-only crowd at the Gresham Community Building.

“I’m not going to stand here and tell you this is not going to inconvenience our customers,” said Case, who promised Gresham would retain its name and Zip Code in the future no matter what.

“We are literally 26 miles round trip to the nearest town,” Nancy Bond said.

“We are very remote. We are an agriculture based community” where “people choose to live to produce GNP (gross national product). I think the government owes us a post office.”

Speaking later in the meeting, Bond sparked laughter when, after describing the post office as the social hub of the community, she said, “It’s where we get our news ... it’s how Connor gets his mowing jobs.”

Danielle Scheele, a mother of two young children who had just gotten off work at the massive new seed corn plant nearby, spoke for the five generations of her family who have called Gresham home.

“We chose to come back here,” she said of her family.

“That job brought me back here. Everybody wants to push rural America, but we’re destroying it. We’re taking everything away.”

Case said the way for Gresham to effectively press its position is to increase both walk-in revenue and total mail volume. Those two criteria weigh most heavily in close/don’t close decisions.

In those two categories it’s important, he advised, for residents to find “anything you can quantify and certify as sustainable” over time.

Asked why the federal government can’t simply infuse money to make the USPS solvent again, Case said that would treat only the symptoms and not the underlying disease.

“We have to fix the business model because it’s changed,” he said.

Therefore a bailout would be temporary at best, a complete waste of money at worst and, either way, would only forestall a return to the same mess eventually.

Case stressed more than once that this is the study phase that precedes a decision in the matter.

Eventually he will review everything that’s been learned and heard about Gresham’s post office and others within the News-Times region in the same boat (Cordova, Grafton and Benedict) and make a recommendation to his superior, who will in turn send a recommendation up the line to Washington.

If closure is the decision, notice is made and 30 days allowed for appeals. Case said if there’s even one appeal the service will conduct a complete review at the national level.

The 60-day study that includes Thursday night’s public meeting ends officially on Nov. 27.

Case said the typical time to complete a closure is 138 days, however he admitted that might not hold up in light of the fact he is personally responsible to study and make recommendations on 26 possible closures in all, including some in Lincoln and Omaha.

Overall, he said, 2,700 post offices have been identified nationally for possible closure.

Donna Rhoades rattled off instances of what she termed egregious waste at the federal level. Though she acknowledged those issues don’t rest with Case, she said, “You understand our frustration.”

The jam-packed room exploded in applause when she said, “It sounds like a lot of hassle to change us over, so why don’t we just leave things as they are? Look at all the people here. Every one of them will be adversely effected.”

At another point in the discussion Rhoades told Case her town has “grown 7 percent in the past six weeks. Just give us a shot. Don’t cut us off at the knees yet.”

Again Case said, “We haven’t made a decision. It’s a proposal under study. I see the passion here tonight,” he said.

“You folks can grow with or without us.”
http://yorknewstimes.com/articles/2011/11/05/news/doc4eb4867fd9b5d271511197.txt