FORT SMITH — Fort Smith public officials, business operators, U.S. Postal Service employees and citizens voiced opposition Thursday to moving Fort Smith’s mail processing service to Fayetteville.
“As mayor of Fort Smith, any degradation of mail service in Fort Smith is unacceptable,” Sandy Sanders told Postal Service officials at a meeting Thursday.
Two of the officials, Arkansas District Manager David Camp and District Operations Programs Support Manager Stan Sowell, moderated a 90-minute public meeting at the Holiday Inn City Center in downtown Fort Smith to get public comment and field questions for a study onmoving Fort Smith’s mail processing center.
Camp said no decision had been made to move the process center from the state’s second largest city. The comments and questions gathered Thurs-day evening will be added to other study data that was sent to the Southwest Area office last month for evaluation.
After 90 days, he said, the study will go on to the Postal Service’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., for a final decision sometime in May or June.
Camp said, though, the Postal Service would save $1.7 million by moving the Fort Smith mail processing center to Fayetteville.
Sowell said the volume of mail has decreased 42 percent nationwide since 2001, and the Postal Service suffered an $8.5 million drop in revenue last year as it tried to compete with the Internet bill paying services, e-mail and other shipping companies.
The Postal Service is looking for ways to cut costs and increase efficiency.
Sanders said in his remarks at the meeting that he did not trust the process the Postal Service was using to evaluate the move. He said he thought the decision already had been made to move Fort Smith’s mail processing center and would not trust the results of the study.
Others in the audience, including several postal employees, appeared to agree with Sanders.
Some of the postal employees asked why, if no decision has been made, was the study focusing on moving the processing center from Fort Smith to Fayetteville but there was no study on the possibility of moving the Fayetteville processing center to Fort Smith.
“We can handle Fayetteville [mail] but Fayetteville can’t handle ours,” said David R. Harris, one of 35 Fort Smith mail processing center employees who will have to move to another city in order keep his job if the center is moved.
Fort Smith postal employees said the processing center in Fort Smith was more efficient than the center in Fayetteville and had room for expansion.
“Who thought up this thing?” asked postal employee Jim Meyers. “Why is Fort Smith being considered butFayetteville is not?”
Sanders said large corporations like Mitsubishi, which announced last year it is building a large plant in Fort Smith, look at availability of postal facilities when considering a move to an area.
He said moving the mail processing center out of Fort Smith will make the city less attractive to industrial prospects, will cost the city jobs and will delay the delivery of mail in Fort Smith.
Patrick Horan of Fort Smith held up a photograph from a newspaper showing a jackknifed tractor-trailer on Interstate 540 and said the interstate is most dangerous one mile either side of the Bobby Hopper Tunnel in the winter.
He said he wondered why the Postal Service would want to send its trucks over mountains and frozen bridges. He said there would be mail delays.
Sebastian County Assessor Becky Yandell said she feared delays in mailed out personal assessments that didn’t reach their destinations by the May 31 deadline would result in taxpayers having to pay a 10 percent late penalty.
She said she realized spending cuts had to be made but it did not make sense to move Fort Smith’s mail processing center to Fayetteville.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 02/25/2011