Starting Sept. 28, the mail Durango residents drop in collection boxes or at the Post Office will be taken to Albuquerque for processing, a U.S. Postal Service spokesman said.
Also, mail addressed to Durango residents will be sorted in Albuquerque and forwarded.
No longer will mail be processed in Durango, Brian Sperry, a Denver-based regional spokesman for the agency, said Friday.
“The Postal Service continues to move forward with its plan to consolidate its vast processing network as part of a larger, more comprehensive plan to reduce costs by $20 billion by 2017,” Sperry wrote in an email. “The Postal Service does not have the mail volume to justify the size and capacity of our current processing network.
“We must match our network to the anticipated workload,” Sperry said. “As part of these changes, mail-processing operations in Durango are tentatively scheduled to be consolidated into our Albuquerque plant on Sept. 28.”
In May 2012, the Herald reported on a Postal Service announcement that said Durango’s mail-processing facility would not be consolidated until at least 2014.
Sperry could not say Friday why the closing of Durango’s mail-processing was apparently moved up, or how exactly that will affect the length of time it will take mail to get to and from Durango.
The Durango Post Office on east Eighth Street will remain open as a post office and as a transportation hub. Delivery and retail operations will not be affected.
Sperry said the decision to move mail processing from Durango to Albuquerque was made more than a year ago.
daler@durangoherald.com
