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September 7, 2007

Postal service curbs deliveries

Push on to move boxes to street

By Tim Krohn

NORTH MANKATO — When Bob Meyer reached out the door to the mail box on his Sherman Street home recently, he had a postcard from the U.S. Postal Service.

“The post office said they would install a rural-type mailbox for me free at the curb in front of my house,” Meyer said.

He wasn’t impressed.

“It’s dumb. It would enable me to walk to the curb to get my mail instead of the mail carrier inserting the mail in the mailbox at my front door.

“And having all those boxes sitting out on the curb doesn’t look good.”

Acting Mankato Post Master Paul Johnson said the slow but steady move to mailboxes on the street is for good reason: to save money and for safety.

“We’re going to continue to encourage it. Every time a letter carrier parks the vehicle and does a walking route, you have a number of hazards,” Johnson said.

Those hazards include everything from walking on icy and sometimes unshoveled sidewalks to nasty dogs.

“And from the efficiency standpoint, it’s much quicker and easier to drive up to the box,” he said.

Johnson said he and postmasters around the country are looking for ways to be more efficient, especially when there are 2 million added addresses for the Postal Service to deliver to each year.

“If we can be more efficient, you increase the time span between (postage) rate increases.”

Johnson said there no set plan for which neighborhoods to try to convert to curbside boxes and no time frame.

“Every route is so different. It depends on a lot of things.”

He said on some routes a lot of boxes are already on the curb, so it makes sense to move all of them there.

Sometimes, it’s dog problems. “If there’s a block where we have issues with a dog, we’ll require them to move the boxes to the curb.”

The Postal Service pushes centralized mail boxes in new subdivisions. They are groupings of up to dozens of locked mailboxes at one of the entrances to the subdivision where people can pick up their mail. Besides the obvious time and cost savings for the letter carriers, Johnson said, people like the locked boxes.

“With more concerns about identity theft, they’re a secure way to store your mail. If you leave for the weekend you know your mail is safe.”

Johnson said the move to more curbside boxes isn’t a plot by the Post Service to subcontract out letter-carrier jobs.

“The only thing we contract out is the delivery of mail (by trucks) from processing centers to individual post offices. In northern Minnesota they have some contracted rural mail delivery. We have no contractors here.”

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