Federal and State agencies are discarding Postal Service
properties which should otherwise belong to the people, and the
community loses properties which otherwise enhance and prosper the
culture and social fabric. This is accompanied by the jobs which
are lost, just like the pattern has been since the 1980s under Reagan's
cruel war against unionized employment and domestic industry, which has
seen the rise of our current condition of permanent war in the
"ghettos".
2013-03-06 "Why the GOP Is Killing the Post Office; The conventional wisdom is that the US Postal Service is closing post offices and ending Saturday service because it's broke... Don't believe it" by Jim Hightower [
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/why-the-gop-is-killing-post-office/Content?oid=3480985]:
Editors' Note: With the announcement last month that the US Postal Service will stop Saturday service this August coupled with the agency's plans to close the historic downtown Berkeley post office and 3,700 other branches around the nation, we thought this piece by acclaimed journalist and commentator Jim Hightower published last year in Hightower Lowdown was particularly timely.
Consider fifty cents. What does that buy these days? Not a cuppa joe — that'll cost you two bucks. Nor will it get you a pack of gum or pay for bus fare. And Walmart, which promotes itself as the palace of cheap, sells practically nothing for a half-buck. There's one place, though, where you can get a steal of a deal for a fifty-cent piece: your local post office. Put down two quarters or five dimes there, and you'll get a first-class stamp in return ... and you'll even get change. Slap that 46-cent stamp on a letter, drop it in the mailbox, and our nation's postal workers will move your missive across town or clear across country — hand-delivering it to any address in America within three days (42 percent arrive the very next day, and 27 percent more get where we want them to go within two days).
Each day, six days a week, letter carriers traverse four million miles toting an average of 563 million pieces of mail, reaching the very doorsteps of our individual homes and workplaces in every single community in America. They ride snowmobiles to reach iced-in villages, fly bush planes into outback wilderness areas that have no roads, run Mail Boats out to remote islands in places like Maine and Washington state, and even use mules on an eight-mile trail to bring mail to the five hundred members of the Havasupai tribe of Native Americans living on the floor of the Grand Canyon.
From the gated enclaves and penthouses of the über-wealthy to inner cities and rural colonias of America's poorest families, the US Postal Service literally delivers. All that for 46 cents. And if you've written the wrong address or your recipient can't be found, you'll get your letter or package back for no charge. The USPS is an unmatched bargain, a civic treasure, a genuine public good that links all people and communities into one nation.
So, naturally, it must be destroyed.
For the past year, the laissez-fairyland blogosphere, assorted corporate front groups, a howling pack of Congressional right-wingers, and a bunch of lazy mass media sources have been pounding out a steadily rising drumbeat to warn that our postal service faces impending doom: It's "broke," they exclaim, the situation "is dire," USPS "nears collapse," it's "a full-blown financial crisis!" Soon, they insist, the whole shebang will implode: The PBS Newshour alarmed viewers last year about "a complete shutdown this winter."
According to this gaggle of gloomsayers, the national mail agency is bogged down with too many overpaid workers and costly brick-and-mortar facilities, so it can't keep up with the instant messaging of Internet services and such nimble corporate competitors as FedEx. Thus, say these contrivers of their own conventional wisdom, the Postal Service is unprofitable, is costing taxpayers billions of dollars a year in losses, and is plummeting irreversibly into bankruptcy. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. I realize that the Powers That Be never allow truth to get in the way of their policy intentions, but — come on — three strikes and you're out! Let's examine:
Unprofitable? So what? When has the Pentagon ever made a profit? Never. Nor does anyone suggest it should. Neither has the FBI, Centers for Disease Control, FDA, State Department, FEMA, Park Service, etc. Producing a profit is not the purpose of government — its purpose is service. And for two centuries — from 1775, when the Continental Congress chose Benjamin Franklin to be our fledgling nation's first Postmaster General — until 1971, when Richard Nixon's Postal Reorganization Act took effect — America's nationwide network of post offices was fully appreciated as a government service.
In fact, the Post Office Department was considered such an important function of public affairs that it was explicitly authorized by the founding document of our nation's government (Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution). The founders would've laughed their wigs off had anyone proposed that the existence of such an essential civic agency be dependent on its profitability. Be efficient and fiscally responsible, yes, but the bottom line for the Post Office was delivering a public service for the good of all the people.
But Nixon happened. His presidency gave laissez-faire ideologues a long-sought opening to insert blasting caps into the structural framework of government. Their first big success was the 1971 "reform" that shattered the public service model by imposing a bottom-line profit mentality on the agency and installing a corporate form of governance over it. "Run it like a business" was the political demand of the right-wing think tankers, Nixonians, and congressional fixers.
So, overnight, the cabinet-level Post Office Department that was overseen by Congress and funded by taxpayers was transformed into today's Postal Service, overseen by a board of governors and funded by postage sales. Technically, USPS is an independent agency of the executive branch, but operational authority is in the hands of the eleven-member board (whose acronym, aptly enough, is "BOG" — as in a morass that prevents progress).
Will it surprise you to learn that the BOG tends to be quite corporate? From 2005 until 2011, for example, one of its most influential members was James Miller III, who was Ronald Reagan's budget director and a longtime proponent of totally privatizing mail service. He's a product of such right-wing Koch-funded outfits as the American Enterprise Institute and Citizens for a Sound Economy (now called Americans for Prosperity) that are ardent pushers of postal privatization.
Also, prior to the 1971 transformation, the postmaster general had status as a cabinet official appointed by the president and confirmed by the senate. Now, though, the top postal executive is hired (and fired) by the board. This helps explain why incumbent Patrick Donahoe — who started as a postal clerk and rose through the ranks to the PGship — has been a willing member of the sledgehammer crew that's out to "save the service" by demolishing it.
The anti-government ideologues have had to concede that profit's not the point, but still they groan that the USPS is losing billions of dollars a year. Why should hard-pressed taxpayers be expected to keep shoveling money from the public treasury into this loser of a government agency?
They're not. Important factoid Number One: Since 1971, the postal service has not taken a dime from taxpayers. All of its operations — including the remarkable convenience of 32,000 local post offices (more service outlets than Walmart, Starbucks, and McDonald's combined) — are paid for by peddling stamps and other products.
But wait, what about those annual losses? Good grief, squawk the Chicken Littles, USPS was $13 billion in the hole from 2007 to 2011 — a private corporation would go broke with that record! (Actual private corporations tend to go to Washington rather than go broke, getting taxpayer bailouts to cover their losses.)
Important Factoid Number Two: The Postal Service is not broke. Indeed, in those four years of loudly deplored "losses," the Service actually produced a $700 million operational profit (despite the worst economy since the Great Depression).
What's going on here? Right-wing sabotage of USPS financing, that's what. In 2006, when George W. Bush was in the White House and Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, the post office was whacked with the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act — an incredible piece of ugliness requiring the agency to pre-pay the health care benefits not only of current employees, but also of all employees who'll retire during the next 75 years. Yes, that includes employees who're not yet born!
No other agency or corporation has to do this. Worse, this ridiculous law demands that USPS fully fund this seven-decade burden by 2016. Imagine the shrieks of outrage if Congress tried to slap FedEx or other private firms with such an onerous requirement. This politically motivated mandate is costing the Postal Service $5.5 billion a year — money taken right out of postage revenue that could be going to services. That's the real source of the "financial crisis" squeezing America's post offices.
But it's not the only hocus pocus that has falsely fabricated the public perception that our mail agency is "broke." Due to a forty-year-old accounting error, the federal Office of Personnel Management has overcharged the post office by as much as $80 billion for payments into the Civil Service Retirement System. This means that, far from being a drain on the public treasury, USPS has had billions of its sales dollars erroneously diverted into the treasury. Restore the agency's access to its own postage money, and the impending "collapse" goes away.
That's all well and good, claim postal agency opponents, but there's no disputing the fact that government-delivered mail is a quaint idea whose time has gone. They point out that USPS's first-class business has fallen by about 7.5 percent in each of the past couple of years, and even Postmaster Donahoe has said flatly, "That's not going to change." This funereal school of despair breaks into two groups: "Kill it" and "Shrink it."
The killers are the outright privatizers who've pushed for decades to get the post office out of ... well, out of our mailboxes. In the 1960s, AT&T chairman Fred Kappel headed a presidential commission on postal reform, and he told a Congressional panel, "If I could, I'd make the Post Office a private enterprise." He couldn't, but he did set down the marker that remains the Holy Grail of the corporate elite. Unsurprisingly, FedEx CEO Fredrick Smith (a former board member of the Koch Brothers' Cato Institute) has been the leading corporate champion for, as he put it in 1999, "closing down the USPS."
The greater danger at the moment, however, are the shrinkers. They propose to fix the proud public service by cutting it down to size (they mean "fix" in the same way veterinarians use the term). Postmaster Donahoe is presently the shrinker-in-chief, having put forth a plan that will close 3,700 of our post offices, including the historic branch in downtown Berkeley; shut down about half of the 487 mail processing centers across the country; cut more than 100,000 postal jobs (or, as Donahoe prefers to phrase it, "reduce head count"); and, as announced last month, restrict mail delivery to five days a week by eliminating all Saturday postal services. Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine is among the people of common sense who recognize that the post office "cannot expect to gain more business, which it desperately needs, if it is reducing service." Likewise, Fredric Rolando, head of the National Association of Letter Carriers, sees that compromising high-quality service is a boneheaded business move, telling The New York Times that "degrading standards not only hurts the public and the businesses we serve; it's also counterproductive for the Postal Service because it will drive more people away from using the mail." Such drastic cutbacks, consolidations, and eliminations create a suicidal spiral that will slowly but surely kill USPS.
The attack of the shrinkers and killers is another sad (and shameful) product of our nation's current crop of no-can-do "leaders." They've given up on America's Big Idea of creating a democratic society united by pursuit of the common good and energized by the spirit of "together we can." Instead, corporate elites are out to shove America's greatness into a shriveled ethic that says, "I got mine, you get yours."
While it's certainly true that emails and tweets are faster than mail, there remains a vast demand for postal services, especially where broadband Internet does not reach (50 percent of rural residents, 35 percent of all Americans), as well as when hard copy and physical delivery are essential. FedEx has its place, but its self-serving priority is always to go after maximum profit — it has no interest in or ability to deliver universal service at an affordable price to the whole nation.
Postal privatizers and downsizers have reams of data on the price of everything USPS does — yet they are completely unable to calculate value. They don't give a whit either that their model of "service" would leave out entire groups of people, communities, and businesses, or that they'd be taking away much more than mail from millions of fellow citizens. Despite the right-wing denigration heaped on this public service, ordinary folks still feel personally attached to their post office and mail carriers. Sure, there are complaints and some horror stories, but there are many more (though less reported) stories of extraordinary service and simple human kindness by postal workers, which is why the agency has been named the most trusted in government for six straight years.
The post office is more than a bunch of buildings — it's a community center and, for many towns, an essential part of the local identity, as well as a tangible link to the rest of the nation. As former Senator Jennings Randolph poignantly observed, "When the local post office is closed, the flag comes down." The corporatizer crowd doesn't grasp that going after this particular government program is messing with the human connection and genuine affection that it engenders.
But then, all you need to know about that crowd's sensitivity to our people's deeper values is that the list of 3,700 postal facilities suggested for closure includes the historic Franklin Post Office in Philadelphia. It is located on the very site of Old Ben's house in Franklin Square, right next door to the US Postal Service Museum. And, get this, in an especially tender touch, the Franklin office received notice that it was going on the chopping block on July 26, 2011 — exactly 236 years to the day in 1775 when the Continental Congress enacted Franklin's proposal to establish a national post office for our fledgling democracy.
The biggest lie of all is that the USPS is an antiquated, unnecessary, failing civic institution that simply must give way to electronic technology and corporate efficiency. This is nothing but ideological hogwash spewed by private profiteers and political quislings.
Obviously, the Postal Service is no longer the only player making the rounds, and it must make some major adjustments to find its proper fit and new opportunities in the marketing and public service mix. But this requires top management and political overseers to be a bit more creative and business-like than constantly cutting, closing, outsourcing, eliminating — and giving in to the bashers and slashers.
This is the time to innovate and offer new services and products — don't shrink, expand! Start with three phenomenal assets that USPS has: (1) that network of 32,000 retail outlets (many of them historic and even works of art) that form the most extensive local presence of any business or government in America, drawing more than seven million people into them each day; (2) an experienced, smart, skilled, and dedicated workforce of nearly 600,000 middle-class Americans who live in the communities they serve and are brimming with ideas and energy to move the Postal Service forward — if only those at the top would listen and turn them loose; and (3) the general goodwill of the public, which sees the local post office and its employees as "theirs," providing useful services and standing as one of their core civic institutions (in a 2009 Gallup Poll, 95 percent of Americans said it was personally important to them that the Postal Service be continued).
Let's build on those big pluses. This is one government program that really works for the people, but it can work better and do more. Here are just a few ideas:
Go digital. John Nichols reported in The Nation that USPS already has the world's third-largest computer infrastructure, including 5,000 remote locations with satellite Internet service. Expand that into a handy consumer service offering high-speed broadband all across the country. Rather than bemoan the loss of postal business to the Internet, become an Internet hot spot in town after town for universal email, digital scanning, and forwarding of documents, etc.
Expand the store. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders wants to let post offices sell products and services that they're now barred from offering (thanks to corporate opposition and Congressional meddling). Sanders suggests allowing sales of cellphones, delivery of wine, selling fishing licenses, notarizing documents, etc. This would be a boon to the people in poor neighborhoods and rural areas who don't have convenient access to such services.
Seven days. Instead of reducing service, be the only entity that offers reliable delivery service to every community in the country, seven days a week.
Bank here. From 1910 until bank lobbyists killed it in 1966, a Postal Banking System operated successfully through local post offices all across the land. It offered simple, low-cost, federally insured savings accounts to millions of "unbanked" Americans who couldn't meet the minimum deposit requirements of commercial bankers or afford their fees. Today, banks are even less interested in servicing the steadily rising number of poor people, leaving them to the un-tender mercies of payday lenders and check-cashing chains. So let's bring this small-deposit banking system back into our easily accessible and familiar neighborhood post offices to serve these people and create loan funds for investments in local communities.
America's postal service is just that — a true public service, a grassroots people's asset that has even more potential than we're presently tapping to serve the democratic ideal of the common good. Why the hell would we let an elite of small-minded profiteers, ranting ideologues, and their political hirelings drop-kick this jewel through the goal posts of corporate greed? This is not a fight merely to save 32,000 post offices and the middle-class jobs they provide — but to advance the big idea of America itself, the bold, historic notion that "Yes, we can" create a society in which we're all in it together.
That's worth fighting for, which means that you and I must add our voices and grassroots activism to those who're daring to confront the cants and greed of the privatizer elite. It means standing up to them, but, most importantly, standing up for ourselves, our values, our country.
Without regard to social costs,
private citizens such as University of California Regent Richard Blum,
and Senator Diane Feinstein use their influence to legally steal
properties through privatization, despite all social costs.
2013-02-24 "Senator Diane Feinstein and her Husband Richard Blum profits from the liquidation of Public Post Offices"
Sign the petition at: [
http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=7309]Sadly, YES, you read the headline right!
Our historic Post Office system is being dismantled before our eyes.
Senator
Diane Feinstein's husband, Richard C. Blum, is the central real estate
figure in the acquisition and disposition of local historic post
offices. The sickening liquidation of many Post Offices is well under
way with many, in California alone, already gone. About forty in CA
have been already sold or put up for sale
See the glum details of the Blum operation: [
http://savethepostoffice.com/eureka-postal-service-finds-gold-california]
It
seems so sad and short sighted to me. And, this Feinstein / Blum
enterprise that feasts on these local treasures makes me sick at heart!
Please
write your Congressman and/or US Senators and tell them to repeal the
ridiculous 2006 law that requires the Post Office to bank 75 years of
retirement funds for employees that have not even been born yet!
It's
a manufactured crisis for the Post Office. The P.O. has been solvent
all through the recession except for the absurd retirement Pre-funding
requirements. NO other business is required to pre-fund retirement at
this level! WHY is this happening? Because there is a quiet campaign
by those who are mesmerized with the idea of shrinking government and,
want to privatize the remains of the Post Office.
Let's not
forget Blum's role at Regent of the UC system, where he presides over
raising fees thereby driving students into his privately owned diploma
mills. Here's my press release calling for Blum's resignation:
STATEMENT:
State
Assembly Candidate and University of California graduate Eugene Ruyle
called for the resignation of UC Regent Richard C. Blum. Candidate Ruyle
timed his call to coincide with the Blum Center for Developing
Economies Open House on Friday and Saturday, October 5 & 6, part
of Cal’s Homecoming.
Noting that Regent Blum is a “symptom, not a
cause” of the misplaced values of the University, Ruyle stated that:
“By resigning, Blum would not only own up to his own misdeeds, he could
begin a process of rethinking the entire structure of the University as
the first step in rethinking the way our society itself is structured.” A
strong supporter of mass organization and direct action, Ruyle said he
looked to Occupy Cal as one of the forces for positive change in the
future of the University.
Eugene Ruyle is one of the two
candidates for State Assembly in the 15th Assembly District that
surrounds the Berkeley campus of the University of California. The 15th
State Assembly District runs from West Contra Costa County to Northern
Alameda County and includes Hercules, Pinole, San Pablo, Richmond, El
Cerrito, Kensington, Albany, Berkeley, Piedmont, and Emeryville, and
North Oakland. Much of the district was formerly in Assembly District
14, and the area remains a Democratic Party stronghold. Skinner ran
unopposed in 2008 and received over 90% of the vote in the Alameda
County portion of District 14 in 2010 against Republican Ryan Hatcher.
No Republicans even bothered to run in the June 2012 Primary. This
permitted Peace and Freedom Party activist Eugene Ruyle to run as a
write in candidate and obtain enough votes to be placed on the November
ballot under the new “Top Two” rules created with the passage of
Proposition 14 in 2010.
Running with the slogan, “End the Wars,
Tax the Rich, Power to the People,” Ruyle supports the working class,
socialist, and feminist Platform of the Peace and Freedom Party. A 1963
graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, Eugene Ruyle is
Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at California State University, Long
Beach. While at Long Beach, Ruyle was a union activist with the
California Faculty Association and a member of the Academic Senate. He
also worked closely with the local Gabrielino/Tongva Indians in their
struggle to save Puvungna, a sacred creation center on the CSULB campus.
Administration plans to lease the land for commercial development were
ultimately blocked by an ACLU lawsuit on behalf of the Native American
community.
As a lifelong educator, Ruyle wants to help build the
movement to democratize and de-militarize the University of California
in the heart of the 15th Assembly District. Ruyle is a strong support of
Occupy Cal as well as Occupy Oakland and progressive social movements
everywhere.
Ruyle cited a January 2012 article in Z Magazine by
Oakland historian Larry Shoup, and noted that Blum is known as the
“alpha dog” of the Regents. A multi-billionaire financier with interests
in weapons manufacture, real estate speculation, and private education,
Blum is married to U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein who uses her political
power to further the couple’s wealth. According to the L.A. Times,
Feinstein, as chairperson of the Senate’s Military Construction
appropriations subcommittee, supervised and supported the appropriation
of over $1.5 billion for two military contractors controlled by Blum:
URS Corporation and Perini Corporation.
As major investors in two
private educational corporations, the Career Educational Corporation
and ITT Educational Services, Blum and Feinstein are also using their
power to undermine public education and weaken teacher unions. While
Blum presides over tuition raises that force students out of public
universities and into his private diploma mills, Feinstein supports
school vouchers that use public money to pay for tuition at private or
parochial schools.
Candidate Ruyle cited the University’s role in
nuclear weapons research as a further example of the misplaced values
guiding the University of California: “Every nuclear weapon in the U.S.
arsenal, from the Atomic Bombs dropped on the people of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki until today, was designed at one of three labs run by the
University of California: Los Alamos, Livermore, and the Radiation Lab
at Berkeley.”
As an anthropologist, Ruyle also expressed concern
about the way in which the University is flouting the Native American
Grave Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Passed by Congress in
1990, NAGPRA requires all institutions to make their collections of
Native American human remains and funeral objects available to the
Native American community for reburial. Citing reports that the remains
of some 12,000 individuals are still stored in the basement of the
Woman’s Gym on the Berkeley campus, Ruyle stated that “NAGPRA represents
an effort to address an historical injustice. Some institutions are
making good faith efforts to comply with this law, Berkeley is not.”
For more on this, see my comrade Larry Shoup’s article in Z Magazine, Jan 2012.
[
http://www.zcommunications.org/the-power-couple-of-california-by-laurence-h-shoup]
Peace, Power to the People,
[signed] Gene
2012-07-03 "Eureka! The Postal Service finds gold in California"
[
http://savethepostoffice.com/eureka-postal-service-finds-gold-california]:
The
Postal Service has been actively selling off historic post office
buildings for over a year now. About forty have been sold or put up for
sale. They’re scattered around the country, but for some reason more
than a third of them are in California.
Last week news came out
that one of the most beautiful post offices in the country would be
sold, the 1915 post office in Berkeley. The protest is already
beginning (SF Gate [
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Berkeley-preservationists-decry-post-office-3677806.php] and Daily Californian [
http://www.dailycal.org/2012/07/01/downtown-berkeley-post-office-move-services/]).
The
Berkeley post office was built during a period when many believed
architectural beautification could bring harmony to urban living,
explains Gray Brechin, UC-Berkeley geography professor and founder of
the Living New Deal [
http://livingnewdeal.berkeley.edu/].
“The federal government went to special lengths to give Berkeley one of
the handsomest postal facilities in the state and possibly the nation,”
says Brechin. “It represents the high idealism of the City Beautiful
Movement.”
Apparently the country is done with that kind of
idealism, and rather than building beautiful public places, the federal
government is selling them off. What’s going on in California is one of
the main reasons the National Trust named the Historic Post Office to
its list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Places of 2012.
Historic
post offices are highly prized by their communities. They anchor the
downtown area, help local businesses, enable people to walk to the post
office, and elicit pride of place. People may complain about the long
lines, but they love their grand old post office.
If something
doesn’t stop the sell-off, it looks as though the Postal Service is
prepared to dispose of all 2,200 of the country’s historic post
offices. Postal officials seem to think that this legacy belongs to
them, to do with as they please. They forget that these post offices
are the property of the American people. They seem unaware of the
magnitude of the crime they're committing.
The Postal Service
says it needs the money these sales bring in, and the old buildings cost
too much to maintain, especially when a lot of space is underutilized.
But the sales bring in a relatively small amount of money in the
context of the USPS budget, the maintenance costs are less than the rent
the Postal Service pays on the replacement post office, and the
underused space is the Postal Service's own fault. Rather than making
the most of the downtown location, the Postal Service moves letter
carriers to other locations (which also cost money to lease or
maintain), so that the mail processing that used to go on in the back
now goes on somewhere else, leaving just the retail services in the
building.
The explanations offered by the Postal Service disguise
what's really going on. The Postal Service is selling off its
properties because divestiture of assets, along with outsourcing, is one
of the main steps in the process of privatization. The plans have been
in the works for a long time. Back in 1998, President Reagan's
Commission on Privatization recommended selling off "obsolete buildings
in central business districts" — historic downtown post offices — to
help move the Postal Service toward privatization. You can read all
about it in the Commission's report, "Privatization: Toward More
Effective Government" (pp. 122-125) [
http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNABB472.pdf].
Why California?
California
has fourteen historic post offices that have been sold, put on the
market, or planned for sale — the most of any state in the country.
Connecticut is number two, with five (most of them in the “Gold Coast”
area around Westport). Several other states have one or two.
One
might assume that so many historic post offices are being sold in
California because the state has an unusual number of them, but that
explanation doesn't hold up. California ranks fifth in terms of how
many historic posts offices it possesses, 106. New York is number one
(with 238); Pennsylvania, second (182); then come Illinois (170) and
Ohio (126). Yet these states have only one or two historic post
offices for sale.
Of California's approximately 1,800 post
offices, the Postal Service owns around 600. Using fifty years old as a
rule of thumb for listing on the National Register of Historic Places,
over a hundred California post offices are eligible and 24 are currently
on the Register. (A list of California’s historic post offices is here
[
https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1JXcFm-nfNE91d_s1ysSFLzXyFIxnyKZEpAjSWOE], a map here [
https://www.google.com/fusiontables/embedviz?viz=MAP&q=select+col25+from+1JXcFm-nfNE91d_s1ysSFLzXyFIxnyKZEpAjSWOE&h=false&lat=37.423&lng=-122.084&z=2&t=1&l=col25], and a spreadsheet showing how post offices and historic buildings break down state-by-state, here. [
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AoN_G6sw6laedGtCOTNCY2NrZjNlNi1vMjJ1alFqRkE])
Percentage-wise,
California is not at all unusual in the number of historic post offices
it possesses. About 6 percent of the state’s post offices are
historic, which ranks California 29th. By contrast, in the New England
states, about 13 percent of the post offices are historic.
There
must be another reason why the state is seeing so many sales compared
to other states. One possible explanation is that postal management in
the Pacific District is simply being more aggressive about selling post
offices than other districts, perhaps to please postal headquarters back
east. It’s also possible that the California post offices are among
the country’s most valuable, and the Postal Service wants to work on the
big-ticket items first. That would also explain why it sold off the
post offices in Connecticut’s Gold Coast and Palm Beach, Florida. Or
maybe the Postal Service is just starting the divestiture process on the
West Coast, intending to work its way east, so it’s only a matter of
time before other states suffer their share of the damage.
The California Connection
Whatever
the explanation, there’s another interesting angle to the California
story. Last year, the Postal Service signed a contract with the CBRE
Group (aka CB Richard Ellis), the world’s largest commercial real estate
company, to handle sales and leases. The partnership has not pleased
postal lessors [
http://www.auspl.com/pdf/spring2012.pdf], and the USPS OIG has been looking into the problems, though its report seems stalled.
The Postal Service and CBRE soon set up a website advertising many of the USPS properties for sale [
http://uspspropertiesforsale.com/].
But overall, the company seems to be taking a low profile. Some
properties have been put up for sale without appearing on the website,
and CBRE rarely gets mentioned in news articles about pending or
completed sales.
The California connection is that CBRE is
headquartered in Los Angeles, and the Chairman of the Board is Richard
C. Blum — a native of San Francisco, a graduate of UC-Berkeley, and a
Regent of the University of California. He also happens to be the
husband of California Senator Dianne Feinstein.
Mr. Blum has been
on the board of CBRE since 1993, and he's been Chair since 2011. In
2001, Mr. Blum's company, Blum Capital Partners, an equity investment
management firm, did a leveraged buyout of CBRE for $800 million [
http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/cb-richard-ellis-group-inc-history/]. In other words, Mr. Blum basically owns and runs CBRE.
The
Blum-Feinstein relationship has received scrutiny because of Mr. Blum’s
government contracts as well as his dealings with China, which raise
conflict-of-interest issues with his wife’s official duties. For
example, in 2009 the senator introduced legislation to provide $25
billion in taxpayer money to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, a
government agency that had recently awarded CBRE a contract to sell
foreclosed properties. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in
Washington (CREW) urged the Inspector General of the FDIC to investigate
the CBRE contract
[http://www.citizensforethics.org/index.php/press/entry/crew-urges-investigation-into-fdic-contract-awarded-to-cb-richard-ellis/],
but apparently that didn’t happen. (More on the web of connections,
here [
http://news.muckety.com/2009/04/22/senators-husband-gets-fdic-contract-as-she-presses-for-agency-funding/14711] and here [
http://theava.com/archives/3874], and more allegations, here [
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/06/06/Dianne-Feinstein-Still-Dogged-by-Allegations-of-Conflicts-of-Interest].)
Mr.
Blum's CBRE isn't a stranger to helping the government sell off
assets. In October 2009, CBRE won a contract with the California
Department of General Services to broker over $2 billion in office
buildings the state wanted to privatize because of its financial
problems [
http://theava.com/archives/3874].
No
one has had much to say about the USPS-CBRE-Blum-Feinstein connection.
The media have ignored it, and no watchdogs have seized upon it. There
may be nothing to it. If there is anything amiss, don’t worry about
rectifying matters in this lifetime. Mr. Blum is a self-professed
Buddhist, so you can leave it to karma and reincarnation to take care of
things.
The same story, over and over again -
When
the Postal Service sells one of its historic post offices, the
storyline is always the same. The process begins with the Postal
Service shifting letters carriers from the post office to an annex
outside the downtown area. That leaves the retail end of the operations
alone in the building, occupying a small part of the total square
footage. A few months later, maybe a year or two, the Postal Service
says that it can’t afford to maintain all the wasted space, so it would
be better to move the retail activity to another location.
In
some cases, the Postal Service waits to move the carriers until the
building is under contract, but either way, the carriers and the
processing work they do are always bifurcated from the retail end of
things. The carriers go to one location, the retail clerks to another.
(Decoupling mail processing and retail is another part of the
privatization process.)
When it first informs postal workers and
customers of its intention to sell the building, a USPS spokesperson
inevitably tells the media that the Postal Service is only "considering"
the building for sale, and a decision is months away. A few weeks
later, there’s a community meeting, and the USPS spokesperson says the
same thing: “No decisions have been made. We’re just looking into it.”
That’s just a way to placate people and to make it seem as if they have
plenty of time to persuade the Postal Service to change its mind.
The
USPS spokesperson will also offer the boilerplate explanation for why
the post office needs to be sold: The Postal Service is losing billions
of dollars a year, and it has to look everywhere it can to cut costs.
The downtown post office is much bigger than they need (the carriers
have been moved away), so a small retail space would be more economical.
The
news item about the pending sale will repeat this explanation as
gospel, and the reporter will never look at the USPS financial reports,
which show quite clearly that were it not for the Congressional mandate
to prefund the retiree health fund at $5.6 billion a year (a totally
unnecessary expenditure that's designed to help the federal budget more
than postal workers), the Postal Service would be practically breaking
even.
When a closing is not a closing -
Once
the decision to move forward with the sale has been made, the Postal
Service starts looking for a new location for retail services. Because
the retail is just moving and not closing down completely, the Postal
Service considers the closing of the post office as merely a
“relocation,” not an actual “discontinuance.”
For a community
watching its historic post office being closed and sold, the distinction
is meaningless, but for the Postal Service, there’s a big difference. A
discontinuance occurs when a town’s post office is closed completely
and people need to go to another town to do their postal business.
There are laws and regulations that govern exactly how this process is
to be conducted. It involves advance notification, community meetings,
surveys, and a particular timeline. Plus, a community can appeal the
Postal Service’s decision to the Postal Regulatory Commission. The PRC
can’t overturn a discontinuance decision, but it can remand the final
determination to close the office back to the Postal Service for further
consideration.
When it closes one of these historic downtown post
offices, however, the Postal Service always sets up a small retail
operation in a new location. The post office hasn’t “closed” — it’s
just been “relocated.” Hence, there’s no need to go through a formal
discontinuance process, and the community has no right to appeal.
Actually, it can still file an appeal, but it won’t do any good. When
the community in Venice appealed to the PRC a few months ago, the PRC
dismissed the appeal on the grounds that it did not have jurisdiction
over relocations [
http://www.prc.gov/Docs/79/79947/Order_No_1166.pdf]. The same thing happened in Ukiah [
http://www.prc.gov/Docs/74/74806/Order_No_804.pdf].
A
small rural post office that serves a very small town and just leases a
few hundred square feet in a ramshackle building turns out to be more
protected by the law than a large, historic downtown post office serving
an entire city. But that’s the way it is. Perhaps it’s a testimony to
how much power rural communities have in Congress, or perhaps
legislators never envisioned the Postal Service selling off its legacy
of historic post offices.
Repurposing the public realm -
While
the Postal Service doesn’t have to follow discontinuance regulations
when it relocates a historic post office, it does have to deal with
Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, which requires
federal agencies to take into account the effects of their undertakings
on historic properties. But the Postal Service knows all about
following the rules of Section 106, and the Act has not turned out to be
a tool for preventing the sale of post offices. It can ensure some
protections, however, like making sure that a famous New Deal mural
remains accessible to the public.
Once the Postal Service has a
buyer, it sometimes tries to lease space in the same building so that
the post office can remain open without a relocation. That keeps people
in the community happy, but it usually turns out to be a temporary
arrangement. The new owner has paid too much money for the building to
worry about providing space for a post office. He has big plans, and a
post office isn’t part of them.
After the new owner takes
possession and gets all the permits in order, the building is
repurposed. Old post offices have been turned into everything from a
police station to a restaurant. Real estate magnate Peter Malkin, owner
of the Empire State Building, bought the historic post office in
Greenwich, Connecticut, and rumors say it will be turned into a
Bergdorf-Goodman or some other high-end retailer. The post office in
Palm Beach was purchased by a billionaire who made his fortune in credit
default swaps; it's now Sunshine Reality. The post office in Bethesda,
Maryland, is being eyed for a condo development. The potential buyer
for the post office in Venice, California, wants to convert it to a film
production studio.
As for the economics, these historic
properties are fetching two or three million dollars, sometimes more.
The Postal Service saves some maintenance costs, but it has to start
paying to rent space in another location. The Postal Service won't
share much information about these arrangements, but the average rent
for a post office is about $2,000 a month, and in affluent places like
the Connecticut Gold Coast and most of the locations in California,
rents can run several times that amount. In Palm Beach, Florida, rumor
has it that the Postal Service is paying $10,000 at month for the retail
outlet that replaced the New Deal post office, which it owned outright [
http://www.savethepostoffice.com/location/florida/palm-beach-fl]. The economics of selling historic post offices only make sense if the long-term goal is complete divestiture.
California status report -
Here’s
a list of the fourteen historic post offices sold or for sale in
California. For more on the history of these post offices and the
famous murals and other artworks many of them contain, check out the
Living New Deal website.
BERKELEY: Sale planned.
The
most recent addition to the list of endangered post offices in
California is Berkeley’s 98-year-old landmark building designed by
architect Oscar Wendorth, in the style of a famous Renaissance hospital
in Florence, designed by Brunelleschi. The Postal Service announced
last week that it was planning to sell the Berkeley post office and to
open another storefront in the neighborhood. No buyer or a price has
been named. The Berkeley post office is on the National Register of
Historic Places.
BURLINGAME. For sale.
The
Postal Service announced in February its plan to sell the 1942
Burlingame post office. “Nothing is being taken away. We’re simply
looking at relocating retail services,” said U.S. Postal Service
spokesman James Wigdel. “The facility is three times the space we need.
It’s literally a waste of space,” said Jeff Suess, real estate
specialist in the Pacific Facilities Service Office for the U.S. Postal
Service. Suess shared photos of post offices that had been turned into
office space with cafes, a museum or, Suess’ favorite, a bed and
breakfast. A public meeting was held in April, but no news since then.
FULLERTON: For sale.
There
doesn’t seem to be much in the news about the Fullerton post office,
but it’s listed on the USPS-CBRE website as “Coming Soon,” with “List
price to be determined.” The building was constructed in 1938, for
$56,000, in less than seven months. It has a 1936 mural by Paul Julian,
depicting idealized images of Fullerton citrus, oil, and aviation
industries. Julian worked as a cartoon background painter and
Roadrunner voice artist for Warner Brothers.
HUNTINGTON BEACH: For sale.
The
Postal Service announced in February that it planned to sell the 1935
Huntington Beach post office, but according to USPS spokesman Richard
Maher, “No decisions have been made. We're not sure if this would be
able to be accomplished." The building is a local landmark, and a few
months ago, comedian Betty White used it as the backdrop for a scene of
the TV show, "Off Their Rockers."
LA JOLLA: Sale planned.
The
Postal Service announced in January that intended to sell the building
and relocate postal services to a smaller location. There’s a Save the
La Jolla Post Office Community Task Force, and Save Our Heritage
Organisation has also taken up the fight. USPS spokesperson Eva Jackson
told the media, "A recommendation has not been finalized. Once a
recommendation is made, it will be made public and there will be a 15
day appeal period." The La Jolla post office was singled out by the
National Trust when it declared the historic post office building to its
list of endangered places.
MODESTO: Closed, sold.
The
Postal Service can share the blame for the sale of the historic El
Viejo post office with the GSA, which owned the building. The Postal
Service closed the post office in April, then in September the building
was sold for $1.02 million to developer Peter Janopaul III. He plans to
convert the post office into ten, three-level residential lofts and a
4,000-square-foot penthouse, complete with a private pool, which will go
for $1.6 million. Development may be hampered somewhat by the fact
that the building is on the National Register. The Depression-era
murals must remain available for public viewing, and the bronze postal
boxes and the lobby's ornate metal writing table will stay with the
building as well.
PALO ALTO: For sale.
The
Postal Service announced in December that the Palo Alto post office
would be put up for sale. "We're not closing any of these post offices,
but we are relocating them," said James Wigdel, a spokesman for the
U.S. Postal Service. "It'll be the same amount of retail when it's all
said and done." The iconic building was designed by prominent local
architect Birge Clark, whose other buildings include the Lucie Stern
Community Center and various buildings on the Ramona Street Historic
District. The building is probably worth about $6 million. In March,
city officials submitted a letter of interest to the Postal Service, but
no word yet on the response. In the meantime, the building is listed
on the USPS-CBRE website as “Coming Soon.”
REDLANDS: For sale.
The
folks in Redlands are lucky to have local resident Karlie Miller
fighting to save the post office. She has singlehandedly taken on the
Postal Service — and more besides. In March, when news came out that
the post office would be closed and services relocated about
three-quarters of a mile away to the New York station on Redlands’ west
side, Miller went to work gathering signatures to save the post office.
But she’s not only up against the Postal Service. The Redlands
Historic Museum Association has set its sights on the building as a
location for a city museum, and the City Council supports the idea. The
downtown building has been on the National Register of Historic Places
since 1985. No closure date has been announced, but the building is
listed on the USPS-CBRE website as “Coming Soon.”
SAN RAFAEL: For sale.
The
75-year-old post office on D Street is slated to be closed and moved to
a new downtown location. It contains a New Deal mural entitled "San
Rafael Creek – 1851” by Oscar Galgiani, a life-long resident of Stockton
and a founder of the Stockton Art League. The post office is listed on
the USPS-CBRE website as “Coming Soon.”
SANTA BARBARA: Sale planned.
Residents
learned in late April that the post office in Santa Barbara would soon
be put up for sale, with retail services moving to a new, smaller
location. The Postal Service says that since the carriers have been
moved out, it only needs 6,000 square feet of the 50,000-square-foot
property. The building is on the National Register, so no alterations
can be made to its façade. A news report says that last year city
officials toured the building and considered purchasing it for a police
headquarters, but parking was somewhat limited. It’s possible a
successful corporation may want the building as a “trophy headquarters.”
SANTA MONICA: Sale planned.
Citizens in Santa
Monica learned in March that their historic post office would be closed
and retail services relocated to a carrier annex about a mile away.
USPS spokesman Richard Maher said an internal study had been completed
on the financial benefits of consolidating in Santa Monica, but he would
not release any information. “The plan has yet to be finalized,” says
Mahler, and the financial information is irrelevant anyway. "We have to
look at the bigger picture. In order to provide service to every
community in the country, there will be facilities that may be
consolidated that are actually operating at a profit, but for the good
of the entire system, they will be consolidated." Built by the Work
Projects Administration during the Depression, the building is on the
National Register. There will be a public meeting about the pending
sale on July 17th.
SOUTH GATE: For sale.
After
learning that the Postal Service intended to sell the Firestone Station,
the South Gate City Council passed a preservation ordinance limiting
future exterior alteration to buildings so designated. From now on,
property owners must get a city permit for changes to the façade or
architectural styling. The ordinance passed 3-0 with Vice Mayor Gil
Hurtado, a postal employee, abstaining. The South Gate post office was
dedicated in 1936, under Supervising Architect Louis Simon.
UKIAH: Closed, for sale.
When
it learned in early 2011 of the Postal Service’s plan to close and sell
the post office in Ukiah, the community did everything it could to save
the post office. As usual, the Postal Service didn’t bother with a
full discontinuance process, since retail services were relocated to a
carrier annex on the edge of town. When the town appealed to the PRC,
the case was dismissed, since the Commission can’t do anything about
relocations. The post office closed in January, and the building was
put in escrow, according to a broker handling the sale to some unnamed
buyer. In May, the building was named to the National Register, but it
doesn’t look like that will affect the sale. The building is currently
listed on the USPS-CBRE website for $675,000. "It's despicable," said
attorney Barry Vogel, who worked with a group of citizens to fight the
sale of the Ukiah post office. “These closures take the guts out of
local communities, subjugating us so that we become less free. We have
fewer services and it makes life more difficult for hard-working people
who have used this post office for 75 years.” (There’s more on Ukiah
here.)
VENICE: Closed, sale pending:
The people
in Venice put up a great fight to save their post office, but as in
Ukiah, to no avail. An appeal to the Postal Regulatory Commission was
dismissed, and while a legal suit is still pending, the Postal Service
has already closed the post office and it’s proceeding with the sale.
The retail services have been relocated to a carrier annex, and the
building is in contract with film producer Joel Silver (Lethal Weapon,
Die Hard, The Matrix), who’s also the co-inventor of Ultimate Frisbee.
The post office is listed on the USPS-CBRE website, for $7.5 million.
There’s a great story about the efforts to save the Venice post office
here, and there’s more here. The post office contains artist Edward
Biberman’s 1941 mural, 'Story of Venice,' which depicts Abbot Kinney,
the founder of Venice.
What's to be done?
Many
of the communities facing the loss of their historic post office have
formed “save the post office” groups, created Facebook pages, done
petition drives, and lobbied their elected officials. Nothing seems to
be able to stop the Postal Service. As we've seen with Venice and
Ukiah, appeals to the PRC and lawsuits don’t seem to work either.
The
one thing that hasn’t happened yet is forging a unified front against
the Postal Service. Perhaps if all the communities in California faced
with losing their post office got organized, they might have more
success than fighting the Postal Service alone. Perhaps they could
appeal directly to Senator Feinstein, who might have a word with her
husband over dinner one evening. You can contact the senator here.
Another
approach would be to contact the Postal Service officials who are
responsible for the sales. They'll be happy to hear from concerned
citizens — the more the better. Here’s the contact info for a few of
the postal executives who have may some influence:
Tom Samra
Vice President, Facilities
United States Postal Service
475 L’Enfant Plaza, S.W.
Washington, D.C. 20260-0004
Tel: (800) 275-8777; 703-526-2727
Fax: 703-526-2740
Email: tomasamra@usps.gov
Jane E. Bjork
Manager, Facilities, Real Estate and Assets
United States Postal Service Headquarters
475 L'Enfant Plaza, SW, Room 6670
Washington, DC 20260-1862
Tel.: 202-268-8463 Fax: 202-268-6305
Email: jane.e.bjork@usps.gov
Diana K. Alvarado
Manager, Property Management
395 Oyster Point Boulevard, Suite 225
South San Francisco, CA 94080-0300
Tel.: 415-550-5112 Fax: 415-550-5207
Email: diana.alvarado@usps.gov
