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Staff Photo by Lesley Onstott Keith Vaughn, right, hands David Westfield his change at the Murray/Lake Hills post office on Tuesday. A meeting to discuss the office's possible closure was held Tuesday evening.
The U.S. Postal Service should think first about the coming of Volkswagen's Enterprise South manufacturing plant before closing a nearby postal service station, customers said.
Dozens of postal patrons spoke Tuesday evening at a public meeting held by the Postal Service. The meeting, held at Oakwood Baptist Church, encouraged public opinions on the possible closure of the Murray/Lake Hills branch and is the first of four such meetings this week on the proposed closures of four Chattanooga branches.
"This post office is a very good post office, it's one of the larger ones," said Larry Johns, a nearby resident and retired letter carrier. "It's also very close to Volkswagen."
The distance to the next nearest post office on Shallowford Road would be too great for VW and all the predicted offshoot enterprises to even consider using it, Mr. Johns said, which would further hurt the Postal Service's finances.
In Chattanooga, the Postal Service is considering four closures: North Chattanooga, East Lake, Highland Park and Murray/Lake Hills.
The service is projected to handle 170 billion pieces of mail this year, down from 211.7 billion pieces in 2005, regional spokeswoman Beth Barnett said. The agency lost $2 billion in 2008 and likely will lose another $7 billion this year, she said at the start of Tuesday's meeting.
"We have to look at every avenue to reduce costs," Tracy Mofield, regional manager of postal operations, said at the meeting. "What we hear from customers is that they want us to close the post office down the road, not their post office ... but we've got to cut costs somewhere."
Customers said the closure of the Murray/Lake Hills office would create a serious inconvenience. They say the Shallowford Road branch is too far away, too busy and would require driving along Chattanooga's most-congested roads.
"Traffic is horrible on Shallowford Road," Mitch Gardner said. "When you get out there in all that traffic, you are going to have wrecks, and people check their mail at the busiest times of the day when traffic is the worst."
Three more meetings will be held this week to hear comments on the other proposed post office closures. Postal officials caution that no decision has been made and that they are merely in the fact-finding portion of the process.
Comments from this week's meetings will be sent to Washington, D.C. Once there, officials will review them and make a decision in 10 days, according to the plan presented by Ms. Barnett to audience members. If a decision to close a branch is made, the office would be closed in 60 days, she said.
IF YOU GO
Three more public meetings are scheduled this week to solicit comments on the possible closure of four post offices.
* North Chattanooga: 5-6 p.m. Today. Chattanooga Theatre Centre, 400 River St.
* East Lake Station: 5-6 p.m. Thursday. Temple Baptist Church, 3204 Clio Ave.
* Highland Park: 7-8 p.m. Thursday. Saint Andrews Center, 1918 Union Ave.
Adam Crisp covers education issues for the Times Free Press. He joined the paper's staff in 2007 and initially covered crime, public safety, courts and general assignment topics. Prior to Chattanooga, Crisp was a crime reporter at the Savannah Morning News and has been a reporter and editor at community newspapers in southeast Georgia. In college, he led his student paper to a first-place general excellence award from the Georgia College Press Association. He earned ...
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