TheBakersfieldCalifornian.com

The U.S. Postal Service said Thursday it will end mail processing at the Bakersfield Processing & Distribution Center and move those operations to Santa Clarita.

About 300 people work at the Bakersfield facility on Pegasus Drive near Meadows Field Airport, and 136 positions would be cut with the consolidation, said James Wigdel, a spokesman for the Postal Service in San Francisco.

The Postal Service would offer all affected employees positions elsewhere in the system, he said. Attrition is also expected to take up some of the slack.

"We would do our best to place our employees in positions they're qualified in doing," he said. Some employees may choose to change positions, and retraining would happen in those cases, he said.

Mail from the Bakersfield facility -- which processes 12 million pieces of mail a week -- will be processed through the service's Santa Clarita facility, about 80 miles away.

Whereas the expectation now is that mail sent, say, across town is delivered overnight, that would change to being delivered in two to three days, Wigdel said.

The consolidation is dependent on the Postal Service approving the change in service standards. Retail services and post office boxes will still be available at the facility. Customers will also be able to continue dropping mail off there.

Wigdel said the processing closure won't happen before May 15 to give Congress time to work out an alternative plan to save the service money. Already, one bill has been proposed that would recalculate the service's roughly $5 billion annual contribution to its retirement plans, which many see as a financial drain on the system.

The Postal Service has said it needs to cut costs by $20 billion by 2015 in the face of a 25 percent drop in first-class mail since 2006 and other financial pressures.

Bakersfield's is among about 250 facilities of the 487 nationwide that the service is considering closing or has closed.

Wigdel said it's too early to say exactly when the consolidation process would start, but the service hopes it would begin in the next year.

In late December, the Postal Service held a community meeting in Bakersfield that about 75 people attended, many of them pleading with Postal Service representatives not to close the facility.

Wigdel acknowledged the outcry, but added, "We're facing a new reality with the Postal Service. It's about saving money ... and also rightsizing the system. ... So we're adjusting for that to keep the Postal Service sustainable for the long term."

Ted Arbolante, an electronic technician, has worked at the facility since it opened in the mid-1980s.

"I know I'm going to be out of a job," he said. "They told us when the mail processing equipment that I work on is removed, my job will no longer be available."

Arbolante said he's worked for the Postal Service for 33 years and was planning to extend that to 38 or 39 before retiring.

"It's very disruptive to the employees down here," he said. "Now they're cutting me short, so it's kind of changing my life plans."

Arbolante does maintenance work on the mail sorting machines but said he has been told there are no similar openings at the Santa Clarita plant.

"Moving the mail (processing) is very, very easy," Arbolante said. "But taking care of the personnel is the most difficult part, and they really haven't addressed it, in my mind."

"I've been told that there are no openings in Santa Clarita for our employees," said Alfred Paredez, president of Local 472 of the American Postal Workers Union, which represents workers at the plant.

"If the Post Office does what they want to do, it's going to send the mail all to Santa Clarita, and it's going to sit there for two to three to four to five days," Paredez said. "If they do that, they're not going to need the (same) amount of people to run the mail because they don't have to get it out overnight."

"Right now, the only recourse we have as the public and as registered voters is to contact our congressman and senators," he said.

The change could cost Bakersfield Presort some customers, said Manager Stan Shelbourne. The company presorts and codes mail for the city, Kern County, State Farm and other customers to get them a discount at the post office.

Bakersfield Presort gets a discount of about 3.5 cents for what would normally cost 45 cents to mail, but that discount is because Bakersfield Presort delivers the mail to the same facility it's shipped out of, Shelbourne said. That will likely change when mail is distributed from Santa Clarita, he said, and Bakersfield Presort will have to raise its prices.

"We're going to lose some nonprofit mail, we're going to lose some bulk mail," he said. "We're definitely going to lose payroll, because payroll can't sit at the post office for three days."

Bakersfield City Clerk Roberta Gafford said her office is already starting to look at internal deadlines for notices and other documents to see how some of those deadlines may need to be moved. The city is required to give a certain number of days' notice for things like public hearings, and that often involves using the mail.

For example, Gafford said, "The notices for hearings we may have to send a few days early to accommodate the additional timeframe that it's going to take to get mail from Santa Clarita.

"Definitely we have to adjust our schedules to accommodate the need for the citizens to receive their notices timely," she said.

California's chief elections official wants to delay the announced closure of postal centers, including Bakersfield's, until after this year's presidential election.

"While I certainly sympathize with the financial challenges faced by the USPS, I do not support a plan that undermines the timely delivery of election materials in the middle of a presidential election year," said California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, adding that the closure "would have a devastating impact on democracy."

During the 2008 presidential election, 5.7 million Californians -- 41.6 percent of those who voted -- cast their ballots by mail. Noting the increasing popularity of voting by mail, Bowen predicted the number will be much higher this year.

Kern County elections supervisor Karen Rhea shares Bowen's concern that closing the Bakersfield processing center could result in thousands of ballots arriving at Kern County's elections division too late to be counted. More than 120,000 Kern County voters receive an absentee ballot.

Though postal officials have said first-class mail will move to two- to three-day delivery, Bowen said the delays caused by the closure of three processing centers in Monterey, Ventura and Sutter counties last year were much longer.

"In each case, vote-by-mail ballots took up to seven days after being mailed to arrive at county elections offices," said Bowen, expressing fear that millions of people who vote by mail may be disenfranchised.

Bowen and Rhea said they were discussing plans to minimize impacts with postal officials. Legislation also has been introduced in Congress to postpone the closures until after the election.