About 35 residents attended a public hearing Thursday to plead with the U.S. Postal Service to not close the post office in Avilla, Mo., as a part of cost-cutting measures, reported the Carthage Press.
Thirty-five doesn’t sound like much — until you realize that Avilla’s population, according to the 2000 Census, was about 130. (2010 Census figures for all towns aren’t yet available.)
A few choice excerpts from the story:
“I have a book Marvin VanGilder had written about our history and a lot of our history is gone,” said Avilla Mayor Rosemary Lombard. “This post office has been here since I was a little kid and it’s so handy and we want it for our town. It’s a historical site, Route 66 runs right by here and I watch those people take pictures. This would be a big blow to the community to lose this post office, we’re proud of it.” […]
“It’s just one of the icons that’s been on the road for years and it’s one of the few post offices that is on the Route,” said Tommy Pike, Springfield, president of the Route 66 Association of Missouri. “There’s one in Devil’s Elbow, but everything like that that you lose is gone. It’s an asset to this community and it really needs to be saved. I can see that the people here are not happy about it closing. I wasn’t too happy either, when I heard about it.”
Here’s the link to about 12 small-town post offices on Route 66 that would be closed under the proposal. In total, more than 3,600 post offices across the country are targeted. And the postmaster general earlier this week said the U.S. Postal Service may default if drastic measures aren’t taken.
I know this little town of Avilla quite well; my Dad spent 33 years with KAMO Electric which operates a substation and microwave tower a few miles from the town. I spent a few summers doing maintenance work for KAMO as a teenager and this was how I ‘rediscovered’ MO-96 (of course aka Route 66). Judging by the old buildings at the sides of the road I figured this must have been a busy patch of road at one time, but It wasn’t until I bought the Rolling Stones “December’s Children” from a thrift shop in the summer of 1983 and heard their cover of “Route 66” for the first time that it clicked: Hmmm, I wonder….I got out an old highway atlas and sure enough, that old highway Avilla sits on was “THE” Route 66 in that song!
So now we’re being told we can’t afford a Postal Service. And maybe the volume of mail isn’t what it used to be? Well, rather than whine and take sides politically I’d rather do what engineers are paid to do: propose a solution to the problem.
The volume of mail can’t be great enough to require the attention of a full time staff at a little place like Avilla? So why not keep the building and fixtures intact and well maintained and allow either part time staff or perhaps even volunteers to staff some operations much the way volunteer fire departments are ran? If we can trust civic minded citizens with our lives, property and 80,000 pound fire trucks then surely we can trust them to handle the operations of a low-volume post office?
It seems like this might be a better solution than letting one of the bastions of the town’s existence go dark; let alone the entire US postal system.
Reading up on the issue in recent weeks, I’d say the biggest issue the USPS faces is the fact it has to fund its pension plan 75 *years* in advance. That’s a huge outlay that I’m certain few companies could handle. https://bit.ly/o80Yuy