Manchin Proposes Plan to Keep Post Offices Open - Beckley, Bluefield & Lewisburg News, Weather, Sports

U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, D- W.Va., introduced an amendment Wednesday that would delay the planned closing of 3,700 postal facilities for two years. There are 150 post offices in West Virginia slated for closure as a cost-saving move for the struggling U.S. Postal Service.

Manchin said, in a press release, that he is encouraging the Postal Service to consider several other cost-saving measures before cutting into the core of its mission. Some of his preferred cost-saving ideas include: eliminating excessive bonuses for Postal Service executives, making sure that the products offered by the Postal Service cover their costs, getting rid of retail space that the Postal Service is not using, and ending the expenditure of Postal Service advertising dollars on luxuries such as sponsoring the U.S. Tour de France team and a NASCAR team.

 "Under the Postal Service's proposal, they would close thousands of rural post offices to save $200 million, but that's less than 1 percent of the Postal Service's $20 billion and is roughly equivalent to the amount we spend in one day in Afghanistan. While that does very little to improve the Postal Service's bottom line, it would devastate our rural towns, including potentially 150 communities in West Virginia. I have offered this amendment because, as I have heard from hundreds of my constituents, we simply cannot afford to let these facilities close in the communities that need them the most."