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"But it gets worse. What the Postal Service saves by closing post offices comes at the expense of the people it’s supposed to be serving. Take the case of Etna, New York.
Etna is located in Tompkins County, in the “dark forest” of the southern Finger Lakes region, a great vacation spot and home to Cornell University and Ithaca College. Many of the towns and villages in the area have names like Ithaca, Homer, Hector, and Ulysses because the surveyor’s clerk had a fondness for Greek and Roman history, and there was a classical ferver going around, as evidenced by early nineteenth-century architecture—all part of the desire to associate post-War of Independence America with ancient Greek democracy.
Named after Mount Etna in Sicily, the town got its first post office on January 16, 1823. The first postmaster was Henry B. Weaver, and over the next 182 years, a succession of fifteen postmasters would serve the people of Etna. A year ago, postmaster Barbara J. Van Dusen resigned. She may be the last of the Etna postmasters. The Postal Service never replaced her, and for the past year, the post office has been run by an officer-in-charge. Now the Postal Service is using the absence of a postmaster as a reason for closing the post office.In May the Postal Service held a meeting at Houtz Hall, the community center where the Postal Service rents space for the post office, to hear comments from the town’s citizens about the impending closure. The Postal Service scheduled the meeting for 10 a.m. on a Thursday morning, when most people are at work. As the Cortland Standard reported, about twenty people attended, and it doesn’t sound like they were very happy. They didn’t like the idea of mailboxes—the snow plows knock them down—or cluster boxes either—they freeze up—and neither has the security of a post office. And they didn’t like the idea of driving three miles to the next-nearest post office in Freeville. And they didn’t like losing a place that’s been there for their whole lives, a place many can walk to, a place where they chat with neighbors, a place that helps give identity to the town...Though cruel to the citizens of Etna, the decision to close the post office will be based on hard-nosed analysis of data (done with the help of a new computer program). But when the Postal Service does its calculations, it’s only looking at one side of the ledger—theirs.
The Postal Service rents 448 square feet in the Etna Community Center for $4,480 a year. An officer-in-charge typically gets about ten bucks an hour, but this position will need to be replaced by a mail carrier, who probably gets union wages, so there won’t be much savings, if any, in labor costs. So what will the Postal Service save by closing Etna’s post office? A whopping $5,000 a year?
Now consider the other side of the balance sheet. Etna has a population of 5,725. How many trips will need to be made to the Freeville post office, three miles away? Let’s say 500 a week. So:
500 trips/week × 50 weeks/year × 6 miles/trip ÷ 30 mpg × $4/gallon = $20,000
That’s $20,000 the citizens will be paying for gas to drive to another town’s post office. It would be cheaper if every person in Etna paid a $1 a year to the Postal Service to keep the post office open...One woman at the Etna meeting said she mails over 35,000 pieces of mail a year out of the post office for the National Audubon Society. Think she may be looking for another delivery service? (By the way, with all the business she brings in, the Etna post office may actually be running at a profit.)"
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Etna Holiday Craft Fair
Houtz Hall
2 Lower Creek Rd
Etna, NY 13062
Craft Fair to benefit the Etna Community Association to help with the maintenance of the Community Center and playground.