Sen. Jon Tester on Monday, February 12, 2024, urged the postmaster general to reconsider any thoughts of moving the Processing and Distribution Center from Missoula to Spokane.
Employees at the Missoula post office on Kent Avenue expressed concern last month after they learned that the facility is under review for possible relocation. The center sorts mail for delivery across Western Montana.
“The Missoula (center) is a critical part of postal operations in Montana,” Tester said in a letter to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. “If processing were to be moved out of state, mail would get sent from Missoula more than 200 miles over two mountain passes to Spokane to be sorted before any of it is sent back to be delivered.”
The Postal Service in January published a notice of intent to consolidate roughly 30 processing and distribution centers.
The notice stated that it was “highly likely” that each center would be “modernized and repurposed as a Local Processing Center, a Sorting & Delivery Center, or both, consistent with the broader network redesign outlined in the Delivering For America (DFA) Plan.”