Starts This Weekend : U.S. Postal Service to Cut Hours, Pickups in S.D.

Beginning this weekend, the United States Postal Service in San Diego will trim the hours at some of its post offices as well as curtail pickups at all its collection boxes to cut about $5 million from its annual budget.

Mike Cannone, communications manager for the service’s San Diego region, said that letters and packages dropped in the 2,376 collection boxes countywide will no longer be picked up by postal employees on Sundays--a cost-cutting move that has been instituted nationwide.

“You need to get it in the mail Saturday or Monday, because we’re going to eliminate Sunday mail collections,” Cannone said.

Sunday pickup service, however, will continue from the 362 Express Mail collection boxes in the county, he said.

In addition, 31 of the county’s 93 post offices will reduce the number of hours that they will be open. Cannone said the average reduction will be 4 hours a week at the designated post offices. The new hours will go into effect today.

“We’re arranged it so some of our post offices will open a half hour later in the morning and close a half hour earlier,” Cannone said. “Some of the schedules reflect limited hours one day a week, and others will be closed daily during the typically slower mid-afternoon hours.”

The post offices that are reducing service at the customer windows have been chosen so that another post office with regular hours is located nearby, he said.

Cannone said the reductions were necessary because Congress has recently cut $1.25 billion from the postal service’s budget, a reduction that must be absorbed over the next 2 years.

The San Diego area’s share of that budget cut was $5 million for this year, and an undetermined amount for next year, Cannone said.