A Bright Idea for the Mail : New, Colorful Sorting Center in Santa Clarita Is a High-Tech Marvel

Outside, the huge, new mail-processing center--where as of last weekend all mail for the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys is sorted--looks like a run-of-the-mill warehouse. Inside, it looks like the setting for a book by Dr. Seuss.

The new Santa Clarita Processing and Distribution Center does things strictly by colors. Bright colors.

Up above, a vast, winding network of conveyor belts are blue, delivering trays of mail to the purple units that sort mail by size, white ones that put cancellation marks on stamps and green machines that handle business mail.

Supervisors traveling around this 760,000-square-foot facility ride along concrete paths on red or blue tricycles, or on yellow electric carts.

Layla Windwillows, a mail processing supervisor, has a small thumb-operated bell on the handlebars of her adult-sized, red cycle. She refers to the bell as a “safety feature.”

“It’s jolly and infantile and a reminder of childhood,” she says.

James Gillery, a postal official overseeing the start-up of the plant, is proud of the facility, although a bit defensive about the decor.

“We didn’t pick the colors on purpose,” he explains. “The Postal Service picked them.”

The storybook decor is in sharp contrast to the real work being done in this facility, located in an undeveloped area about two miles west of Santa Clarita. Here, an estimated 10 million pieces of mail a day are processed on an average day.

The building was designed to make room for the state-of-the-art automated machines that could not fit into the old sorting facility in Van Nuys. Gillery said the Santa Clarita center, which cost more than $100 million to build, is the third-largest of its kind in the state, just behind the processing centers in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The Van Nuys facility, which opened in 1974, is about half as large, Gillery says. Workers there pushed mail in large metal carts to various parts of the building and sorted on far slower machines.

“We’re still going in covered wagons there,” he said several days before the new facility opened. With the opening of the new center, the sorting operations in the Van Nuys office came to an end, but public postal services are still available there.

For several months before the new center opened, a skeleton crew processed bulk business mail to test the new machinery. Most of the workers involved in the test agreed that the new building is a big improvement.

“It’s bigger, it’s better, it’s a lot nicer,” says Mary Brown, who worked at the Van Nuys facility for 10 years. “I never realized (the Van Nuys plant) was small, dark and dingy until I went back.”

But not everyone is thrilled with the new technology.

“See that machine?” asks Sylmar resident Orlando Arreola, 32, pointing to a bulk-mail sorter. “It’s taking three of our jobs. Just us lucky ones are left.”

Gillery confirms that the new machines process more mail with fewer employees. The U.S. Postal Service, he says, has to operate like a business. “Obviously, we’ve got a need to look at ways of cutting costs,” he said.

He says that the facility will have about the same number of full-time employees--2,000--as worked in Van Nuys. But the mechanization will allow the Postal Service to drastically cut down on part-time workers.

Administrative staff and a few mail processors work during the days at the new building, but the vast majority of employees work overnight shifts, Gillery says. The first half of the night is spent sorting local mail bound for other destinations, while the second half is devoted to processing incoming mail.

The newer machines are equipped to read bar codes used on some commercial mail. But letters without the codes, such as those with handwritten addresses, still make up the greater part of the flow of mail and have to be sorted manually as they pass through one of the 17 older, tan-colored machines.

“We have to have an operator at each of those machines and it’s slower than three of the new machines, which can process more mail with virtually no supervision,” Gillery says.

He adds that the bar code readers cannot read the labels on brightly colored envelopes--causing considerable extra trouble during holidays such as Christmas and Valentine’s Day.

“Those are nightmare days for us because we have to go back to the Dark Ages to process that mail,” he says.

The sorting machines are programmed to sort incoming mail by address and ZIP code. “It can actually sort the mail by each carrier’s route and put it in the sequence they walk,” Gillery says.

Above all the colored machines is an extensive network of white tunnels with small, one-way glass windows, where Postal Inspection Service employees randomly monitor the work of the employees below. Gillery says they can observe every square foot of the plant’s operating area.

“If you’ve mailed your sister $10 for her birthday, they’re there to make sure it gets there,” he says.

Gillery says in 1985 the new site was purchased because the land was cheaper than in the San Fernando Valley and because postal authorities errantly believed Santa Clarita’s population would dramatically increase by the time the facility opened.

He admits he would have preferred a Valley site for the building, “because it would put us closer to a majority of our customers.”

But Andy Vergara, 33, a Los Angeles resident who works as a mail sorter, says he likes the rural location, even though except for breaks, his job puts him in the middle of the giant, purple sorting machines.

“It’s nice to work out here,” says Vergara. “It’s far from the noise of the city.”

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New Mail Facility

The newly opened Santa Clarita Processing and Distribution Center will operate around the clock, year round. Other facts:

Estimated pieces of mail processed on average day: 10 million.

Estimated pieces of advertising mail processed on average day: 3.9 million.

Number of employees: 2,000 full time.

Number of addresses served for delivery: 672,000.