USPS will still drastically reduce its overall footprint by closing facilities that it says are redundant and create costly inefficiencies, as part of a plan it announced in May, but will replace them with new and repurposed mega-centers that can process, sort and send out for delivery mail all under one roof. DeJoy called the change a transformative investment that will make the Postal Service a more attractive place to work and enable it to meet its on-time delivery goals while maintaining its self-sustainability. The building of the new centers will take take several years to implement and are part of DeJoy’s promise to invest $40 billion in capital improvement projects.
Plans for the new or refurbished regional centers are already underway, USPS said in an internal magazine for employees, and “major initiatives” are first targeted for the Atlanta, Indianapolis and Charlotte areas this year. The goal of the new super centers is to bring all processing operations in a given metro area into one building. Some metro areas currently have up to eight processing plants with 80 delivery units—the final sorting location where carriers pick up mail and packages for home delivery—that require hundreds of trips to move the mail between them. Postal management has said it can consolidate these redundancies with a single, modernized plant that uses “standardized processes” to make the use of space more efficient.