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Postal Service asks to cut deliveries to five a week

WASHINGTON – The post office will run out of money this year unless it receives help, Postmaster General John Potter told Congress on Wednesday as he sought permission to cut delivery to five days a week.

“We are facing losses of historic proportion. Our situation is critical,” Potter told a House panel.

The agency lost $2.8 billion last year and is looking at much larger losses this year. Reducing mail delivery from six days to five days a week could save $3.5 billion annually, Potter said.

Potter also urged changes in how the post office pre-pays for retiree health care to cut its annual costs by $2 billion.

Last week, the post office said it planned to offer early retirement to 150,000 workers and is eliminating 1,400 management positions and closing six of its 80 district offices.

The post office had a $384 million loss in the first quarter of the fiscal year – October through December – which is usually the busiest period because of the holidays.

Officials said the recession has contributed to a mail volume drop of 5.2 billion pieces compared with a year earlier. If there is no economic recovery, the USPS projects volume for the year will be down by 12 billion to 15 billion pieces of mail.

Citizen Online Archive, 2006-2009

This archive contains all the stories that appeared on the Tucson Citizen's website from mid-2006 to June 1, 2009.

In 2010, a power surge fried a server that contained all of videos linked to dozens of stories in this archive. Also, a server that contained all of the databases for dozens of stories was accidentally erased, so all of those links are broken as well. However, all of the text and photos that accompanied some stories have been preserved.

For all of the stories that were archived by the Tucson Citizen newspaper's library in a digital archive between 1993 and 2009, go to Morgue Part 2

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