WASHINGTON — The Postal Service today took its case for five-day delivery to the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC).

The Postal Service is required by law to seek an advisory opinion from the PRC any time a nationwide change in service is proposed. Today’s filing begins the PRC review.

A report accompanying the request notes, “The Postal Service does not take this change lightly and would not propose it if six-day mail service could be supported by current volumes. There is no longer enough mail to sustain six days of delivery.”

The five-day delivery proposal is part of comprehensive plan announced March 2, “Delivering the Future,” a roadmap intended to bring certainty to a viable Postal Service well into the future and to help it recover from dramatic losses in volume resulting from electronic diversion and exacerbated by the economic recession.

The five-day report notes, “Ten years ago, the average household received five pieces of mail every day. Today, it receives four pieces and by 2020, that number will fall to three. Reducing street delivery to five days will help rebalance postal operations with the needs of today’s customers. It also will save more than $3 billion a year, including reductions in energy use and carbon emissions.”

Postmaster General John E. Potter said it was important to stress that the proposal dealt only with Saturday street delivery and that Post Offices will be open on Saturdays, access to P.O. boxes would continue, Express Mail would be delivered seven days a week and incoming mail would still be processed.

“It’s five days of delivery, six days of service and Express Mail seven days a week,” Potter noted adding that postal processing operations would continue on a seven-day schedule.

In addition to a review by the PRC, it’s also necessary for Congress to refrain from enacting legislation that would require the Postal Service to generally deliver mail six days a week after the end of fiscal year 2010.

The Postal Service report can be found at http://www.usps.com/communications/five-daydelivery and the request for the advisory opinion can be accessed at prc.gov.

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A self-supporting government enterprise, the U.S. Postal Service is the only delivery service that reaches every address in the nation, 150 million residences, businesses and Post Office Boxes. The Postal Service receives no direct support from taxpayers. With 36,000 retail locations and the most frequently visited website in the federal government, the Postal Service relies on the sale of postage, products and services to pay for operating expenses. Named the Most Trusted Government Agency five consecutive years and the sixth Most Trusted Business in the nation by the Ponemon Institute, the Postal Service has annual revenue of more than $68 billion and delivers nearly half the world’s mail. If it were a private sector company, the U.S. Postal Service would rank 28th in the 2009 Fortune 500.