GLENDALE, AZ – The U.S. Postal Service today announced that the Glendale Remote Encoding Center (REC) will be closed as part of the next phase of a nationwide consolidation plan. The facility located at 5260 W. Phelps Rd. will close in May 2010. The USPS also announced RECs in Ft. Wayne, IN, and Charleston, WV, will be closing in late 2009.
“The Remote Encoding Centers were designed as a temporary solution to automate and expedite the processing of handwritten and poorly printed addresses,” said Charles Van Dyke, USPS Glendale REC Manager. “The plan from the start was to phase out the REC operation as technology enhancements enable us to automate more mail.”
When the Glendale REC and 54 others were established, postal computerized sorting equipment could only read 2 percent of addresses on handwritten envelopes. Since that time, with new technology improvements, postal computers are currently able to read and process 95 percent of the mail electronically.
Van Dyke said the decision about which facilities to close was based on a variety of business factors, including operating costs, facility costs, lease expiration dates and the ability of other RECs to absorb the workload. Since the consolidation process began in 1999, 50 sites have been closed. The closing of the three centers will reduce the number of RECs to two, located in Salt Lake City, UT, and Wichita, KS.
The Postal Service is providing REC employees with a minimum six months’ notice of the closings – Glendale REC employees are receiving 13 months notice. The Glendale REC’s 227 career postal employees will be reassigned to available positions in accordance with employee union collective bargaining agreements. The facility’s 500 part-time temporary employees will receive outplacement counseling to help them find new employment.
The remote encoding process involves transmitting electronic images of handwritten mail from mail processing plants to RECs where operators view them on computer screens and key in address information. This information is transmitted back to the postal processing plant where a barcode corresponding to the address is printed on the envelope so that it can be processed on automated equipment. With ever-increasing improvements in optical character recognition technology, the volume of images sent to RECs has diminished significantly and the Postal Service has gradually consolidated them. As technology evolves, the Postal Service will continue to look for opportunities to reduce operating costs. This could lead to the remaining centers being phased out at some point in the future.
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An independent federal agency, the U.S. Postal Service is the only delivery service that reaches every address in the nation, 149 million residences, businesses and Post Office Boxes, six days a week. It has 34,000 retail locations and relies on the sale of postage, products and services, not tax dollars, to pay for operating expenses. Named the Most Trusted Government Agency five consecutive years by the Ponemon Institute, the Postal Service has annual revenue of $75 billion and delivers nearly half the world’s mail.
