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The Tribune-Star
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“A real step backward for downtown.”
That was the assessment of the announced fate of Terre Haute’s U.S. Postal Service facility at Seventh and Cherry streets by Andrew Conner of Downtown Terre Haute Inc. We could not agree more.
The four-year deal struck by USPS and Indiana State University — to maintain a shell of a post office in the heart of the city — may please those two institutions, but it is sorry news for the people who have been working for years to revitalize the downtown district. Those people include merchants, bankers, developers, residents, hoteliers, restaurateurs, city promoters and elected officials. They understand that a vital, valid downtown neighborhood requires more than a wall of locked, individual P.O. boxes and a “user friendly” automated kiosk for its many postal needs.
Downtown needs human beings — or at least one human being — who can sell stamps and money orders to folks who are not fluent in touch-screen transactions made in public places. (Especially public places where lines of impatient customers form behind a hapless soul trying to make sense of all the flashing, buzzing options.) The district needs a real person to weigh a package or letter and calculate the cost of sending it to Cambridge, Mass., or Cambridge, England. It needs a genuine postal station, not a mute stamp-vending machine and its computerized, self-service sidekick.
We know budget-tight ISU chose not to spend precious funds for clerks to staff a postal station in a corner of an old federal building that soon will house the university’s business college. That’s fine, but what about the dozens of other possible venues downtown in which a neighborhood-serving contract postal unit might be established? Did anybody from USPS even look for alternatives?
The process can’t be all that difficult. For many years now, the contract postal unit in 12 Points has been living proof that the job can be done quite nicely by an octogenarian in the back of his variety store. Surely, Downtown Terre Haute deserves the same — or at least something more animated than a touch-screen and a cash-only stamp dispenser.
