Dear Bloomington Post Office,

The Bloomington post office is closing its downtown location in 2009. The First United Methodist Church is not renewing the U.S. Postal Service’s lease on the Fourth Street location, ending a 60-year stay. \nAs often occurs when a downtown institution closes its doors, a fair amount of residents have resisted the change. They want the U.S. Postal Service to stay downtown for easy accessibility. Bloomington Councilman Chris Sturbaum cited increased travel time and gasoline consumption as reasons the downtown location should be kept. That seems fair, but with downtown real estate getting pricier and the post office building taking up a 5-acre lot, it seems unlikely that the U.S. Postal Service can find a similarly central location to suit its fickle tastes.\nIn the long run, though, is this so bad? What do Bloomington’s residents lose if the post office leaves the downtown? Sturbaum said that a post office “is one of the civic buildings that holds the downtown together.” See, here’s where the argument goes off the rails for a little bit. We don’t have many fond memories of the post office. In fact, most of our time with it is spent waiting in line while reading “US Weekly.” \nTrue, the post office is a federal institution that people use often, but it has never seemed particularly central to downtown. As Bloomington spreads farther out, we need a central post office less, especially one that only serves as a redirecting post for mail going to and from Indianapolis. Though it does seem wasteful to leave the old post office location as a parking lot for the First United Methodist Church, we don’t believe that the loss of the downtown post office will harm Bloomington’s sense of community.\nIt’s nice to see the Bloomington community caring about its public buildings, but in this case, the concern is misplaced. Aren’t there larger concerns in the community worth addressing than the location of a facility whose main purpose seems to be organizing its queues as inefficiently as possible?\nAt this point, with first-class mail volume going down and the U.S. Postal Service in need of a way to save money, maybe it’s OK that we just let it go. The age of snail mail, though far from dead, is clearly on its way out, and we can’t expect the federal government to continue to sink money into facilities that will be used less over time, as long as there are other problems on the horizon. \nMake no mistake: we love the convenience of going down Fourth Street to the post office’s welcoming arms for everything from passport applications to package delivery, but in the grand scheme of things, we’re not going to fret about going an extra mile to do it.