Students worried about having to walk to Medford Square to mail their boxes and letters can breathe a sigh of relief: Tufts' United States Postal Service (USPS) branch, which was under review for possible closure, will stay open for the time being, USPS announced last week.
The decision to keep the post office open came after discussions between the postal service and Tufts officials, according to USPS Greater Boston Discontinuance Coordinator Dennis Tarmey.
A local division of the American Postal Workers Union also sent USPS a petition with 163 signers — many of them Tufts students — who opposed closing the post office, according to Bob Dempsey, a union official.
The postal service had considered closing the Tufts branch as part of cost-cutting measures that would shutter hundreds of locations across the country. Tufts' post office is housed in Curtis Hall near Brown and Brew.
The Tufts location and nine other Boston-area post offices had been placed on a list of offices that USPS is currently reviewing and considering closing to decrease expenditures. Six of the nine have been removed from the list and will remain open, according to Dempsey, who is the vice president and treasurer of the Boston Metro Area Local 100 division of the American Postal Workers Union.
"The Postal Service looks forward to continuing to work as partners with the administration at Tufts University so that the campus Post Office will remain a useful resource for the students, faculty, staff and citizens in the neighborhoods surrounding Tufts University," Tarmey, who serves as the postmaster in North Reading, Mass., told the Daily in an e-mail. He did not respond to numerous e-mails over the past week requesting additional comments.
Tufts Mail Services employees met last month with USPS officials and suggested that the postal service should better market the branch and make changes that would appeal to students, according to Sheila Chisholm, Tufts' support services manager and one of the employees involved in the discussions.
Chisholm said she and Ron Drauschke, the supervisor of Mail Services, met with officials from USPS evaluating the branch last month.
"USPS was interested in new ideas, and what we ended up going away with was that we had to try and give them information on why it should stay open," Chisholm said.
When Chisholm met with the representatives from USPS a second time, she had come up with ideas to improve the branch's revenue in order to convince officials to keep the location open.
"We feel [that] with more marketing they could increase the current business that they already have," Chisholm said.
Holding more passport days, — when customers can come to the post office to apply for new passports or renew current ones — would draw additional people in, as would increasing signage around the store itself, Chisholm said.
"Right now you could walk by and almost not notice that it was there," she said.
She also emphasized that Curtis Hall is an ideal location for the branch, because it is very close to a planned stop on the MBTA T subway system's Green Line extension.
Meanwhile, three Boston-area branches remain on the USPS' list under review; those post offices are located at Logan Airport, Faneuil Hall and Boston University.
Dempsey, of the American Postal Workers Union, said that student support as well as university officials' lobbying probably contributed the most to keeping the branch open.
"We're obviously thrilled for the customers and the students of Tufts," he said. "We just don't want to see the service … deteriorate to the point of pushing the public down to Medford Square," the location of another post office, he added.
Dempsey warned, however, that this decision does not mean that the Tuft's branch will remain open forever.
"We were already cautioned that every office is going to be reviewed next year," he said. "And will we make the list next year? We just don't know."
Chisholm said that if USPS takes Tufts' suggestions for increasing revenue seriously and continues to work closely with the university, it will be able to keep the branch open.
