DES MOINES -
The U.S. Postal Service says its decision to halt the closing of more than 3,700 post offices includes roughly 600 urban and suburban postal branch offices and satellite stations.
The facilities in many cities serve as neighborhood post offices. The Postal Service announced last year that it was looking at closing up to 252 mail-processing centers and 3,700 post offices, many of them in rural areas, as part of a plan to save some $6.5 billion a year.
It backed off the plan to close the 3,700 post offices last week, saying it would no longer close thousands of rural post offices but would keep them open with shorter hours. The mail agency reiterated that about 600 branches and satellite stations in urban and suburban locations that had been included in the original study for closure also will be kept open, rather than shut down sometime after Tuesday.
The Postal Service has said it will also put forward a new plan for the mail processing centers later this week.
It has been struggling as people switch to email and other electronic forms of communication.
The Senate offered an $11 billion cash infusion last month, but Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said that amount fell far short of what is needed to save the Postal Service in the long term. The House has yet to take action on its own bill.
Pressure has been building on the Postal Service to extend a self-imposed moratorium on the closure of post offices and mail processing facilities.
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