The U.S. Postal Service announced yesterday that it will keep mail processing facilities in Waterloo and Cedar Rapids open, saving hundreds of jobs.

The two Iowa facilities potentially on the chopping block beat the odds, judging from this background piece posted on the U.S. Postal Service website:

On Sep. 15, 2011, the Postal Service announced it would study 252 processing facilities for possible closure. At that time, the Postal Service announced that it was considering changing service standards and an advance notice of proposed rulemaking was filed with the Federal Register.

Eight facility studies had already been initiated prior to the Sep. 15 announcement, and four additional studies were undertaken sometime after that, so the total number of facilities studied was actually 264.

Of the 264 processing facilities studied, 6 are on hold for further internal study, 35 will remain open for now and 223 will be consolidated – all or in part.

I wasn’t optimistic about prospects for keeping the Waterloo and Cedar Rapids processing facilities open. Sioux City lost its mail processing facility last October, despite strong opposition from Representative Steve King and U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley and Tom Harkin.

Speaking to the Des Moines Register,

[Postal workers union local president Dan] Skemp said he thought the decision was influenced by statistics showing that the Cedar Rapids facility was one of the agency’s most efficient plants. He said another factor was most likely an analysis showing that the Milan [Illinois] plant would have needed a multimillion-dollar expansion to accommodate the extra work.

Skemp told SourceMedia Group reporter Steve Gravelle that the Cedar Rapids facility has “one of the best locations with access to Interstate 380, the airport and a short distance to Interstate 80.  In the end I don’t think it was worth the expense to ship all that mail and work to Milan.”

Three postal workers in Carroll will lose their jobs when mail processing in that city and in Creston move to Des Moines.

Both Waterloo and Cedar Rapids are located in Iowa’s new first Congressional district, where Representative Bruce Braley has been a vocal critic of plans to close post offices. In a statement yesterday, Braley said, “I’m glad to see that the U.S. Postal Service has finally gotten the message that now is the wrong time to lay off hundreds of workers. We still have a lot of work to do to save more post offices around the state, but this is good news today for Iowa workers.”