April 2, 2009

CHARLESTON, WV - The U.S. Postal Service today announced that the Charleston Remote
Encoding Center (REC) will be closed as part the next phase of a nationwide consolidation plan. The
facility, located at 1002 Lee Street E, Charleston, WV will close in October, 2009. In addition, the
centers located in (Ft. Wayne, IN and Glendale, AZ) will be closing also.

“The Remote Encoding Centers were designed as a temporary solution to automate and expedite
the processing of handwritten and poorly printed addresses,” said Michael Thompson, Manager Remote
Encoding Center for the U.S. Postal Service. “The plan from the start was to phase out the REC
operation as technology enhancements enabled us to automate more mail.”

When the Charleston REC and 54 others were established, postal computerized sorting equipment
could only read two percent of addresses on handwritten envelopes. Since that time, with new
technology improvements, postal computers are currently able to read and process 95 percent of the
mail electronically.

Thompson said the decision about which facilities to close was based on a variety of business
factors, including operating costs, facility costs, lease expiration dates and the ability of other RECs to
absorb the workload. Since the consolidation process began in 1999, 50 sites have been closed. The
closing of the three centers will reduce the number of RECs to two, located in Salt Lake City, UT, and
Wichita, KS.

The Postal Service is providing the REC employees with a minimum six months’ notice of the
closings. The 82 career postal employees at the Charleston REC will be reassigned to available
positions in accordance with employee union collective bargaining agreements. The 252 part-time
temporary employees will receive outplacement counseling to help them find new employment.

The remote encoding process involves transmitting electronic images of handwritten mail from mail
processing plants to RECs where operators view them on computer screens and key in address
information. This information is transmitted back to the postal processing plant where a barcode
corresponding to the address is printed on the envelope so that it can be processed on automated
equipment. With ever-increasing improvements in optical character recognition technology, the volume
of images sent to RECs has diminished significantly and the Postal Service has gradually consolidated
them. As technology evolves, the Postal Service will continue to look for opportunities to reduce
operating costs. This could lead to the remaining centers being phased out at some point in the future.

Source: USPS