Starting Saturday (Aug. 27), several rural mail carriers will relocate to other larger, nearby post offices, affecting how timely some News-Gazette rural subscribers receive their papers.

Starting today postal carriers who were based out of several area small towns, including Allerton, Bismarck, Catlin, Oakwood, Philo, Thomasboro and Westville, will relocate to centralized post offices. For example, Philo carriers will be based out of the Urbana post office and Thomasboro carriers will work out of Rantoul.

Rural postmasters contacted about the change referred questions to the regional spokeswoman.

"Periodically the postal service reviews operations at all our facilities — routes, plants, offices. We are, in the Oakwood area and other places, moving the carriers into larger facilities to allow greater flexibility of our workforce," said Valerie Welsch, a U.S. Postal Service spokeswoman in St. Louis.

The post offices affected by the change "are not closing. They're still open for retail so customers can still go mail a package, buy stamps and do the normal activities they're doing," including accessing their post office boxes.

"The only real change customers might see is a change in delivery time," Welsch said.

Some News-Gazette subscribers who receive the paper by mail and who had the option of picking up their Sunday paper at post offices may receive their Sunday paper on Monday in the mail.

"Unfortunately this is beyond our control. For our Sunday people it will be a downgrade in service to them," said Pete Jones, the News-Gazette's director of circulation.

News-Gazette customer service staff on Friday called the paper's subscribers who would likely be affected and notified them of the change in service.

A small number of subscribers are affected and how they will be affected will vary, Jones said.

In the case of Catlin, for example, "rural subscribers have had the option of going to pick up their Sunday morning paper if they wanted to (at the Catlin post office). If they didn't (pick them up) they'd put the papers in the mail and on Monday they'd receive them."

Since the postal carrier will not be operating out of the Catlin post office, the newspapers will be delivered to the Danville office and papers will be mailed from there instead.

"Our only option is instead of taking papers to the Catlin office, now we take them to the Danville office," Jones said.

In another scenario, News-Gazette rural subscribers in Allerton who used to pick up their Sunday paper in Allerton will be able to pick up their Sunday paper at the Broadlands post office if they choose to do so, he said, as carriers shift operations to Broadlands.

Several years ago, The News-Gazette delivered some of its newspapers for residents of rural towns to the Champaign post office, where staff directed them to the different trucks leaving for deliveries to those towns.

But because of some delays, the company requested "exceptional dispatch" which allowed the News-Gazette to drop off papers directly at rural post offices such as Philo, Thomasboro, Catlin and elsewhere.