The U.S. Postal Service is fast-tracking its plan to close its mail processing centers in Pendleton and Bend and consolidating the operation in Portland.

By the end of 2013 the post office will start sorting all letters for zip codes beginning in 978 including the area from Umatilla to Baker City in Portland. The Pendleton post office will remain open and still process packages for those addresses, but letters sent from one Pendleton address to another could take a day longer to deliver.

We have more equipment, more space than we need to handle the declining volume of mail, said USPS spokesman Peter Hass. It does have to do with us having a very dire financial situation because of the 25 percent decline in mail volume over five years.

USPS has not announced when it will move letter sorting to Portland, but Pendleton interim postmaster Kerry Schwartz said she expects it will happen before June.

The postal service does not plan to let go or reassign any of its 32 workers in Pendleton, Hass said. But employees at more than 50 other processing facilities scheduled for consolidation across the country may be reassigned.

USPS?initially planned to consolidate the processing centers in 2014, but on Tuesday announced it would make the move to cut costs earlier. It plans to save money over time by not hiring replacements for employees in Pendleton who retire or quit. Consolidating its processing centers is just another step in the postal services plan to save money by accomplishing more work with fewer employees, Hass said.

USPS also plans to cut Saturday mail delivery in August to save an estimated $2 billion a year. USPS will still deliver packages on Saturday, but other mail will only be delivered six days a week to post office boxes.

The postal service also will remove many of its blue mailboxes from Umatilla County. All public mailboxes in Hermiston except the ones outside the post office, and several in Pendleton including those at Safeway, City Hall and Walmart will be removed in April.