ZIP codes won't change

The United States Postal Service announced it will not move its processing operations for the Thousand Oaks Post Office from Santa Clarita to Oxnard.

The operational change would have required new ZIP codes to be issued to addresses in Thousand Oaks, Newbury Park and portions of Westlake Village.

Some residents, businesses and politicians objected to the move.

A request to relocate the postal operations was made last summer with the justification that the change would reduce transportation costs and allow for more efficieny in mail delivery. The Thousand Oaks Post Office is 34 miles closer to the Oxnard mail processing facility than the Santa Clarita facility.

All ZIP codes beginning with 913 are processed in Santa Clarita.

But an analysis of the proposal determined that the cost savings wasn't going to be as great as originally planned. Also, mail volume has dropped since last summer, which has given the processing and transportation windows at the Santa Clarita facility more flexibility.

U.S. Postal Service management also wants to further study how the relocation of processing operations could affect certain service standards, such as the number of delivery days from one point in the nation to another.

The nation's ZIP code system was established by the Postal Service in 1963 to provide an efficient postal distribution network and moves more than 703 million pieces of mail every day.