MONROE - Consolidation does not mean closure, according to Sean Hargadon, a spokesperson for the United States Postal Service.

The U.S. Postal Service announced Monday its plans to continue consolidating mail processing facilities, which began in 2012 as a way to cut costs. The postal service consolidated 141 processing facilities in 2012 and 2013. The announcement is USPS's six-month advance notice of consolidations.

Madison has one of the four Wisconsin mail processing and distribution centers on the consolidation list scheduled to take effect in 2015. Its service area includes Green County. Processing and Distribution Centers, or P&DCs, process and dispatch mail from post offices and collection boxes within a region.

Information released Monday by the USPS shows Madison's Processing and Distribution Center identified as a "Consolidation Facility" and the corresponding "Gaining Facility" is in Milwaukee.

Processing and distribution centers in Iron Mountain, Mich., and Wausau will consolidate with the center in Green Bay, while Eau Claire and La Crosse centers will consolidate with St. Paul.

Hargadon said USPS will not confirm which of the 82 sorting and distribution facilities nationwide will be closed. More detailed information about the future status of the plants will be released in the coming weeks, he added.

With the coming reorganizations, the time for first-class mail to reach its destination will increase slightly from an overall average of 2.14 days to an overall average of 2.25 days, according to the USPS.

Hargadon said there will be no impact to the delivery process for customers in Green County.

Rob McCarthy of McCarthy Media Group, a direct marketing company in Monroe and Sun Prairie, said the extra time difference will probably not be noticeable to most mail users.

"But will we still get next-day delivery?" he wondered.

Currently, the post office can deliver first-class mail from Sun Prairie to Monroe or from Madison to Monroe in one day, McCarthy said. Any future additional time for delivery may have a bearing on when businesses mail out their bills, he added.

The City of Monroe probably would not have to adjust mailing dates of the water bills, according Director of Public Works Colin Simpson.

"Bills have to go out by a certain time of the quarter," a date set by the Public Service Commission, he said. "Ultimately the due dates (for payments) would be the same."

USPS estimates about 20 percent of first-class mail volume is expected to be delivered overnight, more than 35 percent is expected to be delivered in two days and about 44 percent delivered in three days, after phase two is completed.

The second phase of consolidations is projected to save USPS over $3.5 billion in the next five years or $750 million per year in savings. USPS said it recorded financial losses of $26 billion during the past three years.

The new changes were originally set to go into effect in February 2014, but were postponed. This continuation of network rationalization activity was approved by the Postal Service Board of Governors in 2011.

After decades of expanding its national network and infrastructure - vehicles, facilities, equipment and employees - to accommodate a growing nation and its volume of mail, the USPS found need to "rationalize" its network and seek efficiencies, given the significant reduction in the amount of first-class mail that now enters the postal system.

Among the criteria for making consolidation decisions are the processing facilities, built in strategic geographic locations to assist with the logistics of processing and delivering more mail. Some facilities were built over a half-century ago or more, based upon the population and mail usage of that geographic location at the time. Because mail volume has decreased so dramatically, the Postal Service contends it is imperative that it re-evaluate each facility to ensure it still provides a cost-effective solution.