The downtown post office is set to move from its current location at 801 I St. to Westfield Downtown Plaza by mid-May, postal officials said Friday. In the new location, customers will have access to the lobby from 5 a.m. - 9 p.m. seven days per week. There will be no security checkpoint, and those with post office boxes will have access to them every day, said Augustine Ruiz, spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service’s Sacramento district. “It’s going to be 4,000 square feet, and we’re going to be leasing the location,” he said. “One of the added conveniences is better parking.” Postal officials previously told The Sacramento Press that there is no need to expand the post office, but they

On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, when most folks are sitting down to enjoy dinner with family and friends, public safety officers, doctors and nurses and others in service industries still have to work. It’s not always easy – crime and accidents don’t take a break on holidays. The Sacramento Press asked some of them to share their holiday work experiences. These are their stories. FIRE DEPARTMENT: “(Christmas) is a pretty loaded day,” Doug Bruce, an engineer with Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District, said Friday. “There is a lot of last-minute things going on, so there is a lot of traffic out. We keep busy.” Bruce said calls to the fire station can be strange no matter what the day,

Citing customer convenience, United States Post Service officials proposed relocating the Metro Station post office from 801 I St., where it has stood since 1933. On Dec. 22, the Postal Service issued a letter to Mayor Kevin Johnson.  The letter states the current facility is "inadequate to serve Sacramento's future postal needs" and requests "4000 square feet of net interior space." Postal Service spokesman Ralph Petty said the post office does not need to expand. Its current location has "about 7,500 square feet or so" of space. "There is no need to expand. There is no reason to expand," he said. The reason for relocating is to better serve its customers. Petty said that since the

Sergeant Norm Leong, spokesman for the Sacramento Police Department, announced at 3:05 p.m. that the package found outside the Fort Sutter post office at 1618 Alhambra Blvd. was not an explosive. Sacramento Post Office spokesman Ralph Petty described the item as a glass bottle that had been wrapped up with a wire protruding from it. Shortly after 1 p.m., when a customer found the package, the Sacramento Fire Department and the Sacramento Police Department were contacted by the post office and traffic was blocked off by squad cars. The block of Alhambra Boulevard between P and Q Streets, half of one lane of P Street between 30th and Alhambra, as well as Q Street between Alhambra and 30th

 I am from Mississippi and have been living in Sacramento for a year attending school. My father arranged to have the absentee ballot sent to me here. Disappointingly, the ballot was the only straight-forward document of the bunch. The instructions were convoluted to say the least. The envelope required to mail the ballot was even more confusing. What was clear was that I had to fill out my ballot in front of a witness. The witness could be a notary public, postmaster, asst. postmaster or postal clerk. In the last general election, the directions were very clear cut. It stated that a notary should be the witness and there was room for their seal. In the new and improved procedure, there