The U.S. Postal Service has narrowed its list of postal facilities in Honolulu that will be considered for consolidation or closure to two small offices at Pearl Harbor.

The USPS short list did not include eight branches that were on its preliminary list released on July 30. Those stations were the larger and popular offices in 'Aina Haina, Wai'alae-Kahala, Kapalama, Kaimuki, Makiki and Mo'ili'ili, as well as smaller stations at Fort Shafter and Tripler Army Medical Center.

Duke Gonzales, Postal Service spokesman in Hawai'i, said officials here evaluated a wide range of criteria before coming up with the final list. One of them, he said, was the number of customers that used each of the 10 stations.

"These are two very small facilities," Gonzales said of the Pearl Harbor and Makalapa money order offices. "One of the leading criteria that we looked at was the volume of customers that were served by the offices. For the smaller offices in particular, that was one of the things that stood out the most."

The Makalapa office, he said, is a "small, small, small facility" that employs one person and is open four hours a day, five days a week. The other operates eight hours a day, but has just one full-time employee, Gonzales said.

No decision has yet been made on whether to consolidate, close or keep open the two offices. Gonzales said postal and military officials will continue to meet to see what options are available, and they hope to come to an agreement by the end of the month.

"We're not planning to abandon the customers in the Pearl Harbor area at all," he said. "What we're looking for is to work with military officials to identify a way to continue to provide service to those customers, but just in a different way that is currently being provided where you have one down the hill from the other one and neither one's numbers are particularly strong."

Gonzales would not say how much will be saved by closing or consolidating the two offices.

The proposal to reduce the number of postal facilities is one of many ways the USPS is looking to cut costs in the face of mounting losses. Each of the nation's 74 Postal Service districts has been told to review stations and branches for possible closure or consolidation.

Gonzales said postal officials already have realigned carrier routes, reduced energy use, shifted employee workloads and removed underused mail collection boxes in an effort to save money.

When the USPS released its preliminary list last month, postal customers had mixed reactions to the possibility that their community post office could be closed. Some said it would be an inconvenience to travel to another branch, while others said they understood that the USPS, which does not receive taxpayers' money, has to cut costs to survive.

Hawai'i Kai resident Andy Mertz has a post office box at the Wai'alae-Kahala post office. He said yesterday that he could live with shutting down his branch.

"I'm OK with the Kahala post office staying open as long as the Postal Service is really trimming their expenses and improving their business model so they don't lose billions of dollars each year," said Mertz, owner of Andy's Pool Service Corp. "I would prefer closing stations to raising postal services."