Adams County Supervisor Lynwood Easterling hopes to save thousands of dollars by centralizing the county mailing system.

Easterling, a retired postmaster, has been meeting with with Pitney Bowes officials who lease postage meter machines to discuss reducing the number of postage meters leased to Adams County.

Once Adams County centralizes its mailing system, Easterling estimates the county will save $8,000 to $10,000 annually initially with that amount expected to increase once Adams County also begins bar-coding its own mail.

Once that takes places &uot;that ($10,000) will double in just the next month or so,&uot; Easterling said.

Easterling has been looking into centralizing the county mailing system since last summer.

The idea is to process all the county’s mail at one central location to reduce the number of postage meters needed from 10 to two.

That also makes the county eligible for cheaper postage rates for pre-sorting the mail, Easterling said.

He said the eventual bar-coding will allow for additional pre-sorting, which will further reduce the cost of each postcard by 4.6 cents. He estimates the county sends out as many as 10,000 pieces of mail monthly.

Currently, individual county offices use their own postage meters or place stamps on their mail, with the tax collectors office, the sanitation department and the circuit clerk’s office sending out the most mail.

Once mailing is centralized, machines will do much of the work, Easterling said.

The work of running the mailroom will be minimal and will not include hiring extra staff, he added.

&uot;Somebody who is in place now will do that,&uot; he said.