When the U.S. Postal Service opened its Remote Encoding Center in East Pittsburgh in 1995, it was considered a high-tech facility.

Now it's being upstaged by more advanced technology, forcing the postal service to shut it down Nov. 14 and send its 443 employees looking for jobs elsewhere. The postal service notified employees and mayors in surrounding communities Wednesday.

"It's going to have a devastating impact on us for a while," said East Pittsburgh Mayor Louis Payne, who anticipates the borough will lose about $20,000 currently earned from the $52 local services tax on employees.

The center also employed about a dozen people from the borough, and most of the employees came from eastern Allegheny County and parts of Westmoreland County.

Postal service spokesman Tad Kelley said remote encoding centers were created in the mid-1990s when mail processing technology had trouble sorting mail bearing illegible or incomplete addresses. Only about 2 percent of handwritten addresses could be read by machine.

An image of the unreadable mail was sent to the center electronically, where a clerk would decipher the handwriting or correct the address and send the information back to the sorting center.

But optical character reading technology has drastically improved so that 98 percent of handwritten addresses can now be read by machine, rendering many of the encoding centers unnecessary. The East Pittsburgh center is the 48th out of 55 centers to close nationwide.

When the center opened, it was considered a boon for Keystone Commons, where it leased 24,000 square feet, and for the borough, which was declared economically distressed by the state in 1992. Initially, it provided 800 jobs.

Keystone Commons was created out of the old Westinghouse Electric plant, which at one point employed 21,000 people but closed in 1988. Purchased in 1989 by the nonprofit Regional Industrial Development Corp., it was one of the largest brownfield projects in Western Pennsylvania.

Small-scale manufacturing took up most of the space on the site but RIDC was looking to diversify its tenants. Landing the encoding center helped them do that, said Brooks Robinson Jr., vice president of marketing for RIDC.

"It was a big catch ... they were probably among the first nonmanufacturing type tenants," he said. "They helped validate Keystone Commons as a good place for business and industries."

Keystone Commons now leases to 50 tenants -- from an electronics manufacturer to a health care company -- that employ more than 1,700 people.

Mr. Robinson said the center's closure will not jeopardize Keystone Commons, which leases about 1.5 million square feet of space.

But Mr. Payne said the city will take a hit and that the loss of $20,000 in taxes may mean police will have to hold off on buying new equipment.

Though the postal service anticipated technology would improve and told the borough it would be a temporary operation in 1995, Mr. Payne said he thought it would be around much longer and was blindsided by the announcement of the closure.

"We weren't expecting it to be so soon, if at all," he said. "I wish they would have told us the end was coming ... like next year or the next two years so we could prepare a little differently."

Mr. Kelley said the announcement was made as soon as possible. "We think on our end we've done the best we can," he said.

He said 142 career employees represented by the American Postal Workers Union will have the opportunity to bid on openings elsewhere in the postal service. Thirteen managers also will move elsewhere in the postal service. The 288 transitional employees will be offered job counseling.