Racetrack owner Joe Ricci and other civic leaders in the Portland area are dreadfully unhappy these days because the U.S. Postal Service, after a five-year, 45-site study, chose Lewiston-Auburn as the place for its new distribution and processing center. While these leaders may have an actual complaint about the way the Postal Service presented the announcement, their tortured cries sound like the deep regret of officials who took a deal too casually.

The Postal Service, currently located in Portland, needs more room to operate its distribution center. It wants to move from its current location, a 260,000-square-foot building over several floors and a couple of nearby buildings to a single-story, 400,000-square-foot facility. The new structure would cost approximately $60 million to build, employ more than 800 and serve the southern portion of the state in much the same way as the Hampden center (which moved out of Bangor in 1994) serves this region. Operations are scheduled to begin in 2002.

The criteria for a new site were simple: at least 40 acres, access to the Turnpike or I-295, no wetlands or other environmental concerns. After years of examination, it focused on a Portland site. Along with wetlands and unwelcoming neighbors, however, that location brought out a mayor who proposed buying the land out from under the Postal Service to prevent the development. With that sort of response, the service expanded its search and recently announced its choice was down to two sites, one in Lewiston, the other in Auburn.

Decisions of where to put a facility like this one should be made, of course, strictly on the merits of a site. It is no surprise, however, that the center brings not only good jobs and a long-term economic catalyst, but a mail truck full of politics. So when an elected official in Portland is trying to stop a project (though the City Council ultimately voted 5-4 to encourage it), while in Lewiston, hungry local leaders take out a full-page newspaper ad welcoming the service to town, where do you suppose the facility is going to go?

That does not excuse the Postal Service, of course, from describing to Greater Portland why none of the sites there were acceptable. A full discussion about the process is important, given the number of postal employees who will be asked to commute the 20 or 30 miles north. Even if that isn’t much of a drive for many people in this area, it is more than what the employees there expected.

The simultaneous declarations from Portland that the process was unfair and that they did not understand it, however, is a bit much. Mr. Ricci, owner of Scarborough Downs and a site rejected for the center, has made very serious charges of misconduct on the part of the Postal Service — saying in a lawsuit that the center’s manager defamed him. The Portland Chamber has asked members to lobby the Postal Service into changing its decision. Local newspaper commentary has suggested the local member of Congress, former Portland Mayor Tom Allen, step in and try to reverse the process.

Taken together, they make Portland’s leaders seem shocked by the idea that any other part of Maine could be more desirable for business than their own, a parochialism that hardly serves the entire state well. Greater Portland has carried far more than its share of the state economically for years, a condition no one likes. Instead of acting wounded, why not apologize to local postal workers for not trying harder and congratulate Lewiston-Auburn for having the energy and enthusiasm to attract this major employer?