Pittsburgh to lose 220 Mellon jobs

Downtown Pittsburgh will lose another 220 jobs Oct. 31 when Mellon Financial Corp. stops processing passports at its client service center for the federal government, the company said Tuesday.

The jobs loss follows Mellon's decision about a month ago to move 240 Downtown jobs to South Buffalo Township, Armstrong County, in 2007. That's where Mellon intends to build a data processing center because regulators had told banks to set up such redundant sites in case of catastrophes.

Yesterday, Mellon said it lost a contract to process U.S. passport applications and renewals nationally for the Treasury Department's Financial Management Service in May when Mellon was outbid by Citibank. The New York-based institution will process the documents from two sites, versus Mellon's one, said a Treasury spokeswoman.

"The decision was based on pricing only," said Mellon spokesman Ron Gruendl. "We were told a new provider would process passports in the fall and that we'd continue providing service during a transition period."

Mellon will shut down the processing operation on Oct. 31 at the giant Mellon Client Service Center on Ross Street, which it opened in early 2001. The banking corporation currently employs about 6,300 people in Western Pennsylvania, mostly in Allegheny County.

Losing their jobs will be 115 data-entry operators, 59 module processors and 46 related workers, the firm said.