Reshaping the future of the mail

 

The tiny post office in Rupert was one of 14 across Vermont that the U.S. Postal Service tried unsuccessfully to close in 2011. Now some advocates and members of Congress say rural post offices face a new threat from the pending consolidation of regional mail sorting and delivery operations. Tony Israel file photo

 

By MAURY THOMPSON
Contributing writer

 

The 1993 hit song “I Like to Move It” by Reel 2 Real plays in the background of a 15-second ad the U.S. Postal Service is running on national television.

“We’re rethinking our networks with simpler, more efficient routes, so we can deliver more value to our customers,” a Postal Service employee boasts, to which another proclaims, “Fast, reliable, perfectly orchestrated — the U.S. Postal Service.”

The Postal Service is going to great lengths to promote its plan to reinvent itself and put its finances on a more sustainable footing.

But critics, including U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., say the mail is too often moving at a snail’s pace -- and that the reorganization plan could result in closing of rural post offices as the Postal Service consolidates back-office mail handling at regional sorting and delivery centers.
“Many Vermonters that I hear from on a regular basis, they fear that the opening of these sorting and delivery systems is the first step toward closing their post offices,” Balint said as she questioned U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy at a May 17 hearing of the House Oversight Committee.

DeJoy insisted the reorganization plan would improve efficiency and the Postal Service’s financial viability. And he denied it would threaten service in rural areas.

“Our plan for sorting and delivery centers is in fact something that’s going to save service throughout the nation,” he responded. “We have a 50-year-old mail delivery operation that is geared for twice the mail and a tenth of the cubic volume. The rolling out of this network will not result in the reduction of rural operations.”

Steve Hutkins of Rhinebeck, N.Y., administrator of the national advocacy organization Save the Post Office, said Balint’s concern about the future of rural services is realistic, though it might take another six years or so before these services would be threatened.

Hutkins said there might be a grain of truth in DeJoy’s insistence that the opening of sorting and delivery systems will not directly result in the closing of rural post offices. Federal law prohibits closing a rural post office simply because it is losing money.

But once consolidation is completed, Hutkins explained, there will be a lot of unused space at some post office buildings.

The typical post office that now has 15 employees based at it, including route drivers, might wind up with five employees after consolidation is completed, he said.

That could give the Postal Service justification to sell underutilized post office buildings or not renew leases — or to reduce operating hours, he said.

“The excess space will be used as one of the justifications,” explained Hutkins, a retired English professor at the Gallatin School of New York University who took on his current role of Postal Service watchdog amid the agency’s push a decade ago to shutter more than 3,500 rural post offices, including more than a dozen in western New England and eastern New York.
At the May 17 hearing, Balint specifically asked DeJoy if he would guarantee that rural post offices will not be closed.

“I cannot possibly commit to something so broad as that,” DeJoy responded. “I wouldn’t even know-how to understand what you’re asking me to commit to.”

In follow-up, he said the plan for consolidation of sorting and delivery operations does not include closing rural post offices.

“The organization is just genetically committed — it’s all the way up to management and myself — committed to servicing every address that we’re supposed to service,” DeJoy said.

 

Major reorganization taking shape
The Postal Service is two years into DeJoy’s Delivering for America initiative, a 10-year plan to streamline operations and improve the service’s financial performance.

One of the first changes took place in the fall of 2021, when the Postal Service changed its service standards to lengthen delivery times for many first-class mailings. Timeframes for package deliveries also were extended last year.

Now a series of new changes are afoot. Under its evolving distribution reorganization plan, the Postal Service is establishing 60 “regional distribution centers” and at least 400 new sorting and delivery centers.

For post offices that are within a 30-minute drive of a sorting and delivery center, sorting of mail and dispatch of routes will be relocated to the sorting and delivery center, rather than operating out of a local post office.

DeJoy, in a keynote address at the National Postal Fair on May 24, said the system will replace a current system of “randomly plopped” facilities, many of which have limited automation.
“Service the nation with postal products and cover your costs -- that is the law, and that is what we are pursuing,” he said.

Details of the plan are still sketchy, and only a few of the locations have been announced so far.
“It’s mostly just guesstimates about where they might be placed,” Hutkins said.

Hutkins and other skeptics say DeJoy would be wise to avoid any hint of future post office closings for now, because he would not want to stir up criticism from members of Congress at a time when the Postal Service is attempting to sell its plan to the public.

In addition, any proposal to close post offices would trigger a U.S. Postal Service Commission review, which would put the plan in the forefront of the news cycle.

But in year eight of the 10-year plan, the Postal Service has projected that it will focus on eliminating expenses. That’s likely when the Postal Service would broach discussion of closing or scaling back some rural operations, Hutkins suggested.

 

Fewer hands, slower service
The reorganization of mail sorting and delivery systems comes as the Postal Service faces not only financial pressures but also, like most industries in the current economy, a labor shortage.
Vermont’s congressional delegation — Balint plus independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and Democratic Sen. Peter Welch — wrote to DeJoy in February requesting an explanation of how the Postal Service was addressing the labor shortage, which has been contributing to delays in mail deliveries.

“Across our state, Vermonters have reported first-class mail delays that have lasted for multiple weeks,” they wrote.

Some constituents reported not receiving bills in the mail until after the due date, and senior citizens complained of delays in receiving prescription medications by mail, the representatives wrote.

Balint, at the House Oversight Committee meeting, reiterated these concerns and said the problems are not the fault of postal workers.

“We know that postal workers are going above and beyond to make sure that our rural communities are getting their letters and packages, and I am very grateful for their hard work,” she said. “But despite their best efforts, Vermonters are still struggling with service delays in mail and packages.”

DeJoy responded that the Postal Service has taken measures to improve rural delivery.
“We have special measures now in rural areas that are hot spots that deal with just the sound of trouble, so that we can begin working on it,” he said.

The Postal Service contends its overall service quality is improving. A recent U.S. Postal Service interim “progress report” on its 10-year plan states that 91 percent of first-class mail was delivered within the Postal Service standard for on-time delivery in the 2022 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, an improvement of 8.3 percentage points from the previous fiscal year.

On-time delivery of marketing mail improved 5.7 percentage points to 93.3 percent, and on-time delivery of periodicals improved 8.1 percentage points to 83.7 percent, according to the report.
But the delivery time for mail shipped from a sampling of post offices around the region is taking longer than it was a year ago, according to a dashboard at usps.com that allows users to search average delivery time by ZIP code.

For the week of June 3, the most recent for which data was available in mid-June, the average first-class letter mailed from 12801, the ZIP code for Glens Falls, N.Y., took 2.5 days to reach its destination, compared with 2.3 days for the comparable week in 2022.

For 12534, the ZIP code for Hudson, N.Y., the average letter took 2.5 days to reach its destination, compared with 2.3 days a year ago. The same figures applied for 12816, the ZIP code for Cambridge, N.Y.

And for letters mailed from 05701, the ZIP code for Rutland, Vt., delivery took an average of 2.6 days in early June, compared with 2.4 days a year ago.

 

Echoes of 2011-12 cuts
Just over a decade ago, local advocates and the region’s congressional representatives successfully fought back against a U.S. Postal Service push to close more than 3,600 post offices nationwide, including 14 across Vermont and several in the border counties of eastern New York.

In 2011, postal officials said these cutbacks were necessary after two decades in which the advent of email, direct deposit and online bill payments had dramatically reduced the volume of first-class mail. In addition, the deep recession of 2008-09 had cut demand for advertising mail.
But local advocates and elected officials argued that, particularly in rural areas, post offices weren’t just a place to buy stamps and mail packages but also functioned as vital centers of their communities.

“In a small town, the post office is a meeting place,” Hutkins explained. “It’s a place of community identity.”

 

 

The post office in North Hoosick, N.Y., was among those targeted for closure in 2011. It survived, but the U.S. Postal Service cut its retail window service to just two hours per day. Tony Israel file photo

 

Although some post offices were shuttered in 2011, by the next year the Postal Service backed away from its plans, granting a reprieve to local post offices — including Rupert and Florence, Vt., and Old Chatham and North Hoosick, N.Y. — that had been targeted for closure.
Instead, however, the agency set a goal of slashing $500 million a year in costs by cutting retail service hours at 13,000 post offices nationally – including at more than 50 at rural locations around the region, from Ashley Falls, Mass., to Cleverdale, N.Y., and from Hollowville, N.Y., to Chittenden, Vt.

Though they may be important to their communities, rural post offices typically operate with deeper financial losses than their urban counterparts.

A recent report by the inspector general’s office of the U.S. Postal Service found that rural post offices handle 16 percent of the national mail volume but account for make up 57 percent of the nation’s post offices.

The report found that 63 percent of rural post offices do not cover their expenses but that rural customers generally view the Postal Service more favorably than urban customers do.
“We found that rural post customers value and have a greater interest in using the mail compared to urban customers,” the report concluded.

Last year, the Postal Service’s fiscal picture improved when President Biden signed legislation that relieved the service of a requirement to prepay its employees’ retirement benefits for 75 years.

Congress had put the prepayment requirement in place in 2006, at a time when there was concern about a number of private companies that had been unable to meet their pension obligations. No other company was subject to the prepayment requirement.

The Postal Service has estimated that removing the retirement pre-funding requirement will reduce its expenses by $48 billion over 10 years.

“That was long overdue,” Hutkins said.
The Postal Service says the change in the pension funding requirement, when combined with other cost-cutting measures, means that within two years it has achieved $70 billion toward a 10-year goal of reducing losses by $160 billion to reach the break-even point in its operating costs.
The legislation Biden signed last year also required the Postal Service to continue mail delivery six days per week and authorized it to contract with local governments to offer non-postal services such as the sale of bus passes or hunting and fishing licenses. A pilot program for post offices providing other government services is already under way in California, Hutkins said.

 

 

Local representatives speak out
When contacted for this report, several other area members of Congress offered written statements expressing their support for rural post offices and in some cases echoing Balint’s concerns about how these facilities might be affected by the Postal Service’s ongoing consolidation program.

Rep. Paul Tonko, D-Amsterdam, said in a statement that the Postal Service Reform Act that Biden signed last year “helps ensure America’s Postal Service remains viable” but said it “does not fix every problem.”

“I’m continuing to advocate directly with USPS officials to improve service here in the Capital Region, including by demanding answers from the postmaster general on reports of delayed mail delivery and capacity limitations imposed upon USPS facilities in our region as a result of agency-wide directives,” Tonko said.

Rep. Marcus Molinaro, R-Red Hook, said in a statement that last year’s postal legislation was “a step in the right direction” but said he remains concerned about the fate of rural post offices and delivery services.

“While the Postal Service’s plan to consolidate sorting and delivery service is still not totally clear, I’m concerned that this will lead to the closure of hundreds of post offices — disproportionally impacting rural communities and the people most reliant on these services,” Molinaro said.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-Schuylerville, said in a statement that she aims to “continue to work to deliver improved postal service and post office hours throughout the district -- especially in our rural communities who have faced inadequate coverage.

“My office has solved numerous constituent casework ranging from helping to ensure seniors get their medicines delivered, to opening post offices in underserved areas, to helping address staffing shortages,” Stefanik said.

In May, Stefanik co-sponsored a bill introduced by Rep. Randy Weber, R-Texas, to require the Office of Comptroller General to investigate the theft of letters and packages in the Postal Service district system and report its findings to Congress. The legislation, HR 3456, had seven co-sponsors, all Republicans, as of June 23.

In December, lawyers for Stefanik’s campaign asked the Postal Service to investigate nearly $20,000 in checks to Stefanik’s campaign that went missing in the mail. Envelopes of checks mailed from Stefanik’s campaign office in Glens Falls to her campaign treasurer in Washington were received ripped open and damaged, with the checks missing. Stefanik’s office did not respond to a recent request for an update on the situation.