Plans to streamline the U.S. Postal Service are drawing the ire of lawmakers from both parties.
This month, members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and House Committee on Oversight and Accountability questioned and rebuked Postmaster General Louis DeJoy over his 10-year reform plan.
“Delivering for America” is intended to cut costs and increase efficiency, as the postal service strives to break even amid a $9.5 billion dollar loss last year due in part to mail volume declines and inflation.
However, several lawmakers, including Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), voiced concerns about how the changes are affecting rural areas in their districts.
Rici Roberts shares those concerns. She’s a mail handler and union president at the plant in Cheyenne, Wyo. Operations there are set to be downgraded, as most mail processing shifts 100 miles south to Denver.
“They're going to rip out all of the machines that we currently use for processing mail here,” said Roberts, who has worked for the Postal Service for about a decade alongside several family members.
She worries jobs will be lost and local mail delivery delayed as it travels to the city and back.
“Here, our geography is so different than the East Coast, and we have such wide distances – we have weather; we have terrain,” Robert said.
Some other changes planned or already underway as part of the USPS reform plan include lowering the mail delivery speed standards, slowing the collection of mail at more remote post offices and cutting the number of truck trips.
James Boxrud, a spokesperson for USPS in Denver said no “career employees” will lose their jobs as part of the shifts. Temporary and non-fully-benefited jobs, however, could go.The agency has said other employees could be offered transfers.
Additionally, Boxrud said, even though mail leaving from and returning to Cheyenne would have to go through Denver first, it would still be held to a two-day delivery standard. The major change is that outgoing mail wouldn’t be processed first in Cheyenne.
“With this change, we’re simply taking out that expensive and inefficient first handling,” Boxrud said.
A review conducted by the Postal Service last year found downgrading the Cheyenne plant could save $2.5 million to $3.3 million in year one.
The agency agreed to pause all consolidations until January to avoid problems during the election and holiday season, but they could resume early next year. That could mean more locations in the Mountain West are likely to shift the bulk of operations to larger hubs, known as Regional Processing and Distribution Centers, in Boise, Billings, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Denver.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
