When your local postal manager tells you not to send a letter by certified mail because it will likely get lost in their system, you know the mail delivery in our area just plain stinks.
And plans under consideration by the US Postal Service seem guaranteed to make it even worse.
An earlier proposal Delivering for America would have eliminated the USPS processing facilities in Wyoming and moved them to Montana and Colorado. Strong protest to that proposal has put it on hold until January…but it’s not dead.
Now the postal service has a new plan that will lengthen “on-time” delivery to five days…for some areas. But this plan would add another day for delivery to rural areas farther than 50 miles from the nearest large processing facility. That means mail delivery in most if not all of Wyoming would be “on-time” if it’s delivered in six days.
Just the fact that this plan has surfaced seems evidence enough that the USPS knows it can’t get the job done.
Some news reports indicate that the post office may no longer scan a letter/package at the window when received --- triggering the number of days for “on-time” delivery. Instead that first scan may not happen until processing begins. This, one postal official says, “is to skirt around the official time, and make it seem like it was within the standards, even though it was not.”
More than once my community has gone head-to-head with postal officials over poor performance. In one case nearly half the residents of Encampment showed up at a meeting with regional USPS officials to let them know our service was not adequate. We succeeded in having our postmaster reassigned. Last I heard that worker had been moved a couple more times when other communities also objected to his inefficiencies. The USPS, like much of the federal bureaucracy, does not fire ineffective workers…they are simply promoted or moved elsewhere.
Earlier this year when the “Delivering for America” plan came up many people including the Wyoming Congressional Delegation, the governor, and a lot of regular folks protested. That may have helped at least delay the change.
Now, the USPS is giving the people who will be affected by this new proposal that will lengthen delivery times one – yes, just one – chance to comment.
They are holding a Zoom meeting on Thursday, Sept. 5 at 11 a.m. to provide information and take comment. You must register to attend this meeting and I urge every person reading this to do just that. Register for the meeting here: Zoom meeting online.
Let’s pack that Zoom meeting because the USPS needs to understand just how much we who live in the rural West rely on postal delivery.
We get medications through the post office. We receive and pay bills through postal delivery. We get absentee ballots and must return them using the post service. Nonprofit organizations often have reason to hold elections and they must send and receive ballots by using the USPS, too.
Our small businesses are at the mercy of the post office for everything from billing and collections to in many cases mailing their products to customers.
Imagine this: The Post Office is proposing that “On-time” delivery of a letter will be six days in our rural areas. In 1861, the Pony Express carried President Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address from St. Joseph, Missouri to San Francisco is just seven days, seventeen hours. The Pony Express also delivered news in eight days, fourteen hours that South Carolina troops had fired upon Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor setting off the Civil War.
If young men riding horses could deliver the news that quickly, you wouldn’t think it would take trucks and automated services nearly that long to get a letter from Encampment to Cody.
Please understand, these postal issues are NOT created and promoted by the people who run our local post offices – though no doubt those folks are the ones who hear most of the complaints. This is a federal bureaucratic mess.
Postmaster Louis DeJoy has told Congress and the Postal Regulatory Commission that the changes he has proposed are vital to saving the Postal Service and making it financially self-sufficient in the modern age.
DeJoy needs to find a new job. My local postal manager would be far more efficient to run the postal service, of that I’m certain.
Candy Moulton can be reached at Candy.L.Moulton@gmail.com
