Goodbye Saturday mail? Postal Service plans cuts

Mail car­rier Bruce Nick­lay walks along East Third Street in Winona, Minn., deliv­er­ing let­ters to homes Wednes­day. The U.S. Postal Ser­vice will stop deliv­er­ing mail on Sat­ur­days but con­tinue to deliver pack­ages six days a week under a plan aimed at sav­ing about $2 bil­lion annu­ally, the finan­cially strug­gling agency says. (For the Asso­ci­ated Press | Andrew Link)

PAULINE JELINEK

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Sat­ur­day mail may soon go the way of the Pony Express and penny post­cards. The Postal Ser­vice said Wednes­day that it plans to cut back to five-day-a-week deliv­er­ies for every­thing except pack­ages to stem its finan­cial losses in a world rad­i­cally re-ordered by the Internet.

“Our finan­cial con­di­tion is urgent,” declared Post­mas­ter Gen­eral Patrick R. Don­a­hoe. But Con­gress has voted in the past to bar the idea of elim­i­nat­ing Sat­ur­day deliv­ery, and his announce­ment imme­di­ately drew protests from some law­mak­ers. The plan, which is to take effect in August, also brought vig­or­ous objec­tions from farm­ers, the let­ter car­ri­ers’ union and others.

The Postal Ser­vice, which suf­fered a $15.9 bil­lion loss in the past bud­get year, said it expected to save $2 bil­lion annu­ally with the Sat­ur­day cut­back. Mail such as let­ters and mag­a­zines would be affected. Deliv­ery of pack­ages of all sizes would con­tinue six days a week.

The plan accen­tu­ates one of the agency’s strong points: Pack­age deliv­ery has increased by 14 per­cent since 2010, offi­cials say, while the deliv­ery of let­ters and other mail has plum­meted. Email has decreased the mail­ing of paper let­ters, but online pur­chases have increased pack­age ship­ping, forc­ing the Postal Ser­vice to adjust to cus­tomers’ new habits.

“Things change,” Don­a­hoe said.

James Valen­tine, an antiques shop owner in Toledo, wasn’t too con­cerned about the news.

“The mail isn’t that impor­tant to me any­more. I don’t sit around wait­ing for it to come. It’s a sign of the times,” he said, adding, “It’s not like any­one writes let­ters anymore.”

In fact, the Postal Ser­vice has had to adapt to chang­ing times ever since Ben­jamin Franklin was appointed the first post­mas­ter gen­eral by the Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress in 1775. The Pony Express began in 1860, six-day deliv­ery started in 1863, and air­mail became the mode in 1918. Twice-a-day deliv­ery was cut to one in 1950 to save money.

But change is not the biggest fac­tor in the agency’s predica­ment — Con­gress is. The major­ity of the service’s red ink comes from a 2006 law forc­ing it to pay about $5.5 bil­lion a year into future retiree health ben­e­fits, some­thing no other agency does. With­out that pay­ment — $11.1 bil­lion in a two-year install­ment last year — and related labor expenses, the mail agency sus­tained an oper­at­ing loss of $2.4 bil­lion for the past fis­cal year, lower than the pre­vi­ous year.

Con­gress also has stymied the service’s efforts to close some post offices in small towns.

Under the new plan, mail would be deliv­ered to homes and busi­nesses only from Mon­day through Fri­day but would still be deliv­ered to post office boxes on Sat­ur­days. Post offices now open on Sat­ur­days would remain open.

Over the past sev­eral years, the Postal Ser­vice has advo­cated shift­ing to a five-day deliv­ery sched­ule for mail and pack­ages — and it repeat­edly but unsuc­cess­fully has appealed to Con­gress to approve the move. An inde­pen­dent agency, the ser­vice gets no tax dol­lars for its day-to-day oper­a­tions but is sub­ject to con­gres­sional control.

The pro­posed change is based on what appears to be a legal loop­hole — and that may be a gam­ble. Con­gress has long included a ban on five-day-only deliv­ery in its spend­ing bills, but because the fed­eral gov­ern­ment is now oper­at­ing under a tem­po­rary spend­ing mea­sure rather than an appro­pri­a­tions bill, Don­a­hoe says it’s the agency’s inter­pre­ta­tion that it can make the change itself.

“This is not like a ‘gotcha’ or any­thing like that,” he said. The agency essen­tially wants Con­gress to keep the ban out of any new spend­ing bill after the tem­po­rary mea­sure expires March 27.

Might Con­gress try to block the idea?

“Let’s see what hap­pens,” he said. “I can’t speak for Congress.”

Two Repub­li­can law­mak­ers said they had sent a let­ter to lead­ers of the House and Sen­ate in sup­port of the elim­i­na­tion of Sat­ur­day mail. It’s “common-sense reform,” wrote Dar­rell Issa of Cal­i­for­nia, chair­man of the House Over­sight and Gov­ern­ment Reform Com­mit­tee, and Tom Coburn of Okla­homa, top Repub­li­can on the Sen­ate Home­land Secu­rity and Gov­ern­men­tal Affairs Committee.

But Alaska Demo­c­ra­tic Sen. Mark Begich called it “bad news for Alaskans and small busi­ness own­ers” who he said need timely deliv­ery to rural areas.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said she was dis­ap­pointed, ques­tioned the sav­ings esti­mate and wor­ried the loss of Sat­ur­day ser­vice might drive cus­tomers away.

“The Postal Ser­vice is the linch­pin of a $1 tril­lion mail­ing and mail-related indus­try that employs more than 8 mil­lion Amer­i­cans in fields as diverse as direct mail, print­ing, cat­a­log com­pa­nies, mag­a­zine and news­pa­per pub­lish­ing and paper man­u­fac­tur­ing,” she said. “A healthy Postal Ser­vice is not just impor­tant to postal cus­tomers but also to our national economy.”

She noted that the Sen­ate last year passed a bill that would have stopped the postal ser­vice from elim­i­nat­ing Sat­ur­day ser­vice for at least two years and required it to try two years of aggres­sive cost cut­ting instead.

The House didn’t pass a bill.

Repub­li­can House Speaker John Boehner said Wednes­day, “I think try­ing to act in this postal area is pretty dif­fi­cult. But I under­stand where the postal com­mis­sion is com­ing from. They’re in charge with run­ning the post office, but yet the Con­gress, in its wis­dom, has tied their hands every which way in order for them to actu­ally run the post office in a rev­enue neu­tral way.”

“And so Con­gress needs to act, there’s no ques­tion about that, and I hope we’ll act soon.”

Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s spokesman, Jay Car­ney, said the White House learned only Tues­day about the agency’s deci­sion to cut Sat­ur­day ser­vice. He said the White House is still eval­u­at­ing the deci­sion but would have pre­ferred its own com­pre­hen­sive over­haul pack­age that failed to pass Con­gress last year be adopted “for the sake of a stronger future Postal Service.”

The pres­i­dent of the National Asso­ci­a­tion of Let­ter Car­ri­ers, Fredric Rolando, said the cut­back is “a dis­as­trous idea that would have a pro­foundly neg­a­tive effect on the Postal Ser­vice and on mil­lions of cus­tomers,” par­tic­u­larly busi­nesses, rural com­mu­ni­ties, the elderly, the dis­abled and oth­ers who depend on Sat­ur­day deliv­ery for com­merce and communication.

He said the maneu­ver by Don­a­hoe to make the change “flouts the will of Con­gress, as expressed annu­ally over the past 30 years in leg­is­la­tion that man­dates six-day delivery.”

The National Farm­ers Union said “impacts on rural Amer­ica will be par­tic­u­larly harmful.”

Despite that oppo­si­tion, the Postal Ser­vice clearly thinks it has a major­ity of the Amer­i­can pub­lic on its side. The service’s mar­ket research indi­cates that nearly 7 in 10 peo­ple sup­port the switch as a way to reduce costs, Don­a­hoe said.

He said the sav­ings would include employee reas­sign­ment and attrition.

The agency in Novem­ber reported a record annual loss of $15.9 bil­lion for the past bud­get year and fore­cast more red ink in 2013, cap­ping a tumul­tuous year in which it was forced to default on the $11 bil­lion in retiree health ben­e­fit pre­pay­ments to avert bankruptcy.

The finan­cial losses for the fis­cal year end­ing Sept. 30 were more than triple the $5.1 bil­lion loss in the pre­vi­ous year. Hav­ing reached its bor­row­ing limit, the mail agency is oper­at­ing with lit­tle cash on hand.

The Postal Ser­vice is in the midst of a major restruc­tur­ing through­out its retail, deliv­ery and mail pro­cess­ing oper­a­tions. Since 2006, it has cut annual costs by about $15 bil­lion, reduced the size of its career work­force by 193,000, or 28 per­cent, and has con­sol­i­dated more than 200 mail pro­cess­ing loca­tions, offi­cials say.

At the DeCi­cco Food Mar­ket in Pel­ham, N.Y., where they han­dle the mail for all 10 of their stores, the assis­tant man­ager, Frank Tor­res, said they will try to adjust their rou­tine. I’ll tell you, though, the cus­tomers are pretty upset, we’ve been hear­ing them at the (check­out) reg­is­ters. Some of them get mail they want on Saturday.

“You know what also, it will be strange not see­ing the mail­man on Sat­ur­day. Our office girls know him on a first-name basis.”

Posted by AP News on Feb 6 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.