Service changes could slow state’s mail delivery
USPS is vital lifeline in pandemic, election
MALONE - Sara Sippel pulled up to the tiny post office surrounded by verdant fields of soybeans and dropped off an envelope.
She was having trouble filing her taxes online and when she realized she couldn’t, Sippel knew there was an alternative: mailing it.
“To be honest I don’t use the post office all that much, but I need it today,” Sippel said Tuesday in the Fond du Lac County community of Malone. “Had it not been for this post office, I’d have had to drive all the way to Fond du Lac.”
She visited her local post office a day after a memo circulated among postal employees throughout the United States outlining changes that could slow down mail delivery.
Sippel, like many Americans, didn’t know the post office is facing financial difficulties. What Sippel does know, she said, is how important it is to get packages delivered to her home, where sometimes the letter carrier brings them to the door because he knows she has small children.
Letter carriers also sometimes make multiple daily trips to distribution centers, where mail is sorted, to pick up additional mail and ensure it’s delivered quickly. But as first reported Tuesday in The Washington Post, employees were told Monday that they should leave mail behind in the distribution centers if it will delay carrier routes.
This is as the post office has been a vital lifeline during the pandemic, delivering medicine, toilet paper, food and other items.
The agency has also become an even more important part of elections, with many Americans choosing to vote by mail rather than risking infection by standing in line at polling places. More than 1.1 million Wisconsinites voted by absentee ballots during the April primary.
With coronavirus cases and deaths spiking again, the November presidential election could see unprecedented numbers of mailed-in ballots.
The U.S. Postal Service has been in financial peril for years, dating back to a policy mandated by Congress that requires the post office, and no other federal agencies, to prepay retirees’ health benefits. That has put the post office billions of dollars in the red.
And though the number of packages delivered by letter carriers has soared recently, mail is down in general. Fewer bills are coming to mailboxes because people are now paying them online, and fewer letters, too, since it’s easier to send a text or email. Marketing mail has also dropped off because more people are getting their coupons online.
President Donald Trump in April threatened to block federal aid for the post office unless the agency quadrupled the price it charges to deliver packages. “The Postal Service is a joke,” Trump told reporters. “Because they’re handing out packages for Amazon and other internet companies, and every time they bring a package, they lose money on it.”
Trump has been a vocal opponent of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, which reports extensively on the president.
The month after Trump’s comments, Louis DeJoy was named postmaster general and the U.S. Postal Service began reviewing the fees it charges Amazon, UPS and FedEx to deliver packages, according to The Washington Post. DeJoy, who was CEO of a logistics company for decades, is the finance chair of next month’s Republican National Convention. At the time of his appointment, he had donated $360,000 to Trump’s reelection campaign since January.
In a document called “New (Postmaster General’s) expectations and plan,” employees were told that if the distribution plants run late, mail will be held for the next day.
Slowing mail delivery could push people to use FedEx, Amazon or UPS.
“They’re really putting the post office on a ‘slash and burn’ spiral that drives away revenue,” said American Postal Workers Union President Mark Dimondstein. “We’re opposed to anything that diminishes service.”
In a statement emailed to the Journal Sentinel on Wednesday, the Postal Service responded by saying the agency “is developing a business plan to ensure that we will be financially stable and able to continue to provide reliable, affordable, safe and secure delivery of mail, packages and other communications to all Americans as a vital part of the nation’s critical infrastructure.
“While the overall plan is not yet finalized, it will certainly include new and creative ways for us to fulfill our mission, and we will focus immediately on efficiency and items that we can control, including adherence to the effective operating plans that we have developed.”
Congress authorized $10 billion in loans for the Postal Service in one of the first coronavirus relief bills. So far, the agency has not tapped that line of credit because the Treasury Department sought to attach provisions giving it oversight of some of the post office’s operations.
A federal stimulus package approved by the House in May, which hasn’t gotten through the Senate, would provide another $25 billion in aid to the Postal Service and forbid the Treasury Department from demanding conditions to the $10 billion loan.
In Malone, Julie Schneider visits the post office almost every day because she’s wary of putting bills and other mail for pickup in her mailbox.
“I use it all the time. It’s vital,” said Schneider, as American and MIA flags flapped from the flag pole in front of the post office. “I just think it’s essential. I can’t believe we’re even talking about considering not funding it.”
Allen Haas has a post office box in Malone because sometimes snow plows tip over the mailbox at his farm. He stops whenever he has time to pick up his mail.
“The government should bail (the post office) out instead of bailing out other things that are nonsense,” said Haas. “Give them all the money they need.”
Mail carrier Mike Petrie has been delivering letters, birthday and holiday cards, medication, magazines and catalogs, and packages for 26 years. He puts on 65 miles each day driving his own car as he traverses county and town roads, sometimes slowing for tractors.
He is a lifeline, in a way. “Some of the older people you get to talk to, they tell me I’m the only one they see all day. It’s good to see a smiling face,” said Petrie. “You get to see a lot of great people out there. It’s rewarding just doing your job.”