USPS officials provide update on improvements
Work continues on processing center plagued by earlier mail delays
U.S. Postal Service officials provided an updated timeline Thursday of its modernization plan in Houston, noting operations at the South Houston Local Processing Center should be 95% complete by the end of August.
The processing center in Missouri City is a new facility built as part of the Delivering for America plan, the Postal Service’s 10-year plan to modernize the post office. Officials said more than $250 million will be spent on improving operations in the area by the end of the year.
“Unlike our past facilities, where we just shoehorn things in wherever we had space, this building, we were able to get a large enough building where we could put the machines in that we wanted to put in,” said John DiPeri, vice president of Regional Processing Operations.
The facility opened in November as a peak season annex for the region’s main facility in North Houston but continued operating after the holiday season ended. But due to problems, including staffing shortages and a hard freeze, the facility played a major role in the mail delays that swept across the region.
A recent audit from the USPS Office of Inspector General revealed the auditors estimated 384,000 pieces of late mail were at the facility during an unannounced visit at the end of January. The audit also found safety concerns, incorrect reporting of mail and more at the site.
“We got into a congested situation that took us several weeks to come out of,” DiPeri said. “We brought a team of extra plant managers immediately from across the country to come help us. It took us a month to really bail out to get out. And I apologize for that. That responsibility is my responsibility. And it won’t happen again.”
The South Houston Local Processing Center, which is about 400,000 square feet, is currently only sorting packages as its machines to do letters and magazines are constructed. Only one side of dock doors are currently being used as the other side is being constructed.
There will be three package-sorting machines when the facility is fully operational. There are currently five because the facility is taking on packages that will be serviced out of the North Houston Regional Processing and Distribution Center when that facility is full operational.
DiPeri said 205 people were working at the facility in May, with plans to staff up to 500 by August.
The facility also has its first set of running bathrooms with more restrooms starting construction Friday. It is also currently being run on generators as a transformer won’t be in town until July due to supply chain issues, officials said.
DiPeri led the visit along with James Gibson and Larry Wagener, who is the senior director of Division Processing Operations. Gibson is the South Houston Local Processing Center plant manager. He said he started in the role a month ago and moved here from Las Vegas.
The officials apologized multiple times for the mail delays during the tour, which saw service performance drop significantly with a nadir in on-time delivery in January.
Inbound first-class mail in January was on time only 67.33% of the time in the Texas 2 region, which extends the entire Gulf Coast region of Texas and well into the state. Breakdowns into counties or cities are not available via the service’s performance tracker.
“Problems did occur in the execution when we first started,” Wagener said. “Service was admittedly poor during January. We own that.”
Service performance for inbound first-class mail improved to 83.78% in February and 88.91% in March before dropping to 86.60% on April 1-April 26. Data from the last week of April has not been updated online.
While those numbers are up compared to January’s rough statistics, they are down by at least 3% compared to the same period last year.
DiPeri said the Postal Service is learning from what happened in Houston and other areas experiencing problems related to the Delivering for America plan. Earlier in the week, DiPeri along with “four vice presidents and 20 high-level folks” had meetings in Texas regarding the lessons learned from the problems that occurred during and after the holiday season.
“I would have had more people available, and I would have planned the execution better,” DiPeri said. “But I learned from that.”