10,000 complaints about the mail is just the start

I was at the Meriden post office Monday afternoon, talking about a possible slowdown in the mail with the mayor, the senior U.S. senator, the lieutenant governor and the city manager. A guy named John, a local business owner, came charging out of the front door waving a passel of letters.

“The roads have been opened for how long now? And the’re still sending my mail back!”

He was talking about some road work that apparently made it impossible for mail carriers to reach his address, but but that was long over. And so he came to complain — and didn’t get the answers he wanted.

Well, he can take a number these days. Complaining about the U.S. Postal Service rivals baseball as the national pastime. Sen. Richard Blumenthal mentioned that he’s received 10,000 messages — mostly emails and calls, rather than letters — complaining about the mail, just since April.

That’s a big number, part of a grand tradition.

When I was in middle school, my friend’s mother was livid that the loal postmaster rereouted the mail — though I’m not sure whether it was because her delivery came later or earlier.

It’s what we do, complain about the post office. I’ve had good luck with the mail except that they lost my baby pictures, or so the story goes.

But in this go-around, fueled by politics but grounded in mail that’s well, grounded, there’s something truly amiss. We can’t unpack it yet because we don’t know, for example, how much mail has been delayed by how many days, and we probably won’t ever know.

We know that the newly seated U.S. Postmaster General, a guy who’s heavily invested in businesses that compete with the U.S. Postal Service, has, in less than three months, overseen a cutback in overtime and the continued dismantling of some 671 sorting machines nationwide, a handful in Connecticut.

We know that his patron, President Donald Trump, admitted he doesn’t want to help the U.S. Postal Service expand absentee balloting — since he thinks, probably incorrectly, that more people voting means a lower likelihood he’ll win re-election.

We know that the postal service has long been inefficient, but as both U.S. senators from Connecticut pointed out Monday, that’s part of the whole point — it’s a government function, not a business.

We know we’re likely to see 75 million, maybe 80 million ballots cast my mail in the Nov. 3 election, up from 24 million in 2016.

So, when Postmaster General Louis DeJoy says the mail slowdown is part of an orderly process to reckon with the decline in letters, an urgent need to create a “path to sustainability,” not a political ahtchet job, Blumenthal’s response is correct.

“I’m less interested at this point in some kind of court process against him. My goal is very simply to make sure tha the Postal Service is preserved as a public institution accountable to us as Americans, not to a set of private shareholders.”

Blumenthal added, “Donald Trump has two not-sohidden agendas here. No. 1, privatize the post office and No. 2, sabotage the election, and he’s pursuing both relectlessly and tirelessly and they complement each other.”

Maybe that charge is right. Maybe it’s too harsh. The point is, it doesn’t matter. Yes, the Postal Service needs to be reformed to fit the needs of the 2020s and beyond. I could see delivery coming three times a week, or some other radical solutions.

Just not now, when we have a president and postmaster general with an obvious agenda.

Ten thousand complaints is a lot, even for a U.S.senator, even for a hot political issue like the Postal Service these days. By comparison, all of coronavirus — the health issues, the economic shutdown, the messy restart, the failing small businesses, the 750,000 unemployment filings in Connecticut — brought 44,000 complaints, Blumenthal told me.

“We got a lot on the storm but it doesn’t rise to 10,000,” he said.

Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz also said she’s seeing an uptick of mail complaints “from veterans who are waiting for medicine in the mail,” and from people paying bills, and small business owners. And the office of Sen. Chris Murphy said they’re seeing an uptick, but they didn’t have an immediate count.

Bysiewicz suggested, and Blumenthal agreed, that we’re seeing an attack on African Americans and other people of color, and economically stressed groups, for two reasons. First, the Postal Sevice hires people and delivers a middle class life to economically and racially mixed applicants.

And second, people who are struggling can’t easily drop off their absentee ballots at town hall — they will rely more on the mail at election time.

“There are huge equity issues as far as communities of color,” she said.

None of this malfeasance is real, Republicans say — led by DeJoy, who testfied in the Senate Friday and the House Monday that no, there’s no agenda to slow down the mail even though it might be happening.

We don’t care about his and his patron’s motivations. My personal view is they’re lying through their cigars but it doesn’t matter. Voters need to take not of what they’re doing and when — not what they’re saying.

Postal workers, stuck in the middle with curtailed ovetime and less equipment, are by many accounts going beyond the call. Meriden Mayor Kevin Scarpetti said the local postmaster has people watching out for ballots, not sending them to the Wallingford sorting center, which may take longer.

Ditto in Stamford, where City & Town Clerk Lyda Ruijter said postal workers made special deliveries of ballots.

And, Blumenthal said, the Suffield woman’s family whose brother’s cremated remains were delayed by more than a week in the mail, feared lost, finally received those ashes because a postal worker drove two hours out of her way to personally deliver the precious package.

Keep those complaints coming. Life as we know it isn’t the same anymore, mail delivery included. But the tradition of voices of opposition cannot be quelled, and that matters all the more in the next ten weeks.