USPS sees some changes, as state farmers suffer postal delays

By Noah Zucker
Posted 3/5/21

The nation is awaiting Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s plan to save the U.S. Postal Service, due at some point this month.

Meantime, postal delays in Delaware and policy changes at the agency got a lot of attention this week.

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USPS sees some changes, as state farmers suffer postal delays

Posted

The nation is awaiting Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s plan to save the U.S. Postal Service, due at some point this month.

Meantime, postal delays in Delaware and policy changes at the agency got a lot of attention this week.

Tuesday night, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., made a fiery speech chronicling the importance of on-time deliveries and excoriating what he sees as Mr. DeJoy’s poor performance.

“I have no beef with the men and women of our Postal Service, but I have real and deep concerns about how the Postal Service is being run under the current postmaster general,” he said.

“In January and February alone, my office received hundreds of messages from constituents complaining about mail issues,” the senator said.

“Since last April, I’ve heard from nearly 5,000 Delawareans, folks asking for robust funding for the Postal Service, wanting stronger vote-by-mail initiatives, and hundreds and hundreds of them reporting delays in the mail,” he said.

Farmers affected

In particular, Sen. Coons noted that local farmers have suffered quite a bit. He mentioned Townsend’s Bill Powers, the second vice president of the Delaware Farm Bureau and a turkey farmer, as someone who has been impacted disproportionately.

“I’ve been buying chicks and getting them through the mail for 40-some years,” Mr. Powers said. “We’ve never had problems.”

But that all changed in 2020.

“It becomes an economic loss for us,” the turkey farmer said of repeated botched deliveries of 1-day-old turkey chicks. “It hurts a lot of small farms. It’s not going to (hurt) the big integrators because they’ve got their own hatcheries and their own trucks.”

Generally, he said, the chicks can survive about two days in transit with no issues. But if it takes them longer to arrive, large portions of the shipment will die.

Mr. Powers has received several shipments in which all or nearly all the chicks perished in transit, either because the package didn’t arrive in time or because it wasn’t handled properly.

This can be emotionally trying in its own right, Mr. Powers said, but he is more worried about the economics. When he has to reorder chicks, he loses valuable development time for his flock, meaning that the turkeys he ultimately sends to slaughter are smaller and worth less.

“Good thing (we had) the pandemic because people wanted smaller turkeys” at Thanksgiving, Mr. Powers said. “If it was a normal year, we would have been too small.”

Sen. Coons said he is sure the postmaster general’s upcoming changes won’t improve service for Mr. Powers or anyone else.

“My understanding is that DeJoy’s plans for the future of the Postal Service include higher prices and slower delivery. Delawareans are tired, and our Postal Service workers are tired, too, of the constraints placed on them,” Sen. Coons said Tuesday.

Changes

Although the postmaster general’s full plan is supposed to come out at some point in March, he has announced some changes already, which may serve as a preview of the agency’s reorganization.

USPS has consolidated its 67 mailing districts into 50. This means that Delaware is now part of the Philadelphia division — along with the rest of eastern Pennsylvania — instead of the South Jersey division.

“In the past, we were under Baltimore as our district, years ago. Then, we switched to South Jersey,” said John Embleton, president of the Delaware Rural Letter Carriers Association, a union. Now, “we’re moving from Bellmawr, New Jersey, to I believe Philadelphia, where there’s a district already.”

He said that change’s impact will likely not be seen locally.

“For (letter carriers) and customers, I don’t think we’ll be seeing much of a difference on our level.”

Another move USPS has already made is to offer early retirement to certain employees.

“The voluntary early retirement option is only for our eligible, nonunion, administrative employees. This VER is not an option for our employees who process and deliver the mail,” said Melissa Lomax, a strategic communications specialist with USPS.

The program would be available to most non-bargaining employees 50 years or older who have been working for at least 20 years. An article from The Washington Post said “tens of thousands” of USPS employees would be eligible.

Mr. Embleton said most of these employees work in district offices and in other regional capacities, so customers wouldn’t see changes in terms of who is delivering their mail or answering their questions at a local post office.

Another proposed change announced late last month, which customers and mail carriers alike will take note of, are redesigned trucks USPS hopes will replace its aging fleet.

The new truck features a large front window and a shallow hood, which gives the vehicles a futuristic appearance. But Mr. Embleton is most excited about the updated features inside.

“I’m glad that there is an improvement coming. It’s much needed,” he said. “The new fleet with the safety features — air bags, air conditioning, working heat — those are all good things.”

He said the current design is very bare-bones.

“There’s no air bags and no air conditioning. It’s a very dependable vehicle, but there’s no frills,” Mr. Embleton said. “Most of these trucks were designed for city routes, where they would be in town. They park, and then, they walk. Now that they’re being utilized for rural routes, it’s just a different ballgame.”

Moving forward

Sen. Coons hopes that voting to confirm President Joe Biden’s nominations to the Postal Service’s Board of Governors will ultimately lead to Mr. DeJoy being ousted.

“President Biden doesn’t get to choose a new postmaster general just because he’s the new president,” the senator said. “In fact, the current officeholder, Louis DeJoy, was chosen by the board under the previous administration.”

Neither Sen. Coons nor Mr. Powers, who crossed paths frequently earlier in their careers as New Castle County Councilmen, trust Mr. DeJoy.

“I think the last administration was trying to destroy the Postal Service,” Mr. Powers said. “That’s my own personal opinion.”

Both men see the destruction of a mail-sorting machine at a USPS facility in New Castle last summer as evidence of that.

“I drove myself to our mail-distribution center in New Castle after leadership of the Postal Service denied my request to visit,” the senator said.

“Thanks to having been alerted by some front-line employees, I drove around back and was able to see a dismantled, massive piece of mail-handling equipment left outside in the rain,” he said.

Mr. Powers added, “That was the postmaster general.

“This is the first postmaster general in a long time who didn’t come from the Postal Service,” he said. “What I understand of him is he takes companies and dissolves them and sells off the parts and destroys them.”

But that’s not how Mr. DeJoy would characterize his work at USPS.

“Above all, my message is that the status quo should be acceptable to no one because the solutions are within reach if we can agree to work together,” he said last month.

“Our dire financial trajectory, operational and network misalignment to mail trends, outdated pricing, infrastructure underinvestment, inadequate people engagement and an insufficient growth strategy — all demand immediate action,” the postmaster said.

“We have a detailed plan for such action, which we will finalize soon, and with your help, we can restore a Postal Service that the American people truly deserve,” he said.

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