Some 30 to 40 people carried picket signs in North Platte Thursday, calling on the U.S. Postal Service to scrap its plans to move most western Nebraska mail sorting to Denver.
We wager each one of those sign-holders represented 3,000 or more fed-up people in the 691 ZIP codes.
It isn’t just us. Two days earlier, in Washington, D.C., a U.S. Senate committee let Postmaster General Louis DeJoy have it because his so-called “Delivering for America” reorganization plan is delivering the exact opposite everywhere it has been implemented.
It was bad enough for greater Nebraska 30 years ago when that era’s Postal Service bigwigs basically abolished local mail sorting in favor of a handful of regional processing centers.
One of them was built in North Platte. Now even it’s on the verge of being downsized into a “local processing center” that won’t process incoming local mail.
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No, really. Even cross-town North Platte mail will go to Denver and back. The Postal Service admitted as much at a March 28 information meeting.
Richmond, Virginia, was the first target of DeJoy’s plan last summer. Since it was implemented, Virginia’s mail delivery rate has plummeted from 89% to a nation’s worst 66%, the Richmond Times-Dispatch has reported.
Texas has reported similar problems, as has the Atlanta area since its metro-area sorting was consolidated.
DeJoy said at Tuesday’s D.C. hearing that it’ll take months to smooth things out, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
At the same hearing, U.S. Postal Regulatory Commission Chairman Michael Kubayanda said on-time delivery in the Atlanta area had collapsed to 36% for first-class mail and 16% in March for letters and cards.
“Do you think that one of your private-sector competitors would have rolled out a new system that would reduce on-time delivery to 36% and then say it’s going to take months to fix it?” U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff asked DeJoy.
Then he added: “I wrote you on March 14. Did you get my letter?”
DeJoy said he hadn’t read it, the Atlanta paper wrote.
Look: Every corner of this country deserves far better from our government than just maintaining North Platte’s type of status quo on mail delivery.
We get the argument, sort of, about sending bulk mail and even some packages through centralized sorting centers in North Platte or even Denver.
But Nebraska has exactly four cities of 50,000 people or more and just 16 with 10,000 or more. Most of our local post offices count their incoming or outgoing mail in the low thousands. Or hundreds. A few dozen. Or less.
Does the Postal Service really expect us to believe it can’t keep mail staying in the same ZIP code (or two, like North Platte’s 69101 and 69103) at its local post office to be put in the right bags or boxes for delivery?
Don’t try selling western Nebraskans on that. Just one winter blizzard exposes its insanity. It was a foolish idea in the 1990s. It’s foolish today.
Yes, North Platte wants to keep its regional Postal Service center. But don’t tell us this new system is efficient. The old one isn’t, either.