Decisions on local post offices delayed till this spring
19th December 2011 · 0 Comments
By Susan Buchanan
Contributing Writer
While lines to mail gifts are long in December, the city’s postal employees are coping with more than the holiday rush. Many of them are worried about their jobs as the cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service seeks ways to consolidate operations. And the agency’s residential and business customers are concerned about a possible slowdown in mail, starting next year.
The Postal Service must tighten its belt as retiree health benefits, which have to be pre-paid under a Congressional mandate, have ballooned, and mail volume has dropped. To meet its expenses, the agency unveiled proposals this year to shut post offices and processing plants, and to reduce Saturday service and allow more time for first class mail.
But because of a six-month halt on closing facilities, imposed by Congress last week, verdicts on the city’s giant Loyola Ave. processing center and the small Lafayette Square post office have been postponed from early next year to mid-May. That move, at the request of 22 U.S. senators, including Mary Landrieu, prevents immediate service cuts and gives Congress time to consider legislation addressing the crisis. The U.S. House and Senate are working on several different bills to save service.
“With this moratorium, Congress seems to be serious about coming up with financial solutions,” said Theodore Patterson, president of New Orleans Local 83 of the American Postal Workers Union or APWU. “We’re a little more optimistic now.”
Sites across the country remain at risk, however. “Last March, our management announced that feasibility studies—to decide what to consolidate or leave open—would be conducted at 3,700 post offices, and on Sept. 15 it was announced that 252 processing plants would be studied,” said McKinney Boyd, USPS spokesman in Dallas. “All variables, including costs for facility maintenance and transportation, along with revenue and the amount of traffic, are being reviewed.”
This fall, the Postal Service said it would consider shutting the Loyola Ave. processing and distribution center in New Orleans to save millions of dollars annually. Under that proposal, many of the functions of the center, which employs 880 people, could be moved to Baton Rouge. But as of last week, a scheduled early-March decision on the facility has been postponed to mid-May. A verdict on the city’s Lafayette Square retail office, employing two people, was expected either late this month or in January, and has also been delayed to May.
Meanwhile in the Bywater, “it was decided last summer that closing the Poland Ave. office would adversely impact the community, so that facility was removed from our review,” and will stay open, Boyd said. The Bywater’s full-service, retail post office employs 33 people in a neighborhood that needs amenities of all kinds.
In Plaquemines Parish, the Point a la Hatche mail delivery and retail office was under review, but has been spared, and at this time no offices in that parish are on the study list, Boyd said. A decision on the city of Lafayette’s processing facility in Southwest Louisiana has been postponed from early March to mid-May. And the Avery Island office in Iberia Parish is still under study for a possible shutdown.
After this holiday season, a new list of offices and facilities that are being scrutinized for possible closings will be announced, Boyd said. And during Congress’s six-month moratorium, the Postal Service will continue to review facilities and will keep holding public meetings on its cost-cutting proposals.
As for workers, Boyd said “all postal jobs are safe. There continues to be a mis-communication that employees will be laid off, but we have vacancies in the Postal Service and all employees will be relocated within our operations.”
Nationally, the Postal Service workforce is 22% Black and 8% Hispanic, making it among the most diversified in the country. But “in New Orleans, because Blacks make up a big part of the population, their employment in the Postal Service is above the national average,” Patterson said.
Patterson weighed in on the situation at Loyola Ave., explaining that the New Orleans processing facility handles nearly 900,000 pieces of mail a day while Baton Rouge does half that. “We’ve already tried having New Orleans mail processed there, and they don’t have the staff, equipment and space to do it and meet the next-day rule for local, first-class mail.” For awhile after Katrina, New Orleans mail was processed within the state’s capitol. More recently, some of the New Orleans mail sent to Baton Rouge for processing has had to be returned to Loyola Ave. for handling, he said.
Patterson said the Postal Service is considering changing the one-day rule for first-class mail but has run into opposition. “You’ve got people expecting medicine, checks and legal documents the next day,” he said. He noted that at a public meeting held in City Hall on Nov. 8, customers and large mailers complained about possibly moving processing to Baton Rouge. “For law firms mailing a document overnight in the city, they just put a 44-cent stamp on it,” Patterson said. “But if our processing moves to Baton Rouge, and the one-day rule is changed, those firms would have to use private carriers for overnight letters that cost $9 to $10.” Business mail provides nearly three-fourths of the agency’s revenue.
Transportation issues were discussed at the Nov. 8 meeting. “The mail would have to go by truck, trucks break down, and you have accidents and delays on Interstate-10,” Patterson said. “The Baton Rouge airport is too small for the jumbo planes that are used to take mail from New Orleans” to other cities. And streets within Baton Rouge are congested because of growth in the last six years.
As for why New Orleans mail processing would be moved to Baton Rouge, rumors abound from concerns about the Crescent City’s vulnerability to hurricanes to the desire of real estate developers to build on property near the Superdome. “In Louisiana, you often don’t know what the real reason is,” Patterson said. “You’d think with the Loyola corridor coming back now, it would be great to have the post office there.”
Under the current APWU contract, if positions of any of the city’s postal workers are eliminated, they can be transferred within a 50-mile radius. Baton Rouge is 82 miles away, however. And while postal vacancies exist in New Orleans, skills have to match jobs. “Postal Service workers are on average middle-aged, and many of them wouldn’t be suited to letter carrier jobs,” Patterson said. And truck drivers and mechanics require special skills. “Under the APWU contract, you could have people sitting around, twiddling their thumbs on Loyola Avenue,” he said.
Boyd said the need to pre-fund health benefits, combined with customers corresponding by email and paying bills on line, generated the current crisis. In 2006, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act or PAEA was passed by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush. The PAEA mandates that the Postal Service fully pre-pay future, retiree health benefits for the next 75 years and do it within a 10-year window.
To meet that commitment, the Postal Service must send the U.S. Treasury $5.5 billion in the fall of every year for retirement health benefits. Payments partly cover benefits for people who haven’t been born yet. “The Postal Service is the only U.S. entity of any kind that’s mandated to do this,” Boyd said. Meanwhile, the agency receives no tax dollars for operating expenses, and relies on sales of postage, products and services to fund its operations.
Patterson said “Congress got us into this financial mess, and we need Congress to help us get out of it.”
As for mail deliveries, New Orleans has its own set of challenges. “Our carriers go to homes in the Ninth Ward where there are stretches of three or four houses where no one lives,” Boyd said. “We’ve still got to provide universal service and carriers still cover the same territory.” To enhance service across town, USPS has installed neighborhood delivery collection boxes—those outdoor, bureau-like structures holding household mail—in a number of residential areas. “After Katrina, collection boxes gave us an opportunity to maximize time and save money on door-to-door deliveries,” Boyd said.
Next year, USPS will honor Louisiana’s 200th birthday on April 30 with the release of a Forever stamp showing the Atchafalaya swamp at sunset and guaranteeing first-class postage when prices rise.
This article was originally published in the December 19, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper
