Close up: Postal Service Reorganization, continued.

"Please Mister Postman, look and see
Is there a letter, a letter for me
I've been standin' here waitin' Mister Postman
So patiently, for just a card, or just a letter."

Debut single by Marvelettes, 1961. First Motown #1 hit.

The Postal Service is consolidating letter-sorting into large metropolitan centers. The USPS is closing most of the local and regional sorting that takes place in Medford and other secondary cities. Where and how it gets sorted affects the speed and reliability of service. Tam Moore has been trying to get to the bottom of whether service will deteriorate for communities like ours that are losing status as a sorting center. Fact is," Moore told me, "us outsiders can't figure out the impact on local, inter-community mail from the documents the USPS provides." 

Moore has been a TV and print journalist, with a career lasting almost 70 years, so far.

Moore

Guest Post by Tam Moore

In case you are wondering about the U.S. Postal Service reorganization report posted on this blog on August 11, the technocrats clearly won the first round.

At issue is turning sectional processing centers – those regional hubs where machines sort mail and route it to its destination – into “local processing centers” by trucking letters and packages to super sorting centers in more distant locations.

On August 25 USPS posted on its website “Notice of Intent to Proceed” with reorganization of processing centers in Medford and Eugene, Oregon and Macon and Augusta, Georgia. 

No news release to local media. “There is no news release,” emailed Kim Frum, the Seattle-based USPS spokesperson for the Pacific Northwest. “The information is available on our website…”

No response to questions asked at public briefings on the reorganization. Just a one page summary of the public meeting. 

And a workbook (format identical for all four reorganization studies) full of numbers and technical jargon. Clearly missing is an answer to the citizen question asked in Medford about a “map” or chart showing where a letter might go from its point of deposit in the mail system to delivery. Are our letters destined for a neighbor across town really going to be trucked to Portland (the designated super sorting center) for sorting, then trucked back to Medford for a hand-off for delivery by a local letter carrier?

By Post Office computations in the decision workbook, it is 280 miles one-way from the Medford processing center to the super center near Portland International Airport. Calculated at four hours 28 minutes on the Interstate. There is no mention in the 16-page workbook of whose trucks will get the job of all of those round trips to Portland, nor of whether more trucks will be needed on the route. The workbook does list 30 Highway Carrier Route contracts which will be eliminated, at an expected annual savings of about $6 million. Again no computation on the cost or method of assuring customers on those highway routes continue to get mail delivery. 

Here's what’s going away from the Medford processing facility which now sorts mail for four Southern Oregon counties: 

1 package sorting machine

4 letter-sorting and bar code reading machines  

1 universal sorting machine for parcels and non-machinable mail

Depending on where you look in the workbook, up to 37 postal workers either face layoffs or transfer to another facility in implementation of the Medford reorganization.

 

Not every July reorganization study produced similar results. For example, under the August 28 decision, Eugene, serving a larger number of mail patrons, is supposed to get six more digital bar code reader machines, for 12 total. Augusta, Georgia will remove only two letter-sorting machines. It’s 167 miles from Augusta to the brand new Atlanta supersized mail processing center. 

 

It was the home-folks versus the technocrats at Medford’s July public meeting. For this round, the technocrats are winning. Citizens used to bureaucrats thoughtfully addressing every public comment in federal agency decisions governed by the Administrative Procedures Act would be amazed at the lack of transparency shown by the U.S. Postal Service in their latest round of reorganization. It is even more difficult because the Post Office culture is strewn with anachronisms. An internet search leads one to a dictionary of 722 abbreviations used by USPS. One of the equipment abbreviations used in the Medford workbook -- LCUS -- isn’t found in that dictionary, but Kim Frum told me it was a "low cost universal sorting system."

 

The next round promises to include both unfair labor practice complaints from postal worker unions and probing questions from at least two of Oregon’s federal lawmakers. 

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