BIDDEFORD — On Thursday, more than a dozen U.S. postal carriers from Sanford, Kennebunk and Biddeford gathered on Main Street in front of the regional office of Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, to protest proposed changes to the postal service. These changes, they said, are the first step in dismantling the postal system as we know it.
The U.S. Senate plans to begin discussions on S. 1789, the 21st Century Postal Service Act, on Tuesday, when senators return from Easter recess.
Postal carriers converged on Snowe’s six regional offices located throughout Maine seeking her support against the bill. Many, including members of the National Association of Letter Carriers, agree that the U.S Postal Service faces several challenges in its efforts to remain financially viable. The NALC is one of the mail carriers’ unions.
But postal carriers said the proposed changes in the Senate bill go too far. The bill would eliminate Saturday delivery within two years, cut door-to-door delivery for 35 million households and businesses, and result in the layoff of 80,000 postal employees.
“It would be horrible to lose Saturday delivery,” said Gregory Bourque, a postal worker in Sanford. “A lot of people would be laid off.”
It would also hurt customers, said Bourque, like seniors who depend on the postal service to deliver their medication.
The USPS has proposed its own changes, which include closing approximately 3,700 mostly rural post offices, consolidating 264 mail processing facilities, including the one in Hampden, and eliminating overnight delivery for first class mail.
These combined changes would irrevocably damage the U.S. Postal Service, one of the oldest institutions in the country, according to the NALC. It would also have a domino effect, negatively impacting businesses around the country that in some way rely on the postal service.
Some changes are needed, said Snowe in a prepared statement issued Thursday, because the USPS faces major financial challenges, having lost $28 billion since 2007. However, she stated, she recognized the NALC had concerns about the bill and she would keep those concerns in mind when it is discussed in the Senate.
“It is essential that Congress promptly debate and approve comprehensive postal reform legislation,” stated Snowe, “and that this legislation develop the framework for a new, sustainable and successful business model for the USPS into the 21st century.”
Part of the reason the postal service has lost so much money in the past five years, said John Brackett, a Sanford postal carrier, is that the USPS is required to pre-fund its retirement system by $5.5 billion a year. And although S. 1789 proposes reducing the pre-funding requirement to $4 billion, that is still too much, he said. No other company or agency in the U.S. is required to pre-fund, he said.
“The unaffordable burden on the postal service, to pre-fund future retiree health benefits, is being done at the cost of quality service and tens of thousands of jobs,” said Brackett.
However, that’s not the whole story, according to a study by Institute for the Research on the Economics of Taxation released Thursday by the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C. Even without prefunding, it stated in the study, “the government enterprise would have incurred massive losses in 2009-10 even if it had contributed nothing, and in 2011, when it had a one year reprieve and contributed nothing, it still ended the year $5.1 billion in the red.”
There is a way to pre-fund the retirement system without an added financial burden to the USPS, said Brackett. A massive pension surplus in the postal portion of the Civil Service Retirement System could be used to pre-fund future retiree health costs, he said.
While Snowe has some concerns about the Senate bill, Maine’s other senator, Republican Susan Collins, is one of the bill’s authors.
With the postal service reportedly $13 billion in debt, reform is needed, said Collins. However, she is against the postmaster’s plans to reduce access and slow deliver times, which Collins said would “lead to a death spiral for the postal service.”
S. 1789, “would save the postal service, and protect rural delivery, by helping it reduce operating costs, modernize its business model, and innovate to generate new revenue, while maintaining the promises the postal service has made to its workforce for retirement,” said Collins. “It would also prohibit the postal service from implementing its plan to immediately eliminate Saturday delivery for at least two years, and would make it more difficult for the postal service to close post offices inappropriately, especially in small towns and rural areas.”
— Staff Writer Dina Mendros can be contacted at 282-1535, Ext. 324 or dmendros@journaltribune.com.
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