A bipartisan compromise bill is off to a good start to preserve mostly overnight mail service in Maine and stave off the planned closing of about 100 of the mail processing plants that had been slated for shuttering.
After impassioned pleas by Maine’s Sens. Susan Collins, a Republican, and Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, the Senate voted 74-22 on a motion to proceed to debate on S. 1789, the 21st Century Postal Service Act of 2012. That was 14 votes more than necessary to prevent a fatal filibuster.
Provisions of the bill would give the postmaster general the tools he needs to delay and perhaps prevent the announced closing of postal facilities including the Eastern Maine Processing and Distribution Facility in Hampden. Its closure would mean that a letter mailed from one address to another in Bangor would have to go to another processing center in Scarborough and back, causing delay of a day or two and an end to overnight delivery.
The $14 million Hampden postal plant was dedicated with great fanfare in 1994, with a planned work force of 306 people. It has been handling mail from post offices covering two-thirds of the state. Sen. Collins has worked repeatedly to keep it open.
The measure was a negotiated combination of parts of several bills including proposals by Sens. Collins and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
A provision in the bill would reduce the annual $5.5 billion prefunding of retiree health benefits required by Sen. Collins’s 2006 law to about $3.5 billion. It also would allow current premiums to be paid from that fund starting right away instead of in 2017. The prefunding mandate is a major cause of the Postal Service’s financial crisis.
The revised bill partly reflects proposals by the Postal Service Office of Inspector General, which has long advocated restructuring the service including a complete end of the annual $5.5 billion health-benefit prefunding. Inspector General David C. Williams, in a Feb. 6 letter to Sen. Sanders, told of his office’s finding that the prefunding of the Postal Service’s pension and health care benefits “significantly exceeded” the funding levels of organization in both public and private sectors.
He wrote: “Using ratepayer funds, it has built a war chest of over $326 billion to address its future liabilities. This is a astonishingly high figure for a company with such a large employee base.”
He noted that the Postal Service is currently over 100 percent funded in its pension funds, while the federal government is funded at a much lower 42 percent level and the military at 27 percent. He wrote that the average Fortune 1000 pension plan is funded at 80 percent, while only 6 percent of those plans are 100 percent funded.
Mr. Williams wrote that prefunding of retiree health care is rare in public and private sectors, unlike the current 100 percent requirement for the Postal Service.
The shock of the Postal Service’s crisis plan for a drastic cutback in mail service may have jolted lawmakers into backing the new bill.
By the inspector general’s reasoning, the new postal bill falls short of what is necessary, but it is a strong step in the right direction. It should pass.
Get ready for more price increases in rapid succession. The post office will continue to loose business. It just increased that probability.
Say they close Hampden an they cut out saturday service some letters in Northan Maine could take 5 days to be delivered back to northan maine. There will be buy out an it would effece about 100,000 people that are near retirement age
Try sending a letter by UPS an see how much it will cost you an also ask them how much you will get charged if they pick up the letter at your house ? Ile give you a hint just to send a letter to Portland from waterville will cost you 10 bucks an if they pick it up at you house thats an extra charge. So even if that go up by a dime that still will be below the cost of using UPS
Try sending a secure email and see how much it will cost (zero). That’s the problem. The mail service is dying a long, slow, expensive death.
Can every thing be sent by email ?? You really thing email is secure ??
So you get the internet free ??
Let’s hope that this bill preserves those jobs. The ripple effects of the Hampden plant closing would be awful for the area, and would force many private businesses to relocate as well.
If the place is to large now rent out part of it i bet a company the prints junk mail an the company would love to be in the same building. One more thing junk mail brings in 17.2 billion dollars a year to the post office
It should bring in twice that amount.
Nobody wants closures of businesses, much less the post office facility, which many still rely upon to receive hard mail. But the facts remain obvious, the US Postal Service has failed miserably in promoting the technological advances in the world of IT into their organization. For instance, they themselves, could have been one of the forerunner’s in social networking, email and in on-line ordering of merchandise, using their services to carry the products at discounts. In the city we live in, one of the on-line services has a large list of holiday and event cards you can “order” and choose from, and it can be sent directly through an emil service to the person you wish that “card” to go to, all for free, of course. The service is funded by certain card companies. The US Government is the one to decide which USPS locations will go or stay. Most rural facilities such as Hampden, I think, were docketed to “go”, as others across the USA were scheduled for the plank.
IT has been assimilated by the USPS. Much of the “business” of the service, ordering stamps, vacation holds and starts, etc. can be done on the Web. As for greeting cards, some I’ve seen are quite nice but they’ll never replace a “real card”.
Its time to start preparing for a major change in the way we deal with mail. There is not much left that you can’t do with a computer and it is way cheaper for everybody to take advantage of that fact. Old fashioned mail is a luxury we can no longer afford. Packages and delivery of goods is carried out by private companies. We should start the ball rolling by charging actual prices to maintain a system that is getting very expensive to operate. We then implement electronic bill pay standards in every industry. My parents didn’t use a computer until they retired and now they have a PO box they rarely use.
I would say they could go up a dime on all there prices an it would be cheaper than UPS on most stuff
Closing on Saturday, gives the workers 13-3 day weekends a year, But this is why the postal service is a loser, No Brains in the upper mangement!! holidays fall on Mondays, so NO mail, Saturday,Sunday ,Monday.
Consider that of the average 10 pieces of mail I may get everyday 8 or 9 are promotionals that never make it inside the house. Most of the bills come and go through the Internet as does all personal correspondence. I appreciate that we are trying to save Maine jobs but rescuing this facility that is mostly a subsidy to junk mail purveyors may not be the best use of scarce financial resources.
The USPS will eventually shrink. How long will we artificially support it?
Could Portland even handle the processing part of what Hampden does. If Sen. Collins is right Hampden does 2/3 of the state mail. Maybe the Postal Service is looking at shutting the wrong place down. Keep Eastern Maine open and close Southern Maine down. It looks like 306 employee’s can process 2/3 of the state nightly and Southern Maine is doing 1/3 nightly. How many employee’s are in Southern Maine???
If they did away with the one in Hampden that means a letter mailed in Fort Kent that was going to Van Burn would half to travel 623 miles
The problem with the state of Maine is people want to have it both ways. You just can’t. To cut down on their losses, cutting jobs is part of the process as much as that sucks, but that’s the way it is. Secondly, all the little post offices for the towns of 14 people in the middle of the woods in Northern Maine which no one has heard about need to be closed. They are a money sieve. Just because you live in a town with 14 people and have a gas station and a convenience store doesn’t mean you need to have a post office. There is one 10 miles down the road so deal with it. To make up for losses, jobs will be lost so deal with it.
OK the same could be said for every town / city in Maine . Have a post offices cover a 15 miles radius like Bangor ect an no home delivers make people drive to the post office to pick up there mail that would save a lot of money an get rid of a lot of people
This is part of the issue though. We don’t need to keep 100,000 people employed at under-utilized distribution centers just so that the relative handful of people who chose to live in remote locations are not inconvenienced. You made the choice to live in a remote part of the world. That means it takes longer for you to get your mail.
So according to you if there are job opening in remote areas than people will not move there to work because there will be no mail service an no internet service
Would you say the same thing for ferry service to the islands why should there be ferry service to the islands with the support of tax pays money they made the choice to live there let them find there own way on an off the island
How many post offices could be open say 7 to 9 in the morning an 5 to 7 at night ?? So the means that the people working at the window would work 4 hrs a day .
I read were it cost more to for a contractor to hall mail between post offices than it would for the post office to do it them self
The best thing yet… mail should be dropped off (delivered) by contractors to the end of their post office runs, then return picked up (dispatched) to the plants once a day
But they have down time an say the contractor gets to the end of there route say 11 am now they half to what say till 3 pm before they can make there return run that person is still getting paid for that down time while they are waiting
thats what they are doing now an the post office could do it cheaper
Not to go off topic: but there’s another story here about how Washington cannot cut anything. Collins is working hard and with good intent to save Maine jobs. Good for her! But, on the other hand, we’ll never balance the budget unless someone is willing to cut something and / or raise taxes.
Instead, Collins wants to keep spending on the USPS, but not raise any taxes to pay for a money-losing operation. It makes no sense. If Maine wants to keep the Hampden operation, it has to pay for it. We cannot have it both ways.
That’s why Washington is broken and nothing gets done. It’s always the same: I want mine, but I don’t want to pay for it. It is time for courage, particularly from the right.
Why not try other cost saving measers before closing post offices like shorter hours like say sorter hours an yes lay off people renting out part of the mail sorting with say like a printing company for fliers