Rural Americans rely on prompt service, the organization says
A farm organization is concerned with how a United States Postal Service (USPS) decision will affect rural Americans.
The USPS’s Regional Transportation Optimization plan proposes a consolidation of delivery and collection activities.
“For Post Offices far from regional hubs, pick-up and drop-off of mail will occur primarily in the morning,” the plan says.
Typically, mail is brought from regional processing centers to local post offices. Parcels collected from mailboxes are brought to the post office and then taken to the regional centers.
This plan would eliminate the evening portion of the process and apply to post offices more than 50 miles away from processing centers.
This move creates delays that disproportionately affect rural Americans, said Garrett Hawkins, president of the Missouri Farm Bureau.
“We believe these taxpayer-funded services should serve rural and urban areas equally to the maximum extent possible,” he said in a Nov. 13 letter to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. “Further restricting access to services in rural areas does not accomplish this goal.”
USPS reps confirm rural mail could experience longer delays.
“If a mailpiece enters the mailstream near a USPS Regional Processing & Distribution Center and is delivered to a rural area, it will get there as fast, if not faster, than current delivery. If mail enters the mailstream from a rural area, it may take 12-24 hours extra but is still within our service standards,” Becky Hernandez, a USPS spokesperson, told KOSU in Oklahoma.
About 68 percent of single-piece first-class mail could experience downgraded service, estimated Arslan Saleem, the USPS director of corporate performance reporting and analytics, told Congress.
Rural Americans need reliable postal service to receive bills, medication and other items.
Going forward with this consolidation would make the service more unreliable, Hawkins said.
“We urge your team to reconsider this proposal and develop a better path forward that prioritizes efficiency within the service, and equitable treatment between rural and urban citizens,” he said in his letter.