USPS Woes

U.S. Post Office Woes

I’m KayDee Gilkey with today’s Northwest Farm and Ranch Report.

Reorganization of the U.S. Postal Service has already led to delays in delivery of mail for rural Americans. Mail that was once processed in smaller towns now has one to two stops for processing before being delivered. Many rural residents say this has caused delays in delivery of timely mail. And that is just the start.

Missouri U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill says cutting back to five-day delivery may be the beginning of a death spiral for the postal service.

McCaskill: “I think that there are too many people in Washington who don’t understand what mail service -- universal mail service six days a week means to rural America. I don’t think that they understand that it is an economic backbone for rural America. While we are having less first class mail, we are certainly having more packages and in many instances it is our Postal Office that is using its infrastructure to delivering those packages that last mile.”

McCaskill says the other companies actually pay the USPostal Service to deliver packages to their final destination. But she says they are not paying enough - so she doesn’t want private competitors free-loading off the investment of postal service customers.

McCaskill is concerned that those representatives want to see the postal service privatized. She says if that happens - private industry will go where the money is - and that often is not in rural areas.