Slower delivery of mail to be expected with new plan

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is good to go on its plan to slow down the mail and implement aggressive price increases, according to the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) in a pair of decisions handed down.

The PRC expressed skepticism about the wisdom of adding an additional day to service standards for first-class and periodicals mail (newspapers/magazines).

But, it stopped short of telling the USPS not to make the change. Instead, it cautioned the USPS to examine its assumptions about cost savings and to look into the root causes of mail slowdowns in recent months.

On a planned increase in postage cost for periodicals that will average nearly 9 percent, added to a 1.5 percent increase earlier this year, the commission gave the USPS a green light and denied pleas by industry groups to hold off on the increase, until the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled on the legality of the large price hikes.

However, the commission did criticize the postal service’s treatment of the costs for flat trays as a substitute for mail sacks, urging better cost analysis, as the National Newspaper Association (NNA) has repeatedly requested.

The commission has ruled in the past, that the USPS needs more money, citing trends that have driven mail handling, delivery and transportation costs to accelerate faster than inflation.

“There is little to cheer about in this set of decisions,” said NNA chair Brett Wesner. “Slower, more costly mail is assuredly going to accelerate the downward spiral of the postal service. The whole nation will suffer, particularly the rural areas served by many community newspapers.”

The NNA has warned for a decade, that without action by Congress, this decline could become almost impossible to stop. With that in mind, the NNA is reiterating that call now to members of Congress.

“NNA supported the addition of one day to delivery times for long-distance newspaper mail, on the condition that USPS keep its commitment to reach its target 95 percent of the time,” said Wesner. “We are already working with USPS on a task force to improve this delivery, so our newspapers can stem the flow of lost subscribers.”

The NNA’s hope is that the commission will be aggressive in enforcing the new standards.

“The rising rates, however, are not the bitter medicine coming from years of strange technological and environmental disruptions to the mail, as the commission seems to believe,” said Wesner. “They are the hemlock that will eventually kill universal service and require Congress to bail out its agency.”