Those frustrated with the ongoing mail delays in metro Atlanta finally got some good news Tuesday.
After being grilled for months by a bipartisan group of politicians seeking answers about delivery problems across the country, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has agreed to pause the changes being made at some post office facilities until 2025.
In a letter addressed to Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), DeJoy discussed the changes being made at nearly 60 mail processing facilities in the United States, including the Atlanta Regional Processing and Distribution Center in Palmetto, and said the U.S. Postal Service would take a closer look at its “Delivering for America” plan.
“In response to the concerns you and your colleagues have expressed,” DeJoy said, “I will commit to pause any implementation of these moves at least until after January 1, 2025.”
Peters, along with 25 other senators, wrote DeJoy last week and asked him to delay the changes until the potential impacts could be studied. “Delivering for America” was implemented in 2021 in order to improve postal service efficiency.
Peters had expressed concern about changes at the Iron Mountain Processing Center in his state, which would move some mail operations to a facility in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
In Georgia, U.S. senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock had both spoken out about the persistent mail delays that had originated at the new Palmetto facility that opened in February. They sent separate letters to DeJoy in March and April, asking for answers, but did not receive individual responses.
Then last week, Ossoff asked DeJoy again for an update on what improvements had been made since a contentious April 16 Senate committee hearing on the problems. He requested that DeJoy respond by Thursday.
“At the hearing, you told me that my constituents should start seeing service improve ‘now’ and that ‘we will get to where we need to be in about 60 days.’ Please provide me an update on the current on-time delivery statistics in the metro Atlanta area within one week,” Ossoff wrote.
He also reiterated in the letter the glaring fact that Michael Kubayanda, the Postal Regulatory Commission’s chairman, noted at the hearing: that on-time delivery for first-class mail was being met only 36% of the time. That meant some Georgia residents’ bills were not arriving by the due dates and their medicine was not being delivered in a timely manner, among countless other issues.
The Postal Service will not restart the facility changes without advising the senators first, DeJoy insisted. He added that the eventual implementation will now come at a slower pace.
The main goals of the “Delivering for America” plan are to modernize the vehicle fleet, increase revenue and produce a 95% on-time reliability rate.
DeJoy has said the Georgia delays were the result of having to move 2,000 employees to the Palmetto facility from other locations, and that the postal service has “strict requirements as to when they move,” as well as “inbound transportation issues.”
For the past few weeks, he has repeated the same message — the changes are necessary, but that it would take time to work.
“You have been hearing from fellow senators about changes being made at processing plants in their home states, which your colleagues feel have the potential to adversely impact service in their states and especially locally,” DeJoy wrote to Peters.
“We do not see these planned actions as at all consequential to service; rather, they are important elements of achieving a network that can provide greater service reliability in a cost-effective manner.”
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
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