USPS needs to shrink, postmaster tells Kiwanis

Sarah Ein­se­len — Staff

Mike Willacker, Galion post­mas­ter, explains some of the pro­pos­als to shrink the USPS bud­get that have been placed before Con­gress. He was the Kiwa­nis guest speaker at the club’s meet­ing Tues­day, Feb. 7.

By Sarah Einselen

Inquirer Reporter

Galion post­mas­ter Mike Willacker said at the most recent Kiwa­nis meet­ing that the U.S. Postal Ser­vice needs to trim its bud­get but is await­ing direc­tion from Con­gress to do so. The Galion Kiwa­nis Club invited Willacker to speak at the Feb. 7 meet­ing, held in the Moose lodge on South Mar­ket Street.

“The post office is set up to deliver to every address in the coun­try and that num­ber of addresses grows by a mil­lion every year,” Willacker said. How­ever, the vol­ume of mail sent through the USPS has declined rapidly since its peak year in 2006. “We still have to deliver to every house, to truck mail to every city, but there’s less mail on those trucks,” he said.

“The post office wants to get smaller, they want to con­sol­i­date things,” said Willacker. The cur­rent goal is to trim $20 bil­lion out of the present $80 bil­lion bud­get by 2015.

And though Con­gress has over­sight over the USPS—and dic­tates what it can and can­not do to trim its operations—the USPS is not funded through the fed­eral bud­get, said Willacker. “There’s a lot of mis­con­cep­tion that if they’re doing any­thing for us, it’s a buyout.”

Con­gress, the USPS and the Pres­i­dent have pro­posed var­i­ous solu­tions to the USPS’s cur­rent bud­get issues, but “Con­gress has a real prob­lem agree­ing with any­thing and com­ing up with a solu­tion,” Willacker said. The USPS also has to work around cur­rent union con­tracts that do not allow for many lay­offs. Since 2006, it has instead been reduc­ing its work­force by leav­ing posi­tions unfilled after employ­ees retire. The USPS also hires more tem­po­rary work­ers than before, Willacker said, so it can more eas­ily adjust when mail vol­ume fluctuates.

“Galion is good right now,” he said. “We have the peo­ple that we need.” Some other loca­tions are short work­ers and the post office usu­ally tries to shift employ­ees around rather than hir­ing more.

It helps that tech­nol­ogy has taken over some jobs for­merly done by people.

Sarah Ein­se­len — Staff

Peter Waite is hon­ored as the Kiwa­nis Mem­ber of the Week at the club’s Feb. 7 meet­ing. He has been a licensed funeral direc­tor for 12 years and cur­rently man­ages the Mark Schnei­der Funeral Home in Galion. He and his wife moved to Galion three years ago and will cel­e­brate their tenth anniver­sary this year.

“Ninety per­cent of our let­ters don’t get touched by our peo­ple until the let­ter car­ri­ers,” said Willacker. Sort­ing is done by machine and frees up the car­ri­ers to take on longer deliver routes. Where car­ri­ers before were deliv­er­ing to 400 houses, now they take the mail to 700–800 on a route, he said.

Some of the USPS’s cur­rent bud­get prob­lems stem from a 2006 Con­gres­sional man­date that the USPS pre-fund its employ­ees’ retire­ments, said Willacker. “So we have 10 years to fund the health and retire­ment ben­e­fits for the next 75 years.” The USPS has so far put over $30 bil­lion into its retire­ment fund, he said.

The man­date was one com­pro­mise the USPS agreed to in order to get some favor­able reforms enacted, but the com­pro­mise came in the USPS’s peak year, when rev­enues were look­ing good.

Then the down­turn came in 2007, and with it the begin­ning of a dras­tic decline in mail vol­ume. Willacker attrib­uted some of the decline to increased Inter­net use, text mes­sag­ing and online bill pay­ment tools. Ris­ing gas prices have also bit­ten off a chunk of the USPS’s budget—“one penny costs us $8 mil­lion,” Willacker said.

As for solutions—“there’s a lot of things that are out there but noth­ing has been decided,” he said.

The USPS announced in Decem­ber that next-day deliv­ery would cease because it was con­sol­i­dat­ing its pro­cess­ing facil­i­ties. “The the­ory is a lot of peo­ple aren’t using the mail for crit­i­cal things,” Willacker said—choosing to com­mu­ni­cate via phone or e-mail when time is of the essence—so next-day deliv­ery isn’t as impor­tant as it used to be.

Another idea was to cut Sat­ur­day deliv­er­ies, a deci­sion that has to be made by Congress.

“At one point I thought that had a chance,” Willacker said, “because it was the least con­tro­ver­sial of the pro­pos­als. But they want that to be a last resort.

Posted by Sarah Einselen on Feb 10 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.