-
News
WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Representative Jack Bergman (R-Watersmeet) joined Representative Nikki Budzinski (D-Illinois) in a bipartisan effort aimed at blocking efforts to consolidate postal operations and transition certain services away from facilities deemed to be under-performing.
"Bureaucrats in the U.S. Postal Service seem to have this misperception that they understand the delivery needs of the Upper Peninsula’s rural communities more than the people actually living there,” Bergman said in a news release.
The effort comes in the wake of current Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s plans to invest $40 billion nationally in an effort that would upgrade certain facilities to become regional processing and distribution centers, while downsizing others into what DeJoy’s “Delivering for America” plan calls “local processing centers.”
As part of the reorganization, a significant portion of U.P. mail now handled in Kingsford would instead be handled in Green Bay, Wisconsin. As a Regional Processing Distribution Center (RPDC), the Green Bay facility would sort all mail and packages being sent to other regions, as well as sort packages for delivery in the regional area.
RPDCs will be “the hubs for the Postal Service’s long-distance transportation,” according to the USPS Office of Inspector General. Local processing centers, then, will be responsible for sorting letters to individual mail carrier routes in the regional area.
Bergman and Budzinski’s bill, called the Protect Postal Performance Act, would halt USPS’s consolidation plans. It would bar USPS from downsizing any processing facility in regions failing to meet on-time delivery targets of 90.3% for 3-5 day first-class mail, and 93% for 2-day first-class mail. The U.P. currently experiences on-time delivery rates of 75% for 3-5 day first-class mail and 91% for 2-day mail.
In a March opinion column for the Iron Mountain Daily News, USPS spokesperson Elizabeth Najduch said that the Kingsford facility would not be closed, it would receive $3.75 million in upgrades, and that no “career employees” would be laid off.