WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, Congresswoman Nikki Budzinski (IL-13) questioned Postmaster General Louis DeJoy during a hearing with the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. Budzinski pressed DeJoy about his “Delivering for America Plan,” which proposes consolidating the Champaign and Springfield Processing and Distribution Centers in Illinois.
This would result in outgoing mail traveling all the way to Chicago or St. Louis before being sent to its final destination. For reference – Champaign and Chicago are over 130 miles apart; Springfield and St. Louis are about 100 miles apart.
Today’s hearing is part of Budzinski’s ongoing effort to push back against USPS facility changes in Central and Southern Illinois. She has previously written to DeJoy outlining concerns with the downsizing of USPS Processing and Distribution Centers in Springfield and Champaign, Illinois and urged him to reconsider plans that would slow delivery rates for rural residents.
Budzinski’s full remarks and questioning can be found below:
Budzinski: Thank you Chairman Comer and Ranking Member Raskin for holding this important hearing and for giving me the opportunity to waive onto this committee for this hearing. I appreciate that.
Postmaster General DeJoy and Inspector General Hull, thank you for being here and for listening to the concerns that many of my colleagues are sharing regarding the recent proposed changes at the Postal Service.
I represent the Champaign and Springfield Processing and Distribution Centers in Illinois. Under your “Delivering for America Plan,” both of these facilities would be downsized and consolidated into the St. Louis and Chicago distribution centers. This means my constituents’ outgoing mail would have to travel hundreds of miles, additional miles, before even being sent out to their final destinations. With the current degree of service already substandard – these changes are just, quite frankly, unacceptable.
This is even more concerning given the findings in Inspector General Hull’s Report following the implementation of these changes in Richmond, Virginia, which found that these changes “contributed to a decrease in service performance for the Richmond region that continued four months after launch.”
My first question is to Postmaster General DeJoy, can you promise my constituents in Central Illinois that they will not see declines in on-time mail performance if there is a change in operations at the Champaign and Springfield Processing and Distribution Centers? And, I’d really appreciate just a simple yes or no.
DeJoy: They will not experience what we experienced in Richmond.
Budzinski: So no, they will not?
DeJoy: They will not experience what we experienced.
Budzinski: Okay, that’s encouraging. Postmaster General DeJoy, the Champaign Processing & Distribution Center also employs over 200 career and pre-career postal employees and the Springfield Processing & Distribution Center employs over 170 workers. According to the Mail Processing Facility Review, there is expected to be a net loss of over 100 employees at the Champaign Processing & Distribution Center and over 30 at the Springfield Processing & Distribution Center. How are you ensuring that all of these employees are provided with other employment opportunities given that there will be no Processing and Distribution Centers in Central Illinois following these changes?
DeJoy: The intent of the plan number one is, if we in fact make that move for those particular locations, we will be also driving package delivery business into that location. So our intent is that people will have jobs in those particular areas and we will work with attrition – we have a lot of attrition in the Postal Service – and we’ll work through attrition. Some of these locations are evaluating with regard to the new 3661 we just filed and they may or may not be continuing in that direction. That was a big study we did to try to get our hands around where do we get savings from. But I could follow up with you on that. The people are going to be okay.
Budzinski: Yeah, I think that is one of my bigger concerns, these employees and making sure that they can stay within their areas that they’re working. That is the true commitment that they have, that they don’t have to be concerned about their employment situation.
DeJoy: We are very, very committed to that, since I walked in the door, to making the right moves as we’re making this transition so people feel secure in their jobs which is why I converted a lot of people to full-time.
Budzinski: I also wanted to talk about, Postmaster General DeJoy, your Regional Transportation Optimization (RTO) plan. As you know, if enacted, this plan will limit the number of times post offices located more than 50 miles away from a Regional Processing and Distribution Center have their outgoing mail picked up to just one time per day. The Postal Service has admitted that these changes will create up to 24 hours of additional delays for predominantly rural regions – and that’s particularly the region that I represent in downstate Illinois.
In the third quarter of the last fiscal year, on-time delivery rates for three-to-five day first class mail in downstate Illinois was only 68 percent. Given that one-third of my constituents are already getting their mail late, how can you justify further delaying their mail simply because they don’t live within a 50 mile area of a larger city?
DeJoy: We need to reshape the Postal Service because we’re losing a lot of money. It was 59 billion pieces of single piece first class mail in 1999, there’s less than twelve now and it’s going down. What I will say, in this plan, right now we have trucks going out in the morning empty and coming back empty, then going out at night empty and coming back empty. What we’re proposing in this new plan for those further areas, we go out and deliver and pick up the mail at the same time. Then we will accelerate it through the system. 90% of the mail throughout the nation, especially on delivery going into these areas, will be accelerated. It’s just the pickup of single piece first class mail that will be delayed tops 24 hours, so two days might go to three days, three days might go to four days, four days might go to five days but nothing is going beyond five days because we’ll fly it or do something else.
I think all these decisions are tough, we can stop tens of thousands of trucks running around empty around the nation by doing this. And some of these areas, like your area, where it’s remote but it’s got population and package business in and out, we articulate the worst of the situation. I think there’s some other opportunities for those areas.
Budzinski: I just want to say that these changes can’t be made on the backs of rural America and that is my very big concern that the focus is on these urban cities, these big cities, at the detriment and at the loss of services for rural parts of our country. That’s a very big concern.
