CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — The U.S. Postal Service held a town hall meeting on Thursday to discuss the possible changes to service in Corpus Christi.
Immediately upon public comment, everyone called the meeting a "sham" based on the meeting time and place being 3 p.m. in a small library room at the Janet F. Harte Public Library. The library is in a non-centralized location for the city in Flour Bluff. The meeting coincided with Flour Bluff Schools letting students go for the day, as well.
Many people even protested the changes this past weekend.
The meeting was to provide more details on “Delivering for America,” the postal services 10 year plan to reshape the delivery system.
Since January USPS has been conducting a review of Corpus Christi’s plant and how it operates. What the postal service said they’ll do if changes are made is they will modernize and enhance the current plant to be a local processing center. No facilities would be eliminated in this plan. Although, the biggest change is mail, whether it’s staying local or going far away, will have to go to San Antonio to be sorted.
“With the volume that’s remaining in corpus at this time it makes more sense to consolidate it with the volumes that are being processed in San Antonio," said Kim Calderon, San Antonio Executive Plant Manager for USPS.
To the residents in attendance, that just didn't make sense.
“If the mail’s going to go to San Antonio then come back to the Valley and places like that, isn’t that duplication of effort?” said Johanna Ahrel, a Corpus Christi resident.
No one at the town hall spoke up in favor of the Postal Service’s plan. Attendees believe sending mail to be sorted in San Antonio will delay their mail.
"I see all kind of costs talked about, but I don't see improvement in service. Which basically, as far as the public's concerned that's what they care about...The public wants to know, their mail instead of taking three days will be reduced to two days or one. All I hear is about money," said Alex Barrera, president of the American Postal Workers Union Corpus Christi
In the plan there will be no layoffs of career employees. However, many people at the town hall work for a post office and disputed that employees won’t be impacted.
“What the intention is to make it difficult to delay our mail, so customers will not use our mail to reduce the work force. We’ve been told only 11 career employees will be impacted, it’s been nation wide an average of 80 employees that have been impacted,” Amanda Reyes said, a local postal employee.
Calderon said "Delivering for America" is to save money.
“A lot of trucks running out of the Corpus (Christi) plant, basically empty. That’s a lot of money to be running empty trucks,” she said.
Again, postal employees in attendance argued against the claim trucks are leaving empty.
"If anything we've been leaving mail behind, the ones heading to San Antonio," Brandon Thomas said, a postal employee.
"None of these responses by the Postal Service have actually included how much money you're saving, how much money this plan is saving. All that information is conveniently left out," said Juan Munoz, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, Local Branch 1259.
Alex Aleman president of the San Antonio American Postal Workers Union made the trip to Flour Bluff to tell people they should be concerned about their mail. He said San Antonio isn’t even equipped to handle the influx of mail.
“We’re supposed to have a regional processing center, a new building and they haven’t even built it,” he said.
While no decisions have been made, Barrera let everyone know packages from Corpus Christi have been going to San Antonio for sorting since October. Calderon confirmed that information and said San Antonio has been processing Corpus Christi's Saturday mail for years.
Public comments can still be submitted through March 1. After that, the USPS will be reviewing comments and information and making a decision whether to make changes to the Postal Service in Corpus Christi or not.
If you'd like to mail a written comment you can do so by sending it here:
ATTN PLANT MANAGER:
10410 Perrin Beitel Rd.
San Antonio, TX 78284
More information on the review process can be found here.
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