CORPUS CHRISTI, Tx. — The United States Postal Service delivers mail to every single address in the country.
It connects rural communities and helps contribute to public safety by delivering essential goods like medication and supplies.
It's often referred to as snail mail, but in Corpus Christi some postal workers said the region could see even further delays as part of a master plan titled Delivering for America.
"What they are trying to do is revamp and upgrade the delivery standards, but it is going to have the opposite effect," said Alex Barrera, president of the American Postal Workers Union Corpus Christi.
The USPS "Delivering for America 10-year plan, which includes an investment of $40 billion, aims to revers a projected $160 billion in projected losses over the next ten years.
According to the USPS report, "our processing, transportation, and delivery network is increasingly misaligned with the products we accept, process, transport, and deliver, because of our reliance on facilities, trucks, and delivery tools that were originally designed for much higher letter mail volume, far smaller packages, and far lower package volume."
Delivering for America Highlights
- USPS had a loss of $87 billion over 14 years.
- Delivering for America establishes strategies to achieve financial stability and service excellence. This includes optimizing mail and processing capabilities as well as improving technology, among other initiatives.
- From fiscal year 2007 to fiscal year 2020, there was a decline of 36 percent in revenue from domestic mail ($21.9 billion).
- From fiscal year 2007 to fiscal year 2020, total mail volume declined 42 percent and first-class mail declined 45 percent.
- USPS has not met first-class mail service targets in eight years.
There's a lot to the plan, but ultimately how it may impact those and others in surrounding towns includes potential consolidation of a processing and distribution center into a local processing center.
This would ultimately send all mail, including mail set to and from Corpus Christi, to a facility in San Antonio.
"Now they propose to consolidate our mail, our machines to the facilities in San Antonio. Common sense dictates that there's two to three day delivery to San Antonio and back, the math is not going to add up, we are looking at a week," Barrera said. "If I want to mail across the street, I expect my mail to be there the next day or so, not a week later."
KRIS 6 News reached out to the USPS to get more information on proposed changes, the agency said it did "not have any further information at this time" and instead sent this fact sheet.
Barrera said that rather than waiting for the public's input, USPS began sending priority mail to San Antonio in October and he said that has already led to delays in mail delivery.
"Your service is going to be impacted, it's already been impacted," he said. "All that mail during the Christmas holiday season, the peak season, it sat there in San Antonio."
Any consolidation of postal services in the area would also impact local jobs, with the potential of those jobs being sent to San Antonio. The number of employees that would be impacted remains unknown.
"The postal service said that there is generally 20 employees that are going to impacted, but the true number as we speak is 80 per plant. Here in Corpus we have 110 career employees. That would be devastating here," Barrera said.
He said these employees would be given an option to move, or quit, and that the postal service does not pay relocation expenses.
"If an employee is not able to do that, because not everyone is mobile, they quit. So they circumvented the no-layoff clause," Barrera said.
Impacts to the public will not be felt only in Corpus Christi, for any person that lives in a zip code beginning with 783, Barrera said they will be impacted.
USPS has scheduled a public input meeting at 3 p.m. February 15 at the Janet F. Harte Public Library.
That location and scheduled time has been questioned by some.
Juan Munoz, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, Local Branch 1259, said the last time USPS had a public hearing it was held at night, at a centrally-located auditorium.
Now, the hearing will be held at a location that is capped at 50 people, at a site adjacent to the Flour Bluff Independent School District and at a time during which students will getting out of school.
"It's almost like they’re trying to make it difficult for the public to get in there and give their two cents, they want all questions forwarded to them ahead of time, they’re not really going to open it up to public questions which kind of defeats the purpose," Munoz said. "The post office hasn’t bought airtime to announce this because they know they would get a bigger response than 50 people."
He said that he encourages the public to attend the meeting.
"It belongs to the public. Every person has a right to the postal service at the same price, so it is a constitutional right they should have a say so in how it's run," Munoz said.
