241 post offices remain on updated closure list
November 20th, 2009 | Postal Service | Posted by Gregg Carlstrom
The U.S. Postal Service issued another updated list of possible post office closures (pdf) on Friday, and just 241 facilities remain, down from more than 3,300 when the review process started this summer.
Most of the proposed closures are still concentrated in a few states. Florida has the most, with 40; mail volume has fallen faster than the national average in Florida, largely due to the collapse in the housing sector. California and Ohio both have 26 possible closures; Georgia has 17; and Tennessee has 16.
The list still isn’t final. Postmaster General John Potter said last month that he doesn’t expect the closures to begin until at least January; postal officials estimate they will save between $20 million and $100 million per year.
Tags: John Potter, post office closures
Updated list of possible USPS closures: 371 post offices
October 9th, 2009 | Agencies Postal Service | Posted by Gregg Carlstrom
Here’s the updated list (pdf) of proposed post office closures from USPS. There are 371 post offices on the list, down from nearly 700 on the initial list released in July. Most of them are in major urban areas.
California has the greatest number of proposed closures — roughly 70 of them, mostly in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. New York City, Atlanta, and several cities in Florida would also face cuts.
The Postal Service started the summer with almost 3,600 post offices under review. It pared that list down to 677 before a July 30 congressional hearing on the closures. This latest list isn’t final: Postal officials say it will likely undergo at least one more revision.
Postmaster General John Potter said yesterday that he doesn’t expect closures to begin until at least January. A spokesman for the Postal Regulatory Commission, which oversees the Postal Service, told Federal Times that the PRC expects to receive a final list of closures by December.
The Postal Service estimates the closures will save between $20 million and $100 million per year. The agency had a nearly $7 billion deficit in fiscal year 2009, which ended on Sept. 30.
Tags: John Potter, post office closures
USPS offers incentives; will you take them?
August 25th, 2009 | Agencies Postal Service | Posted by Gregg Carlstrom
Two questions for our readers at the Postal Service, following up on this afternoon’s announcement that USPS will offer buyouts to tens of thousands of employees.
First, I’ve been getting e-mails for at least a year from postal workers who said they would consider retiring early if the Postal Service offered an incentive. That incentive is here now, in the form of a $15,000 payout over 12 months. Is it enough? Will you take it?
Second, maybe you read this story I wrote in April after interviewing Postmaster General John Potter. It includes the following:
The Postal Service’s last round of early retirements did not include incentives. And Potter said incentives are not realistic this year, either.
“Our employees would love some kind of a windfall, but the fact is, we can’t afford to,” Potter said.
Less than five months later, USPS has done an about-face. In between Potter’s statement and today, though, some 2,500 postal workers accepted early retirement offers that did not include incentives. Are you one of those employees? Are you frustrated that you accepted the no-incentive offer?
Interested to hear from you, via e-mail or in the comments.
Tags: early retirements, John Potter
Postal penalties? Nobody knows.
March 26th, 2009 | Postal Service | Posted by Gregg Carlstrom
You’ll recall from this story yesterday that the Postal Service is in danger of running out of cash this year, barring new legislation from Congress. John Potter, the postmaster general, said he intends to keep paying salaries and operational expenses — but the Postal Service might have to forego its annual contribution to the retiree health benefit trust fund.
What happens then?
There won’t be an impact on retirees, because the trust fund covers future retiree benefits. The Postal Service currently spends about $2 billion annually to cover current retirees.
The more interesting question is what Congress or the Treasury Department might do. And nobody knows the answer. I’m told, via the Postal Service’s legal department, the statute that created the trust fund is vague — it doesn’t specify any penalties for missing a payment. It’s uncharted territory.
Tags: John Potter
Should Potter get a bonus?
March 25th, 2009 | Postal Service | Posted by Gregg Carlstrom
One other thought from today’s postal hearing. There was a lot of outrage over John Potter’s compensation package. It’s worth about $850,000, though that includes contributions to his retirement plan and his $66,000 security detail — he’s only taking home about half that amount.
Still, Potter earned a $130,000 bonus last year, even though the Postal Service posted a $3 billion loss. Potter said it was because the Postal Service met other goals, like customer satisfaction and workplace safety. But the bonus prompted some congressional criticism:
Rep. Stephen Lynch: Just because we’re rewarding executives at AIG… for running their companies into the ground, doesn’t mean we should be emulating them here… this defies logic to me.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz: If you have a team that keeps coming up in the red, at a certain point, you can’t be giving bonuses to the coach.
Seems to me that Lynch’s criticism is unfair. AIG went under because lots of people made really stupid bets on derivative products, and executives looked the other way (or encouraged the bets). That’s not the case at the Postal Service, where many of the financial problems stem from outside factors — the recession, the Internet, higher fuel prices, congressional rules and restrictions.
That leaves Chaffetz’s criticism: Do postal officials deserve bonuses when the Postal Service is posting huge losses? What do you think?
Tags: John Potter
Short-term fixes, long-term strategy
March 25th, 2009 | Postal Service | Posted by Gregg Carlstrom
I’ve got a story up on the Web site about today’s marathon Postal Service hearing. It wasn’t very encouraging: As things stand now, the Postal Service faces a $6 billion deficit, and it will run out of money by year’s end.
There are some short-term fixes, like switching to 5-day delivery, or changing the way the Postal Service pays retiree health benefits. They’re detailed in my story. And they’re enough to “plug the gaps,” so to speak, and get the Postal Service through the recession. John Potter, the postmaster general, says he’s confident mail volume will pick up once the economy picks up.
But it seems there’s growing concern in Congress about the long-term health of the Postal Service — about what happens if mail volumes don’t rebound.
Tags: John Potter
Potter's pay package
February 18th, 2009 | Pay & Benefits Postal Service | Posted by Gregg Carlstrom
Should the CEO of a company posting billions in annual losses receive a 50 percent raise and a six-figure bonus?
And I’m not talking about the banks, or the crumbling auto companies. I’m talking about the U.S. Postal Service.
ABC News reported last night that the postmaster general, John Potter, received almost an $80,000 raise last year — his base salary is now $263,575 — along with a $135,041 “incentive bonus.” This in a year when the Postal Service posted a $2.8 billion loss. Throw in retirement benefits and other perks, and his annual salary comes to more than $850,000.
I don’t have a position on Potter’s raise and “incentive bonus,” though I’d love to hear your opinions in the comments section.
Once again, though, we have an example of the Postal Service’s odd “hybrid” status — as something in between a private company and a government agency. Congress encourages the Postal Service to act more like a business; private CEOs tend to receive hefty bonuses. And Potter still earns much less than the CEOs of private shipping companies like FedEx and UPS.
But the ABC story has generated a lot of indignant comments about Potter’s salary. The public obviously doesn’t view the Postal Service like a private business.
Tags: John Potter
USPS hearing: Cash flow troubles
January 28th, 2009 | Postal Service | Posted by Gregg Carlstrom
A subcommittee of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee is holding a hearing on the financial crisis and the Postal Service. (You can watch it live here.)Â Steve Losey is at the hearing, and he’ll have a longer story later, but I wanted to post a few important quotes; first, Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., said this in his opening statement:
We may well be faced with a situation later this year where the Postal Service asks Congress to raise its borrowing limit or provide direct financial assistance. Those are steps I don’t think we should take.
Put another way: The Postal Service may be running out of cash by year’s end.
Carper and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, support giving the Postal Service a two-year break from funding its future retiree health benefits fund, one of its biggest expenditures.
And, as we first reported this morning, Postmaster General John Potter asked Congress to reduce the delivery requirement — from six days a week to five. That could mean an end to Saturday delivery for at least part of the year, or to other delivery days if they’re lighter than Saturday.
Tags: John Potter, Tom Carper