.jpg)
Ink Spo ts
Matt Paxton
Most weekly newspapers like The News- Gazette, and an increasing number of daily papers, rely on the US Postal Service to deliver newspapers to their subscribers. This move by dailies to postal deliver and away from their own carriers has slowed but not reversed the decline in Periodical mail volume.
But, just as these daily newspapers are making this move, delivery service by USPS has taken a dive, particularly deliveries to recipients outside the local area of the newspaper. We’ve seen this decline in prompt delivery, and I’m betting you have, too. We hear complaints of mailed payments being so delayed that people get late charges or disconnect notices.
I want to make it clear, this is a systemic problem, not a local one. Our local carriers and offices do an excellent job. Our local subscribers get their News-Gazette regularly on Wednesday. The problem is rooted in changes being made to the national delivery network, and in our case here, changes that started last fall in the Richmond mail sorting facility, where all our mail comes from and goes to.
We have subscribers who live away from Rockbridge County complaining of papers received weeks after they’ve been mailed, and sometimes getting several issues at the same time.
At the same time, USPS has drastically increased the rates we pay to mail the paper – with increases of 5 to 10 percent twice a year since 2022. Just a couple of weeks ago when the cost of a stamp went up, our rates went up almost 10 percent. That’s on top of an increase of about 6.7% we got this past January.
There are two bills in Congress now that would keep the Postal Service from raising postal rates unless and until it can prove that it is delivering newspapers within its own delivery standards 95 percent of the time. The House bill is co-sponsored by Rep. Abigail Spanberger, who represents a swath of Virginia from the Richmond suburbs to northern Virginia. The Senate bill was introduced by Sen. Peter Welch of Vermont. Both bills have bipartisan co-sponsors from across the political spectrum. I think this is indicative of how much dissatisfaction legislators have heard from their constituents on mail delivery.
If these bills were to become law, it may help community newspapers get better service, and failing that, relief on the constant rate increases. But it doesn’t go to the underlying issue – how to make the US Postal Service sustainable for the long term. I don’t agree with Postmaster Louis DeJoy’s strategy for attaining sustainability.
His Deliver For America plan (not to be confused with the Deliver For Democracy act) is based on relentless rate increases and a concentration of the Postal Services resources on developing more package business appears to me to be consigning regular mail to being an afterthought. That’s a huge disservice to the nation, and especially rural areas like ours that depend on the mail for the delivery of medications, for delivering invoices and payments for local businesses and for local newspapers.
Our country needs a postal service that is affordable, reliable and delivers to every home and business in America. The Postal Service needs a reliable source of funding that’s not pushing customers out of the mail. It’s an incredibly complex problem to solve. I don’t have the answer. But there has to be a way than the plan in place that balances the interests of mailers, the public and postal workers that provides a better long-term solution.
