13th District Congresswoman Nikki Budzinski was one of more than a dozen lawmakers who questioned U.S. Postmaster Louis DeJoy on Tuesday during a House Committee on Oversight and Accountability hearing.
Budzinski pressed DeJoy about his “Delivering for America Plan,” which proposes consolidating the Champaign and Springfield Processing and Distribution Centers in Illinois into the St. Louis and Chicago distribution centers. This would result in outgoing mail traveling over 100 miles before landing in someone’s mailbox.
Budzinski said during yesterday’s hearing that the proposed changes are unacceptable and will not improve anyone’s postal service: “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.”
Budzinski also brought up the fact that the consolidation plan has said it would result in the loss of nearly 100 total jobs between both locations, and that Central Illinois would no longer have a processing and distribution center.
DeJoy pushed back saying that empty trucks and a lack of business are pushing the cuts, because the postal service continues to bleed money: “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 says the changes can’t all be borne by rural America: “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.”
Budzinski has written to DeJoy multiple times over the last two years over the implementation of the downsizing plan. Budzinski and others have introduced legislation that would slow or stop its implementation due to already substandard on-time delivery services. According to statistics, Central Illinois only has a 68% on-time delivery rate.