The financially struggling U.S. Postal Service’s announcement Wednesday that it will stop delivering mail to homes and businesses on Saturdays seemed to leave many Yakima Valley residents unfazed.
Several interviewed in downtown Yakima shrugged it off, saying they don’t get much important mail anymore.
“I’m OK with not getting junk mail on the weekend,” said Kris McClure of Yakima.
Like others, Dr. David Ozanne said he takes care of bills and other things online.
The 74-year-old Yakima resident said there were few options besides mail when he was a child and his father worked as a local letter carrier.
“I remember when a letter cost 3 cents and a postcard was 1 cent,” he said.
But with the Postal Service in a difficult financial situation today, several residents said that if cost-cutting means no mail on Saturdays, so be it.
“We can’t ask them to do more than their budget,” said Ellie Lambert of Yakima.
The Postal Service said it would continue to disburse packages six days a week and continue delivering to post office boxes on Saturdays. Post offices now open on Saturdays would remain open.
The service expects the Saturday mail cutback to begin the week of Aug. 5 and save about $2 billion annually, said Postmaster General and CEO Patrick R. Donahoe.
“Our financial condition is urgent,” Donahoe said at a news conference.
The move accentuates one of the agency’s strong points: package delivery has increased by 14 percent since 2010, officials say, while the delivery of letters and other mail has declined with the increasing use of email and other Internet services.
Over the past several years, the Postal Service has advocated shifting to a five-day delivery schedule for mail and packages — and it repeatedly but unsuccessfully appealed to Congress to approve the move. Though an independent agency, the service gets no tax dollars for its day-to-day operations but is subject to congressional control.
Congress has included a ban on five-day delivery in its appropriations bill. But because the federal government is now operating under a temporary spending measure, rather than an appropriations bill, Donahoe says it’s the agency’s interpretation that it can make the change itself.
“This is not like a ‘gotcha’ or anything like that,” he said. The agency is essentially asking Congress not to reimpose the ban when the spending measure expires on March 27 and he said he would work with Congress on the issue.
The agency clearly thinks it has a majority of the American public on its side regarding the change.
Postal Service market research and other research indicates that nearly 7 in 10 Americans support the switch to five-day delivery as a way for the Postal Service to reduce costs, the agency said.
Nicholas Kline, owner of Yakima’s Shipping Shop at the Westpark Shopping Center on 40th and Summitview avenues, said he understood why USPS made this decision.
“Being a business owner, I think it’s a good move on (the Postal Service’s) part,” he said. “They needed to do what they had to do to save money or cut down on their losses.”
Kline didn’t expect the move to affect his business much. He noted that out of the 250 people with private post office boxes in his store, about 70 percent of them come in Monday to Friday. A much smaller percentage — about 20 percent — come in on Saturday.
“People want to complain and say they need it because it’s always been there, when they don’t utilize it in the first place,” he said.
Kline printed out an article from USPS and offered copies for customers. He said the Postal Service could do a better job explaining itself.
Many people still believe the Postal Service receives government funding, he said.
Not everyone is as understanding.
The president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, Fredric Rolando, said ending Saturday mail delivery is “a disastrous idea that would have a profoundly negative effect on the Postal Service and on millions of customers,” particularly businesses, rural communities, the elderly, the disabled and others who depend on Saturday delivery for commerce and communication.
Republican Rep. Doc Hastings of Pasco said he recognizes the Postal Service must find ways to meet its financial obligations and prevent rising costs to consumers.
“The U.S. Postal Service is running out of time and Congress needs to look at ways to give them the flexibility they need to be financially solvent. As a member of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which oversees the U.S. Postal Service, I believe Congress must look at ways to put the Postal Service on the path to fiscal solvency while having the least impact on consumers,” Hastings said in a statement.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Ranking Member Tom Coburn M.D., R-Okla., said in a joint statement that they support of the elimination of Saturday mail.
Others agreed the Postal Service had little choice.
“If the Congress of the United States refuses to take action to save the U.S. Postal Service, then the Postal Service will have to take action on its own,” said corporate communications expert James S. O’Rourke, professor of management at the University of Notre Dame.
He said other action will be needed as well, such as shuttering smaller rural post offices and restructuring employee health care and pension costs.
“It’s unclear whether the USPS has the legislative authority to take such actions on its own, but the alternative is the status quo until it is completely cash starved,” O’Rourke said in a statement.
The Postal Service made the announcement more than six months before the switch to give residential and business customers time to plan and adjust, officials said.
Donahoe said the change would mean a combination of employee reassignment and attrition, and is expected to achieve cost savings of about $2 billion annually when fully implemented.
The agency in November reported an annual loss of a record $15.9 billion for the last budget year and forecast more red ink in 2013, capping a tumultuous year in which it was forced to default on billions in retiree health benefit prepayments to avert bankruptcy.
The financial losses for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30 were more than triple the $5.1 billion loss in the previous year. Having reached its borrowing limit, the mail agency is operating with little cash on hand.
The agency’s biggest problem — and the majority of the red ink in 2012 — was not due to reduced mail flow but rather the mounting mandatory costs for future retiree health benefits, which made up $11.1 billion of the losses. Without that and other related labor expenses, the mail agency sustained an operating loss of $2.4 billion, lower than the previous year.
The health payments are a requirement imposed by Congress in 2006 that the post office set aside $55 billion in an account to cover future medical costs for retirees. The idea was to put $5.5 billion a year into the account for 10 years. That’s $5.5 billion the post office doesn’t have.
No other government agency is required to make such a payment for future medical benefits. Postal authorities wanted Congress to address the issue last year, but lawmakers finished their session without getting it done. So officials are moving ahead to accelerate their own plan for cost-cutting.
The Postal Service is in the midst of a major restructuring throughout its retail, delivery and mail processing operations. Since 2006, it has cut annual costs by about $15 billion, reduced the size of its career workforce by 193,000 or by 28 percent, and has consolidated more than 200 mail processing locations, officials say.
• Yakima Herald-Republic reporters Dan Catchpole, Mai Hoang and Mike Faulk contributed to this report.