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Thursday, August 29, 2013

Rural residents, especially poor, would suffer from emergency postal rate hike, NNA head says

UPDATE, Sept. 5: The Postal Board of Governors today postponed action on the proposed rate increase until its next meeting, Sept. 24-25 in Kansas City.

"The rural poor will be hit hard" if the U.S. Postal Service gets an emergency rate increase as Congress dithers about its future, Merle Baranczyk, publisher of the Mountain-Mail in Salida, Colo., writes in an op-ed piece in The Albuquerque Journal. He is president of the National Newspaper Association, which is lobbying hard for a postal-reform bill.

"The inaction of Congress does not justify the possibility of a major postage increase next January," Baranczyk writes. "The law permits an annual postage increase, which usually occurs in mid-January, so long as the Consumer Price Index sets the ceiling for the increase. It allows much larger increases if the Postal Service faces an 'exigency' or emergency. This allowance has not yet been used since the price cap went into effect in 2007, so no one is quite sure what qualifies as an 'exigency.' But the completely foreseeable creep of digital technology into Americans’ communications habits is not an exigency. It is just a reality."

An "exigent" rate hike from USPS's Board of Governors would come "from the pockets of the public, especially small businesses and rural customers that are most dependent upon the mail," Baranczyk argues. "In a state with sweeping expanses of rural areas, like New Mexico, the burden of major postage increases will fall heavily upon small towns and ranches. When barely two-thirds of the state has access to the Internet and many who do simply cannot afford to use it, the mail is the lifeline." (Read more)

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