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Friday, May 22, 2015

Postal Service should report quality of rural mail service, National Newspaper Association says

Letters have been taking longer to arrive, especially in rural areas. To help address the disparity, National Newspaper Association CEO Tonda F. Rush said at a May 19 roundtable discussion hosted by a Senate committee, Congress should require the U.S. Postal Service to report the quality of mail service in rural areas. NNA Postal Committee Chair Max Health said he and the other postal executives are open to discussion about how rural mail delivery can be improved.

"The Postal Service took a radical step when it began closing down the processing operations in smaller cities and moved them to the heart of urban America," said NNA President John Edgecombe, Jr., who publishes The Nebraska Signal in Geneva, Neb. "NNA is taking every possible step to get USPS to address the problems created by these closings."

Rush said that USPS provides reports about how well it meets its service standards, but most of the information is about urban mail. However, the USPS did report slow service during the first quarter of 2015 for First-Class Mail that should have reached its destination in three days. In many places, that standard was only reached in 60 percent of cases. The Postal Service blamed the weather across the country. Sen. Jon Tester, D-MT said, "There was bad weather in the Northeast, but in Montana, we were in shirt sleeves. There is always going to be bad weather somewhere."

For a 7 mb PDF of NNA's PowerPoint presentation to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, click here.

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