Senate's bipartisan postal-reform bill mirrors the House's, increasing likelihood that Congress will pass it this year

The Senate now has its own version of a bipartisan postal reform bill, identical to the one recently approved by a House committee, making more likely that Congress will pass the measure this year. The bill, S. 1720, was introduced by Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chair Gary Peters of Michigan, ranking Republican Rob Portman of Ohio and 18 other co-sponsors.

The bill "would provide financial relief to the U.S. Postal Service by reforming retiree health-benefit funds and also set up new public-reporting requirements on mail-service on-time delivery," the National Newspaper Association said in a press release. "For the first time in a decade, we have a realistic hope of support from Congress for universal mail delivery," said NNA Chair Brett Wesner, president of Wesner Publications in Cordell, Okla. 

The bill continues a guarantee of six-day mail delivery and an NNA-lobbied provision that would let newspapers to increase the use of sample copies to recruit new readers and reach all households in their home counties. The new limit would be 50 percent of a paper's annual home-county circulation; the current limit, in place for more than 100 years, is 10 percent.

"For community newspapers, the opportunity to regain subscribers that we have lost through service disruptions over the past few years will be a welcome indicator from the Postal Service and Congress that newspapers in the mail are important to American civic life and literacy," Wesner said.

Neither bill would limit postal rate increases, and that worries community newspapers and other large mailers because the Postal Regulatory Commission recently gave the Postal Service authority to raise rates substantially.

“We hope that reform of the onerous employee benefits obligations will remove a substantial amount of the pressure on postal finances,” Wesner said. “One aspect of the anticipated postage increases was to cover retiree health costs. Once Congress comes up with a more rational payment system for those costs, we expect both USPS and the PRC to recognize a need to dial back the plans for big postage increases.”