In the News

The Roanoke Times
By Dan Casey
© November 17, 2011
Full story here

The best show of all this week must have been the meeting at William Fleming High School on Monday night.

There, 500 unhappy and boisterous postal workers, family members and postal customers asked highly charged but intelligent questions and leveled one zinger after another at some bureaucrats on a stage.

The subject was the financial death spiral that the U.S. Postal Service finds itself in today.

One potential solution the suits are prescribing would close down Roanoke's distribution and processing center, which is the source of hundreds of good-paying, blue-collar jobs in our community.

Now here's what such an action would mean:

- Roanoke's mail would be processed in Greensboro, N.C.

- A few hundred longtime postal workers would have to move there to keep their jobs.

- It would triple the delivery time for crosstown mail, because a letter from the Williamson Road area to downtown would first be shipped to Greensboro, processed, then shipped back here.

- And for the most part, Roanoke would lose its coveted postmark, which is one element of a community's identity.

This is necessary, the suits told that unruly crowd, because the postal service is suffering. Indeed, that's true. It's billions in the red.

In 2006, the system processed 213 billion pieces of first-class mail, which is the agency's bread and butter. This year, that's down to 164 billion. Email and online bill-paying are eating into old-fashioned snail mail.

The aim is to eliminate 35,000 postal jobs next year, out of a total workforce of 559,000, which in recent years has been cut from 788,000.

But barely mentioned as a cause of all this anguish was an insane law the geniuses in Congress passed five years ago called the Postal Enhancement and Accountability Act.

That legislative gem was introduced Dec. 7, 2006, by former Rep. Tom Davis, R-Fairfax County, during a lame-duck session of Congress. (Davis retired in 2008).

It passed the House on Dec.8 on a voice vote. And the Senate the same way on Dec. 9. Conveniently, no record exists of how individual lawmakers voted. President George W. Bush signed it Dec. 20, 2006.

It required the postal service to pay in advance for the health benefits of all its workers likely to retire in the next 75 years. And it had to come up with that money within a single decade.

Thus, the agency has to pay now for the future health insurance of workers who haven't even been hired yet. Heck, many of them haven't even been born.

The law also limited the postal service's ability to increase first-class postage rates. So it couldn't raise revenue to afford the new and onerous health-care burden.

Today, that double-whammy is costing the postal service — which gets zilch subsidy from American taxpayers — $5.5 billion per year.

The predictable result has been financial chaos for the postal service. And in large part that underlies attempts to close Roanoke's distribution and processing center, along with 250 others across the country.

You couldn't design a better way to kill an independent, government-sanctioned agency.

Even worse, the billions the postal service is paying to cover the future health care of unhired and unborn workers goes not into any trust, but into the general fund. Congress spends it, then adds the future liability to the national debt.

There's another law under consideration now, HR 1351. Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, is one of scores of co-sponsors from both parties.

It would allow the postal service to shift money from its pension fund (which is overfunded by as much as $50 billion) to cover the onerous prefunding of its retirees' health benefits.

It's better than nothing, but far from perfect.

The postal service indeed needs to make other reforms. Ending Saturday delivery nationwide, as former Roanoke postmaster Billy Martin suggested Monday night, might be a better option. That would save $3 billion or so annually.

Still, as much as 75 percent of the red ink on the agency's books since 2007 is directly attributable to that dumb 2006 law — the one that seems designed to kill the postal service.

The first thing Congress should do is repeal that.

"Personally, I think that's the right thing to do," Griffith told me Wednesday. "That would be the simplest — but this is Washington. Getting it through committee would be another ballgame."

What a sad but true verdict.