The US Postal Service wasted no time after announcing its 10-year plan on Tuesday and filed immediately with the Postal Regulatory Commission on a key provision.
The USPS wants to change service standard for First Class Mail to give it 5 days instead of 3 days to get mail delivered, citing in part the scarcity of airplane and truck capacity.
The Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) announced on Wednesday that the law requires the Postal Service to seek an opinion for changes that generally affect service on a nationwide or substantially nationwide basis.
“On March 23, the Postal Service filed a notice of pre-filing conference with the Commission for the portion of its plan that involves changing service standards for First Class Mail and certain Periodicals,” the PRC announced. “This notice and a pre-filing conference are parts of the process the Postal Service must follow when submitting its plan to the Commission.”
The PRC said it requires the Postal Service to seek public input by holding at least one pre-filing conference – and it must make a good faith effort to address the concerns of interested persons.
The Postal Service must give at least ten day’s advance notice before the first scheduled pre-filing conference.
The PRC noted that, by law, its final opinion is advisory in nature. “The law does not give the Commission authority to veto service changes.”
To make it crystal clear that the Postal Service will be able to implement the change as long as it follows the required steps and timeline in seeking the PRC opinion, the commission added, “As a result, the Postal Service is not required to implement or take any further action with regard to the Commission’s opinion.”
See the full announcement on the PRC.gov website. (Hat tip to PostCom tweet.)
When has first class mail taken three days? Not recently! If it started taking five, I would be nothing short of thrilled. Lately, a lot of my first class packages are taking two WEEKS and longer, with a few taking as long as six to seven weeks!
In some cases, rail could replace trucks. At one time the Postal Service shipped some magazines relatively short distances rail in containers to reduce backhaul costs. While air will continue to be dominant for first-class mail and lightweight packages, containers shipped long distance by rail and short distance by trucks could lower the US Postal Service carbon footprint and increase reliability if managed with reliability as a top priority. Direct rail times coast-to-coast could be three to four days instead of five days by truck. Slowing mail service will require increased storage space mail waiting for transit to the next sorting facility. Did the postal service have enough parking for trucks used to “store” mail waiting for processing last fall?