As he endeavored to defend the 10-year “Delivering For America” plan of the U.S. Postal Service, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was questioned by senators on April 16.
DeJoy insisted that stakeholders must support the strategy, which was introduced in 2021, and called it a good one.
Closing local mail facilities for processing and requiring mail to be dealt with hundreds of kilometers away from its place of origin is one of its main elements.
It can be incredibly depressing for a community to lose its mail processing plant, and frequently, this means that their voice is ignored. “Delivering for America” contradicts common sense and simple logic, despite the plan’s proponents’ insistence to the contrary.
DeJoy told the U.S. Senate during the pandemic’s peak in 2020 that although he did not forbid postal employees from working overtime, he did order the dismantling of 600 mail sorting equipment.
After two years, Duluth’s mail stopped being processed there and started traveling to St. Paul every day to be processed.
Up until November of the previous year, the USPS Board of Governors had four meetings where citizens could voice their worries about their mail service.
Then all online and in-person public comments were suspended. The closing of a mail processing facility in Duluth is not unusual.
Thirty localities have received notifications of plant “consolidations” since January.
The Dickinson County Board of Commissioners in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, concerned with the closure of the only mail processing plant in our region, started an online petition to oppose it in our community and in other places facing a similar fate.
Commissioners are hopeful that change will occur if they band together with other cities facing similar challenges.
Perhaps it’s time for a new league of America’s cities, big and small, to band together in this petition to send a message to the postal service: “Your plan isn’t delivering for us.”
This is similar to the fictitious world of DC Comics, where heroes band together for a common good to battle villains.
A new one is required. On April 22, Tracy Asanuma of Iron Mountain, Michigan, successfully petitioned the Dickinson County Board to stop the closure of the only postal processing plant in the Upper Peninsula, which is located in Kingsford. For the News Tribune, she penned this.