City of Cape Girardeau: Late mail no excuse for late payments

The City of Cape Girardeau is reminding its residents that just because a bill arrives late in the mail, that doesn't mean the due date has changed.

Acknowledging that mail delays are "a headache for both residents and staff," the city issued the reminder on payment policies in its email newsletter this week.

According to the communication, the city's utility billing office gets frequent requests from residents to have their past-due fees waived because of the late delivery.

The city has multiple ways to pay bills. Residents can sign up for "e-bills" or emailed delivery of bills; they can pay their bills online; they can have the bill payment automatically deducted from a bank account; they can arrange online bill pay through banks; they can pay over the phone and they can use the utility office drop box.

The city explained in its message that bills are mailed the same week each month. "Payment is due within two weeks, and late fees are applied one week later," the message said.

Postal arrival times and employee conditions are worsening in Cape Girardeau, according to Greg Davidson, a union representative for the American Postal Workers Union.

Davidson said the decision has been made recently to cut off the amount of sorting every day to 5,000 pieces, because that's all the carriers can deliver as the post office is short-handed on carriers. The result, he said, is that large volumes of mail are piling up and mail is being delivered late. Some routes, he said, aren't getting delivered at all, which also means that mail isn't being picked up daily from customers' mailboxes.

"There are over 60 pallets of mail on the floor waiting to be sorted," he said in a message to the Southeast Missourian on Monday, Nov. 20.

Last month, the Southeast Missourian reported that there were several "standby" employees being paid to do nothing, employees who were protected by the union when positions were cut last year. Management has used them sparsely, Davidson said. He said he believes the reason they're not being put to work is to justify cutting more positions. Davidson said some of those employees were put back to work recently, but have "gone back to mostly paying them to sit. ... Here we are heading into the holidays, and Amazon Prime packages are taking two extra days. It's the same for priority packages."