Postal Service working through options in area

The U.S. Postal Service in the Cape Girardeau region continues to struggle, as management searches for short- and long-term solutions, some of which may eventually bring a return of some processing operations to Cape Girardeau.

While fewer post office employees remain on "standby status" and doing nothing as described in the Southeast Missourian last fall, local union representative Greg Davidson said management is shifting resources to some areas while delivery and customer service is deteriorating further in others.

In the short term, the local post office last week struggled to find a replacement for one of its outsourced transportation companies that suddenly stopped its bulk delivery service. Davidson said this news meant the post office had no one to take its mail to St. Louis for processing, prompting emergency meetings.

The company, Ferguson Trucking, "had taken over from Postal Fleet, which also went out of business many months ago," Davidson said. "Postal Fleet was the fourth-largest transportation contractor for the USPS."

Reporting by the Washington Post in 2021 explained that the Florida-based Postal Fleet Services contends flaws with the USPS's "dynamic route optimization" software resulted in incorrect mileage and travel-time calculations, shorting the contractor $110 million over four years.

That business failure, followed Ferguson Trucking's departure Wednesday, March 13, is compounding other issues affecting mail delivery in Southeast Missouri.

Attempts to reach Ferguson Trucking were unsuccessful. Davidson on Friday, March 15, said drivers were found to deliver, but because of language barriers, some of them got lost and made trucks late. He said they picked up mail Friday that should have gone out Wednesday and Thursday, March 14.

Davidson said he's aware of another local truck contractor refusing to make multiple trips to the Perryville area.

The contractor trucking problem is one of many the post office is struggling to fix, as local mail continues to run behind schedule.

Late mail

David Beussink, owner of Cape Delivery and Presort Mail Service for 12 years along with his wife, Pam, said post office service is the worst he's seen in the last dozen years. He said customer service has nosedived since some letter-sorting equipment was removed from Cape Girardeau a handful of years ago.

In his business, Beussink and his employees retrieve mail from post office boxes and deliver it to local businesses. Several of his clients have hired him because mail is delivered to post office boxes more expeditiously than mailbox delivery. Among his clients is one of the two large hospitals in Cape Girardeau. Some of his clients have set up post office boxes specifically for checks to be mailed from clients.

"The mail used to be up around 9 o'clock," Beussink said. "Now some days it might not be up till 2:30 in the afternoon. Some days the mail doesn't even show up at all down there. It's not typical, but it has happened. So we have to wait around for a long period of time or go back to the post office to get this mail. We've noticed a lot of problems with mail getting to people on time, taking five or six days, where it typically should take no longer than three days to get there."

Beussink said he received a personal piece of mail that was returned to him Wednesday that was sent Dec. 12. It was returned because of a problem with the address. In another example, he said he sent a payment from his Scott County home to SEMO Electric in Sikeston. He sent the payment six days before the bill was due, but the payment arrived late, and he was assessed a late penalty by the electric company.

"I think that the Postal Service has lost a lot of respect for the public because they do not have the customer service that they used to," Beussink said. "There's people in there all the time that are mailing packages. I was in line the other day, and a gentleman had mailed seven packages, and none of them got delivered. This used to not be like this."

Out of standby

Davidson said post office management in February moved some employees out of standby status into different roles, after a deadline passed allowing them to do so. Only two standby employees remain; they are both maintenance employees. As reported last fall, several carriers were working many hours of overtime, struggling to make deliveries while shorthanded, and mail was being delivered late because of the lack of workers. Meanwhile, management refused to put the "standby" employees to work to help. Davidson at the time said this was done to show on paper that the standby positions weren't needed, so that management could justify cutting the positions later.

In the end, Davidson said, post office management has cut clerks positions, while trying to provide more people to the delivery of parcels. This means, he said, that lines at the post office are longer.

"So we don't have any clerks," he said. "Here's the problem. After that Feb. 24 date where they took those clerks and made them carriers, the Postal Service has to study the hours and everything. And they're supposed to issue to the union what they call a comparative work hours report. Because a lot of times what happens when they get rid of too many people, and the overtime goes way up. And when that happens, we show a lot of overtime and say, 'You took too many people, so we need a job back or a couple of jobs back' or whatever. Well, they're trying to skew that report right now, so they're not letting anybody work overtime. Not only that, but they're placing some senior people on standby for a while, so they're trying to show that there's no more work hours. In fact, they're saying maybe we didn't take enough because people can't even work entire eight-hour days. But I see the mail pile up on any given day."

Disregarding rural areas

More generally, Davidson said the focus has been on getting mail out to the city of Cape Girardeau, while other rural areas are seeing more delays or lack of service. Davidson added that when mail arrives late from St. Louis, rather than paying a truck driver several hours to sit and wait, management has determined it is more cost-effective to refund customers for late express mail. On any given day, he said, there could be 100 express mailings run late.

"We'll just let this mail fail," he said. "We just let it fail. Because not everybody will go get their refund. So we're giving away our most expensive service for free to a lot of people. I might go out there and see 15 pallets of packages that did not go out to Sikeston, Poplar Bluff, Marble Hill or Ste. Genevieve. So those have been sitting overnight every day they would come in."

Davidson also said with some of the personnel changes that have been made, there are not enough employees to serve as backups when people are sick or go on vacation.

The picture today is much different than it was a dozen years ago, before the USPS made the decision to strip a lot of the sorting operations out of Cape Girardeau and consolidate it in St. Louis. Letters and packages sent from one Cape Girardeau address to another are routed to St. Louis for sorting before being hauled back. Davidson said the USPS methodically took away machines at different times over the years. He said now management is considering bringing some machines and operations back to the Cape Girardeau area. Though nothing is solid, options are being discussed.

He said management should announce such plans as early as May. Davidson said he doesn't see a scenario where operations will return to Cape Girardeau as they once were, but perhaps returning some operations to Cape Girardeau might allay some of the problems. Even so, he said, the plans wouldn't be executed until 2026.