U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., grilled the head of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) Tuesday about months-long delays in delivering mail processed at a new regional distribution center in Palmetto.
Since the Atlanta Regional Processing and Distribution Center began operations earlier this year, only 36% of inbound mail is being delivered on time, Ossoff said during a hearing held by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. About 66% of outbound mail is being delivered on time, he said.
“I’ve got constituents with prescriptions that aren’t being delivered,” Ossoff told Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. “I’ve got constituents who can’t pay their rent or mortgages. I’ve got businesses that aren’t able to ship products or receive supplies. You are failing abysmally to fulfill your core mission in my state.”
DeJoy attributed the delays to problems rolling out a long-overdue USPS restructuring plan aimed at making the postal service financially self-sufficient and better able to compete with private shippers including Federal Express and the United Parcel Service.
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The plan calls for consolidating local mail distribution offices into huge regional centers, starting in metro Atlanta and Richmond, Va. The Atlanta-area consolidation involved moving nearly 10,000 employees from 10 locations to the new Palmetto distribution center, he said.
“The issues that we had here were in fact management issues on the ground, were in fact employee attendance issues,” DeJoy said. “Now that the organization is engaged … I see the whole team getting better, understanding the transition we have to make.”
DeJoy said he expects to have the problems at both Atlanta and Richmond corrected by this summer.
“Richmond and Atlanta and the whole Georgia area will be the finest run part of the organization very shortly,” he said. “We have to allow time to transition.”
But Ossoff said Georgians who aren’t getting their mail on time don’t have time to wait for the problems to be fixed.
“You’ve got weeks, not months to fix this,” the senator told DeJoy. “If you don’t fix it, I don’t think you’re fit for the job.”
