ATLANTA — Nearly a day after Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff gave the United States Post Office a deadline for responding to questions about the long delays for processing mail at a new facility, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has responded, outlining the steps the federal agency plans to take to help improve mail delivery.
For weeks, Ossoff has been pressing the USPS for answers on delays at its new regional processing facility south of Atlanta in Palmetto, Georgia. The issues were first reported on by 11Alive after viewers contacted our station to report undelivered mail, missing medication and lost packages.
The delays in Atlanta trace to the new Atlanta Regional Processing & Distribution Center in Palmetto. It opened on Feb. 24, consolidating Atlanta, Augusta, Macon and Duluth area processing and distribution centers, which are each being repurposed as local processing centers. Atlanta, following on Richmond, Virginia, was one of the first regional areas to see major network changes.
11Alive has been tracking on-time rates for First Class mail for weeks. Operations are slowly improving but as of earlier this week, the on-time rate for all First Class mail still remains below 70%. Meanwhile, only 44% of single-piece letters are being processed on time.
Images from inside the facility showed mail stacked all throughout the warehouse.
Ossoff had set a deadline of May 16 to DeJoy to respond give concrete answers on how the USPS planned to improve delivery rates. On May 17, the day after the deadline, DeJoy sent a letter addressing how the USPS would address the "significant drop in performance," which DeJoy described as "unanticipated."
Among the steps to be taken include:
- Bringing in more than 100 people from across the USPS to work on-site to identify and "rectify bottlenecks." These employees would also conduct quality assurance, ensure Atlanta employees are "adhering to the new procedures," and ensure timely processing and dispatch of mail and packages;
- Conducting operational meetings twice a day, seven-days a week to assess the current status and make improvements in the region;
- Revising and aligning transportation schedules to and from the processing facility to the other local processing plants to "ensure the smooth flow of volume within the network;"
- Increasing local trips to improve service;
- Adding additional processing capacity in other local processing centers; and
- Shifting cross-country volume away from the facility, as appropriate, until service stabilizes.
"We continue to contend with a variety of operational and workforce issues, but these will be addressed in short order," DeJoy wrote.
DeJoy said the USPS also said it uncovered what it called a "measuring" error in how some mail is tracked.
"To properly anticipate and manage processing operations we rely on sampling the collected volume, but the statistical distribution of the various product types had not been updated in more than 10 years to reflect the present-day mail mix. In effect, we were attempting run our processes-establish sort schedules, plan transportation, etc.-using predictions based on a product profile of the mailstream from more than decade ago," DeJoy's letter explained.
The postmaster said the USPS would be addressing this "failure in precision and management."
"We continue to address the challenges in a purposeful and deliberative manner, and we will continue to devote substantial time and attention until the improvements are performing to the intended specifications," DeJoy promised in his letter.
Earlier this week, the USPS announced plans to pause major changes to its network and how mail is processed until 2025, after lawmakers across the country expressed concerns.
The changes began as USPS started implementing a 10-year system modernization drive called "Delivery for America," which is also intended to significant reduce operating costs.
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