That seems to be a more accurate headline for the story from Texas about the possible consolidation of the McAllen processing facility into Corpus Christi than “Potential Postal Service reorganization could delay local delivery”.

The only indication that “local delivery” could be affected in any way by moving the outgoing processing comes from a local APWU official who claims that “a local resident mailing a first-class letter to another address in the same town or in a neighboring town could expect delivery to take an additional day or two”.

Really? Unfortunately, the reporter didn’t bother to ask why that would be the case. The USPS said it wouldn’t be the case, but the paper went with the union official’s assertion for it’s headline.

And the worst fear of any McAllen resident is mentioned: the plan could “replace local postmarks with the Corpus Christi postmark and delay postmarking altogether”. (What does “delay postmarking altogether” mean?!).

I’ve got no idea whether or not this particular move makes sense, but let’s be honest- this is complicated, but it ain’t rocket science. Mail moves every day between these two facilities, and I’d be willing to bet it doesn’t take two or three days to travel the 160 miles. The transportation is a known factor. So are the volumes of mail currently processed in both facilities. You don’t need a supercomputer to do the math and decide whether or not there’s at least a theoretical possibility of moving the operation.

That’s when it starts to get messy- sure, maybe you can do it, but does it make sense? Do you actually save money? Do you have any negative impacts on service? Those are the questions, among others, that the AMP study has to answer.

But that’s not something that makes a snappy newpaper headline.

As for the APWU official, he’s just doing his job. The problem is that the real impact of such a move on his members would probably not be the kind of thing that would rally public support. “Postal workers to keep jobs, may need to change reporting times!” wouldn’t really get people fired up. So instead he plays the service card.

The only one I’d let off the hook is the politician- he’s probably just clueless.

Potential Postal Service reorganization could delay local delivery
The Monitor - McAllen, Texas

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 1st, 2006 at 7:51 am and is filed under Politics, plant consolidations, postmarks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.