postalnews blog

Cliff Clavin may have been violating postal service rules by hanging out at the Cheers bar in is letter carrier uniform all those years, but if he’d patronized his local VFW post instead, he’d have been in the clear. That’s the gist of a Federal Appeals Court decision handed down earlier this year, and confirmed this week by the Merit Systems Protection Board.

The case involved Ohio letter carrier Gary Gose, who was terminated ”on a charge of unacceptable conduct for consuming alcoholic beverages while wearing his Postal Service uniform at the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) Post 9927 in Kettering, Ohio”. The Postal Service claimed that this violated section 661.54 of the ELM, which forbids the consumption of “intoxicating beverages in a public place while in uniform”.

Gose, who was on a Last Chance Agreement (he was to have been removed for ”failure to use a satchel in the delivery of mail”), appealed his dismissal to the MSPB, which backed the Postal Service. He then took his case to the Federal Appeals Court. The Court found that the Postal Service interpreted the term “public place” to mean “every place where there is a Postal Service customer and, further, that it considered every citizen to be a Postal Service customer”. Since that would mean that even the employee’s own home was a “public place” if just one other family member was there, the Court refused to accept the USPS interpretation:

… the problem with this interpretation is that it effectively reads language out of the regulation.  If the agency had wished to promulgate a regulation that prohibited drinking in uniform while “in the presence of others,” it might have done so.  However, it did not.  Instead, it promulgated a regulation that specifically forbade such activity only “in a public place.” (emphasis added).  An agency interpretation that effectively eviscerates regulatory language is per se inconsistent with the regulation and may be accorded no deference.

The Court ordered Gose reinstated, with full back pay and benefits.