On Tuesday, May 7, the Springfield City Council expressed its dismay that, despite extensive backlash in Springfield and surrounding communities, the United States Postal Service has chosen to downgrade Springfield area mail service and forcibly ship all outgoing mail from the greater Central Illinois area to a surviving Processing and Distribution Center (P&DC) in St. Louis, 100 miles to the south and across Illinois-Missouri state lines.
The one surviving distribution center in Illinois will service the Chicagoland area, and possibly parts of southern Wisconsin and Eastern Iowa — which, like the rest of the 50 states, are also seeing extensive scalebacks to mail service under the ironically named Delivering for America plan of USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.
The change comes as mail delivery out of the St. Louis distribution center – which is already known to have one of the worst rates of delivery in the country – is gripped by delivery delays of weeks or more, resulting in critical documents such as social security checks or utility bills being delivered woefully late to local customers. Mail from Springfield and surrounding cities will now co-mingle with mail not only from the already beleaguered St. Louis, but also from other Missouri communities.
Warnings that such moves have already resulted in processing logjams, tremendous delays, or even outright loss of mail, as well as calls for review by lawmakers in Washington, have not slowed the larger consolidation of delivery services.
Mail delivery in northern Michigan will now be routed to Green Bay, Wisconsin. Western Nebraska’s post will first cross state lines into Denver, Colorado, before returning to Nebraska for delivery. Local letters and bills for residents of Sioux City, Iowa and its surrounding area must now await processing alongside South Dakota mail in Omaha, Nebraska.
These represent a few of the “cost-saving” relocations announced by the office of Postmaster General DeJoy, an appointee and former mega-donor of former President Donald Trump, and founder of New Breed Logistics (which was sold to XPO).
During his time at the USPS, DeJoy has refused to relinquish his stake in XPO, Inc., which has increasingly subcontracted with the USPS under his leadership for long-distance hauling. XPO, postal employees have argued, will likely expand its business with the USPS in response to longer and longer hauls mandated by the Delivering for America agenda.
Despite vocal opposition from both political parties, DeJoy’s office has continually asserted that the USPS, an entity mandated into existence by federal law as explicitly laid out in the Constitution, must be independently profitable — this after receiving $50 billion in federal funding last year.
“[In the Post Office’s announcement], they don’t give us a time frame,” said Springfield Alderman Brad Carlson of Ward 7. “They claim they ‘took public input’ — clearly not. I’m still old-school, my kids write thank-you notes to friends or relatives, grandparents, and now it’s got to go to St. Louis and come back up north someplace.”
Sitting as acting mayor for Tuesday’s meeting, Ward 9 Alderman Jim Donelan was equally unimpressed by the Post Office’s announcement. “I feel like we were all shut out. I thought it was a sight for all of us to be up there [at the meeting], standing as one.”
And yet, despite an outpouring of condemnation by the City, the state, and the greater Central Illinois community, it appears that public display was ignored.
