USPS 'Honors' Sen. Byrd With Plant Consolidations

To understand how Congressional leaders exert influence over the supposedly independent U.S. Postal Service, consider the agency’s mail-processing centers in West Virginia.

As long as the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd, sometimes known as the Prince of Pork, ruled the Senate Finance Committee, the 11 mail-processing centers in his home state were safe. Though West Virginia had more such centers per capita than nearly any other state, the Postal Service’s efforts to consolidate its processing network somehow bypassed the Mountain State.

But all that has changed in the past five months, during which the Postal Service’s AMPS (Area Mail Processing Studies) program has hit the Mountain State with full force.

With Byrd on his deathbed, the Postal Service announced AMPS in June to consider shifting work from the Huntington and Beckley facilities to Charleston, WV. Just four days after Byrd died on June 28, USPS moved the processing of mail originating in ZIP codes beginning with 260 from Wheeling to Pittsburgh.

And last month, USPS announced another possible out-of-state shift – of mail processing from the Martinsburg Customer Service Mail Processing Center to the Suburban Maryland Processing and Distribution Center near Washington, DC.

Most, but not all, AMPS result in some form of consolidation – and, for some employees, a transfer on relatively short notice to another processing facility 100 or more miles away. The good news for Huntington workers is that Charleston is “only” 54 miles away; the bad news is that such proximity makes Huntington ripe for consolidation.

Because West Virginia’s mail is divided up among so many “Byrd droppings” – mail-processing facilities that each serve an unusually small number of customers -- mailers rarely dropship into the state. (USPS: Clean Up the Byrd Droppings! explores this in more depth.)

Consolidating more of the state’s handling of destinating mail into the Charleston P&DC could make it a more viable dropship location. That would save mailers and the Postal Service money and bring Charleston some work now performed by such out-of-state network distribution centers as Pittsburgh and Cincinnati.

Related articles:

• USPS Steps Up Mail-Processing Consolidation: USPS accelerated the number of AMPS last year to as part of a renewed effort to reduce the number of facilities.
• USPS: Clean Up the Byrd Droppings!  Many states with far more people and land area than West Virginia nevertheless have fewer mail-processing facilities. West Virginia's excess hurts both USPS and its customers.
• USPS Has Too Many Supervisors And Too Many Employees, Congressman Says: The next chairman of the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee will apparently try to do more with his new-found power over the Postal Service than just bring home the pork.

USPS: Clean Up the Byrd Droppings!

A West Virginia Congressman whose district benefits from U.S. Postal Service pork is trying to prevent the Postal Service from delivering only five days per week.

Rep. Nick Rahall and the other co-sponsors of the legislation have not suggested other ways for USPS to close its billion-dollar budget deficit. But here's one for you, Congressman: Shut down some of the Postal Service's superfluous mail-handling facilities in West Virginia, including the four in your district.

Having the small state fragmented among 11 Sectional Center Facilities (SCFs) is inefficient for the Postal Service, costly for mailers, and leads to slow delivery for West Virginians.

USPS has about 450 SCFs (an average of one per Congressional district), each of which handles mail for one or more 3-digit ZIP code areas. About one-fourth of those SCFs are also Area Distribution Centers, meaning they can handle mail for several nearby SCFs. Commercial mailers generally try to create SCF pallets of at least 500 pounds and dropship to the SCFs when postal discounts make that worthwhile. Periodicals mailers can also obtain somewhat smaller discounts for ADC pallets and for dropshipping to ADCs instead of SCFs.

A Dead Tree Edition analysis indicates that the Lewisburg, WV SCF in Rahall's district has less than one-tenth the mail volume of the average SCF. For nationwide mailings, that means only the largest -- those with at least 2 million pounds -- have enough volume to create a Lewisburg SCF pallet. The other three SCFs in Rahall's southern West Virginia district (home of the Hatfields, McCoys, and Martha Stewart's prison cell) are also much smaller than average.

Mailstreams of less than 200,000 pounds even have trouble creating ADC pallets for the state's two ADCs, which together serve about half the population of an average ADC. That means much of the mail going to West Virginia is packaged in sacks instead of on pallets, which is expensive for both mailers and the Postal Service, as well as delaying delivery. Having the mail fragmented among so many facilities prevents any one location from having the critical mass needed to use the most efficient automated mail-sorting equipment.

Adding to the costs and the delivery delays are the fact that even the largest mailers tend to avoid dropshipping to any West Virginia postal facility. The volumes for each facility are so small that the dropship discounts are not enough to cover the freight costs. Standard-class mail for West Virginia tends to be dropped at Bulk Mail Centers (BMCs) outside the state, gaining the mailers at least some dropship discount.

But Periodicals mailers, lacking a meaningful BMC discount, simply enter the mail at the printing plant, often a thousand or more miles away from West Virginia. They lose any dropship discounts, and the Postal Service has to ship the publications to West Virginia itself. That typically delays delivery by at least several days.

West Virginia's rugged terrain is no excuse for having so many processing centers. Consider that mountainous Idaho has more than three times West Virginia's land area and nearly the same population yet only one ADC and three other SCFs. New Mexico and Colorado are each four times larger and have more people than West Virginia, yet each has only one ADC.

Why does West Virginia have far more Postal Service facilities handling mail than is justified by its population or land area? Could it possibly have anything to do with the state being represented by the Prince of Pork, Sen. Robert C. Byrd, who has the most seniority in the Senate as well as being its only ex-Klansman?

Before postal reform gave USPS more independence from Congressional control, powerful Congressmen could get key postal facilities placed in their districts rather than where the Postal Service needed them. That's probably why Winchester, Virginia, home of another powerful Senator Byrd, has its own superfluous SCF.

There hasn't been a Virginia Byrd in the Senate for more than two decades, but only this year did postal officials start the process of closing the Winchester Byrd dropping. (Dead Tree Edition predicted last year the shutdown of the Winchester SCF because of the new Flats Sequencing System.)

Let's hope it doesn't take the Postal Service so long to slaughter some of its pork in West Virginia.