Are you experiencing mail delays? If so, you’re not alone, according to Minnesota’s two U.S. senators.
As many as 20 mail-sorting machines in the state — all in the Twin Cities — have been decommissioned or face the possibility, according to a federal lawsuit seeking to halt the process.
“My office has received thousands of messages from constituents expressing their concerns about mail delays,” Sen. Tina Smith said in an interview Wednesday.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s staff reported her office also is fielding a lot of complaints about slow mail deliveries.
The two Democrats blame the delays on operational changes in mail delivery that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a President Donald Trump appointee, initiated in recent weeks. Democrats and other critics warned that changes were causing mail delays and could disrupt voting in the November election.
“Minnesotans should be able to depend on their mail delivery and the chaos and delays caused by recent operational change at the United States Postal Service are unacceptable, especially as we near election day,” Klobuchar said in a statement.
Local postal officials say they know of no widespread mail delays.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison announced last week that Minnesota had joined a coalition of 14 states in filing a federal lawsuit challenging the operational changes at the U.S. Postal Service that he said threaten critical mail delivery and could undermine the election.
CUTS FACING MINNESOTA
Cuts in Minnesota reduce capacity by about 100,000 to 200,000 pieces of mail an hour, the federal lawsuit states. They are split between the Minneapolis and St. Paul (located in Eagan) processing centers.
According to the lawsuit:
- Minneapolis. At least three mail-sorting machines had been decommissioned and six more were scheduled.
- St. Paul. Six letter-sorting machines and one flat-sorting machine were taken out of use. Another four letter-sorting machines were scheduled to be decommissioned by the end of the month.
The lawsuit by Ellison also notes the state’s population is about 20 percent persons of color, but the cuts were in the metro where 40 percent of Minneapolis residents are of color and 49 percent of St. Paul’s residents are.
CHANGES TO BE SUSPENDED
In response to the lawsuits and criticism, DeJoy announced he would “suspend” his initiatives until after the election. But he did not offer to restore the operations he had changed.
Those changes included eliminating staff overtime, altering operations at mail distribution centers, decommissioning and removing critical mail sorting equipment and removing mail boxes, according to the Associated Press.
COMPLAINTS PILE UP
Smith said the messages she’s receiving from Minnesotans “shows that the steps the postmaster general has been taking are having an impact here, despite the best efforts of postal workers and letter carriers.”
For example, she said, one constituent who’s at high risk for COVID-19 wrote that she had started ordering prescriptions by mail to avoid going to a pharmacy in person. She said she was running out of pills, and the refill she ordered had been in transit for a week. Her only option was to go to the pharmacy and buy the prescription at a higher price.
Another person wrote that it took 15 days for a letter mailed in Duluth to get to Cook, Minn., less than 100 miles away.
A business that uses the Postal Service to ship plants across the state notified Smith that shipments that used to take one or two days to reach their destination now take three to five days to arrive. “The plants will essentially die if they’re in transit that long,” Smith said.
‘UNAWARE OF ANY WIDE SCALE DELAYS’
Those complaints are news to the Postal Service, a spokeswoman said in a statement.
“We are unaware of any wide scale delays, although short term COVID impacts may affect our employee availability like any other business. Locally here in Minnesota, the mail is moving as it should and our operations are running normally.”
That’s not the message Smith said she heard from postal workers, supervisors and mail carriers last week when she visited the USPS regional mail distribution center in Eagan. They noted the seven mail-sorting machines already removed from the facility could each process 1.5 million to 2 million pieces of mail a day.
Smith said the postal workers told her: “It is in our DNA to deliver the mail every day.” But they are being stymied by DeJoy’s initiatives.
Steve Brooks of Coon Rapids, the American Postal Workers Union’s national director of support services, said the operational changes have a “hampered the ability of our members (nationwide) to do our jobs.”
Brooks said he believes the Trump administration’s motivation for making changes is “they’re looking for any means they can to make it harder for people to vote.”
Calling such charges “outrageous,” DeJoy said he was suspending his initiatives until after the election “to avoid even the appearance of impact on election mail.”
Smith’s Republican challenger, former Republican Congressman Jason Lewis, last week said his campaign office had received a stack of campaign contributions intended for DFL Gov. Tim Walz and said it was the “latest evidence that the current system of absentee voting integrity of our elections here in Minnesota is extremely questionable.” He said that showed that the Democratic support for mail-in ballots demonstrates the Postal Service was “not up to the task” of handling universal mail-in ballots.