Expect more Monday mail under new plan

Talk about it

A plan to end Saturday delivery of mail will mean bigger deliveries on Mondays, according to letter carriers and U.S. Postal Service officials.

The Postal Service announced a plan Wednesday to eliminate Saturday home mail delivery in August — that is letters, magazines, newspapers. Packages and mail delivery to post office boxes on Saturdays would continue and post offices would remain open as well.

“We really don’t know a lot about what’s going on yet,” Jamestown Postal carrier Pat Zimmerman said Thursday. Zimmerman said everyone will know more in two or three weeks.

If the plan does go into effect, Zimmerman said there will definitely be more work for all postal employees.

“It’s going to be a lot (of mail) on Mondays,” he said.

Not having a Saturday delivery means all the mail that arrived on Friday won’t be delivered until the following Monday.

National Association of Letter Carriers local representative Mike Herman said assuming Saturday delivery is eliminated, Mondays will become like the day after a holiday.

“It will mean more mail for us to carry on Mondays, which will make our job more difficult,” he said.

Herman’s route through the southeast part of Jamestown is a nine-mile walk each delivery day.

“We’ve already been downsized and are running a skeleton crew,” he said. “But, we’ve got good people here and we will get the job done.”

Both the NALC and the American Postal Workers Union national offices have condemned the Postal Service plan. The NALC represents letter carriers in cities, while the APWU represents all other Postal Service workers. Both unions are affiliates of the AFL-CIO.

Jamestown Postmaster Gerard Bercier said Thursday he didn’t have much to say as the plan has not yet been implemented.

“We really need to wait and see what is going to happen,” Bercier said.

Postal Service Spokesman Pete Nowacki, of the Minneapolis office, said the best estimate he could give for Jamestown’s post office is that it handles 5 million pieces of mail annually.

“It’s difficult to quantify because we don’t really keep a tally locally for number of pieces,” Nowacki wrote in an email.

Nowacki wrote that Mondays are generally the busiest day of the week for mail and Saturdays are the lightest.

“When I talked with Gerard (Bercier) he added that a typical Monday (mail load) may be about 15 to 20 percent heavier than other days of the week,” he wrote.

Sun reporter Chris Olson can be reached at 701-952-8454 or by email at colson@jamestownsun.com

Tags: post office, local news, news, national, mail, local