Larry Floersch
If any town should have a beef with the United States Postal Service, it is Montpelier. Consider the frustration of getting the USPS to respond to the crisis of our flooded main post office. Or to sporadic delivery.
But those are struggles with the current management, not with the concept of the postal service itself. After all, we are not demanding the USPS leave Montpelier, we are imploring the USPS to give us back our services.
Indeed, the controversy points out the enormous impact mail and the postal service still have in everyday life.
There have been suggestions at the national level that we solve the problems of the USPS by privatizing the whole thing, by making it a for-profit business. As comedian Lewis Black might rant, “What are they thinking!!?”
Consider this.
If you drive U.S. 85 southwest out of Spearfish, South Dakota, you soon cross into Wyoming. As you leave the town of Newcastle, there is a road sign stating, “Next Services 81 Miles.”
It is a stark landscape, part of what is called the “high plains.” As you drive along you see the entrances to vast cattle ranches. These entrances often consist of just an archway with the name of the ranch spanning a long driveway. In most cases, you will not see a ranch house or outbuildings; these mostly are located many miles from each entrance. But at the entrances to these ranches you will often see a familiar sight — a mailbox.
The United States Postal Service is obliged to deliver mail to these mailboxes. It does not matter the nearest postal facility may be 40 or more miles away.
If you knew someone along this road, you could write their address on the envelope of, say, a birthday card, put a stamp on it, and drop the envelope in an iconic blue receptacle here in Vermont. In a few days the envelope would appear in that mailbox in Wyoming. For a fee of just 73 cents.
Few of us think about what it takes for that to happen, or, for that matter, about the postal service itself. It is easy to neglect until a crisis erupts.
The United States Post Office has been around since July 26, 1775, when it was created by the Second Continental Congress. Benjamin Franklin was paid $1,000 a year to serve as the first US postmaster general.
For most of its existence, the postal service has broken even or showed annual profits, sometimes in the billions. But over the decades it also has had to compete with private enterprises attempting to provide better service. Today that competition is in the form of technology — telephones, internet email, text messaging — but the universal existence and reliability of such electronic connectedness still is not as certain, as personal, nor as representative of our nationhood, as the mailbox. As emphasized in popular culture by films such as “The Six Triple Eight” (2024) and Kevin Costner’s “The Postman” (1997), the mail plays a critical role in connecting us as a people, as a civil society, as a nation.
One of the postal service’s first competitors used fast horses and tireless riders to provide a service beyond what the post office could offer for a 3-cent stamp. In 1860, the Pony Express would deliver a letter across the country in 10 days for a fee of $5. That fee today would be more than $175.
The private transcontinental telegraph wiped out the Pony Express. It also forced the postal service to focus less on letters and more on parcels.
Then came private couriers such as United Parcel Service and FedEx. As with the Pony Express, speed and weight cost money. According to FedEx’s rate calculator, the cheapest overnight service for a letter from Montpelier to San Francisco currently is about $130. Nevertheless, these services have siphoned parcel business away from the USPS.
Congress hasn’t helped much. One of the provisions of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 mandated the USPS pre-fund pension and healthcare benefits for its retirees for 75 years into the future. No other agency or department of the federal government had such an obligation. Deficits rapidly ballooned.
It was the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 that changed the United States Post Office Department into the United States Postal Service, a public agency that would act more like a business but still provide basic public services. The services to be provided were spelled out in the Act:
“(a) The United States Postal Service shall be operated as a basic and fundamental service provided to the people by the Government of the United States, authorized by the Constitution, created by Act of Congress, and supported by the people. The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the [. . .] correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities. The costs of establishing and maintaining the Postal Service shall not be apportioned to impair the overall value of such service to the people.
“(b) The Postal Service shall provide a maximum degree of effective and regular postal services to rural areas, communities, and small towns where post offices are not self-sustaining. No small post office shall be closed solely for operating at a deficit, it being the specific intent of the Congress that effective postal services be insured to residents of both urban and rural communities.”
And consider this: If a private company can provide the same basic services as the USPS and make money, why has it not already emerged as a competitor?
The intent of Congress seems clear in the 1970 Act. The USPS belongs to us, the people of the United States. We should feel obliged to fix it, not sell it. We owe it to Ben Franklin — and to our grandchildren.
The material presented here represents the opinion of the author and does not reflect the opinions of The Bridge. Commentaries may be submitted to editor@montpelierbridge.com. Preference is given to submissions by those who live in central Vermont. Submissions are encouraged to be 500 to 750 words in length.
