Post office must adapt to survive

The United States Postal Service occupies a unique place in America. It's one of the few federal governmental expenditures that is explicitly authorized by the Constitution. Roads -- as in "post offices and post roads" -- and national defense are two other legitimate federal expenditures.

But the agency has challenges that make its survival tenuous. Technological advancements and the advent of private parcel carriers have cut into the postal service's revenues. And the USPS continues to waste money at a time when many government functions are consolidating.

Take a drive through Appalachia, particularly West Virginia, on any route linking counties and their seats, and you'll see why. It's hard to travel five miles without seeing a small, rural post office.

Journey from the Danville/Madison, W. Va., area to Beckley on Route 3, and you'll pass post offices for Foster, Peytona, Bloomingrose, Seth, Orgas, Sylvester, Whitesville, Naoma, Dry Creek, Rock Creek, Glen Daniel, Eccles, and Harper. That's 13 post offices along a 74-mile drive, or one every 5.7 miles.

Most of the rural post offices of this type aren't housed in buildings owned by the government. They're often leased from grocery stores or other businesses, which involves monthly payments. There are also postmaster salaries to consider. In many Kentucky communities, small post offices in close proximity to county seats and larger towns have closed when the postmasters retired, but that's not the case everywhere. Despite the presence of these small post offices, all of these areas have rural delivery. Is there really a need for a post office at every wide spot in the road in the mountains?

Even in my county seat hometown, the government doesn't own the post office. I was surprised to learn that the building is owned by a local businessman. The building was built in 1961, the same year I was born. And despite the Postal Service building new, modern post offices with plenty of parking in surrounding towns like Booneville, Campton, Jackson, and Stanton, Beattyville's post office continues to be housed in a downtown location where parking can sometimes be hard to find.

As a young journalist in the mid-1980s, I covered the dedication of a new post office at Lost Creek in Breathitt County. That might not be big news in the big city, but the editor-publisher of The Jackson Times thought the event was worthy of her paper's presence. A short time later, I left for another job, and I had fewer reasons to travel into the mountains toward Hazard. But I was very surprised just a few years later to find that the Lost Creek post office had been abandoned in favor of yet another new facility on the other side of the road. Why change locations so soon? What was cost-efficient about that?

Most government services are a monopoly. Mail delivery is not one of them. Competitors like UPS and FedEx have sprouted up. They often offer more dependable service at cheaper rates. There are even arrangements where the private couriers will deliver packages to post offices, and then the post office will put a notice in your box and you pick up that package at the window if it won't fit in your box. And consider that the number of first-class and bulk mailings has declined with the advent of online bill payment and email.

My Aunt Dorene loved to write letters and send greeting cards. She and her mother, my grandmother, wrote each other back and forth often. Aunt Dorene, who lived near Louisville, frequently wrote my dad, knowing he wasn't going to write her a letter back. It was always a treat to read one of her letters to her brother back in Beattyville. Until she fell into ill health, she'd always send me and my wife a card on birthdays and anniversaries and at Christmas. And we'd get the occasional letter as well. These days, people email and send online greeting cards instead of putting pen to paper. In many places, cursive writing isn't even taught in school anymore.

In recent weeks, changes at the USPS have been in the headlines, as the agency experiences tough financial times. There's a growing drive from those on the left to prop up the revenue-generating agency with tax dollars and relief funds from Wuhan Chinese "kung flu" virus relief appropriations. This despite an increase in the cost of postage stamps. The last time I bought stamps, they were 50 cents each, so what we still call "a book of stamps" cost me $10. I picked up a book last week, and the cost had gone up to $11.

The post office has some room to enact savings before it seeks rate increases or taxpayer bailouts. Closing those small rural post offices is an obvious starting point. Instead of 13 post offices between Danville/Madison and Beckley, why not just three? Keep either Peytona or Bloomingrose, Whitesville, and Glen Daniel, as these are the larger communities along WV 3. Shut down the others. Eliminating one day for mail to be delivered and post offices opened -- preferably a weekday, as those of us who work out of town often pick up packages on Saturday mornings -- would be another thing to look at. Perhaps close post offices and end delivery on Mondays, and give postal workers and contract carriers a full two-day weekend. Government is always inefficient, and there are always ways to cut costs. "We need more money" is always the first thing government thinks about. It's easy to spend someone else's money, especially if you can take it from them without permission. It's much harder to engage in some self-examination and make cuts and improve efficiencies.

The financial woes of the USPS have come under greater scrutiny as the left continues its push for universal vote-by-mail, using the "kung flu" pandemic as justification. The more conspiratorial voices have accused the Trump administration of implementing workplace efficiencies as a means of voter suppression. Of course the whole concept of universal no-excuse mail-in voting is fraught with possibilities for fraud, as anyone who's familiar with election history in eastern Kentucky and the issues with traditional paper absentee ballots can tell you. But that's a subject for another discussion.

The post office is worth saving. After all, it's one of the few specific federal government programs to be found in our Constitution. And it is supported by user fees, unlike a lot of the extra-constitutional programs that rely on tax dollars. I still haven't found justification for a federal Department of Education or any constitutional authorization for spending federal money for public schools. That's strictly a state function. Maybe the Constitution would be better served by eliminating federal programs that aren't authorized by our governing document and focusing those resources on programs that are.

But the USPS needs to look inward for solutions before it looks outward. Congress and the president should demand that the agency become more efficient before more money is pumped into it.