From October to December in 2023, Virginia’s on-time delivery of first-class mail was at its lowest level in years, with a 66% on-time delivery rate. January to March of this year saw the state jump to 77%, shedding last place to Georgia.
Despite the improvement, the state is still in the bottom 10 of nationwide U.S. Postal Service regions for on-time delivery. Only Georgia and Wisconsin are worse.
Virginia was the first mail region in the country to receive a makeover under U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s marquee plan to reenvision the Postal Service. For years, the Postal Service has been in the red financially, surviving with periodic outlays of cash authorized by Congress.
DeJoy said the plan, entitled Delivering for America, would balance the Postal Service’s budget sheets and improve the agency’s overall service for mail.
The transition in Richmond began last summer. The Postal Service closed a number of smaller post offices as it centralized operations at its facility in Sandston, by the Richmond airport. Shortly afterward, on-time delivery rates dipped.
A report from the Postal Service’s Office of the Inspector General released in March identified problems with the rollout. Auditors found months-old mail lying around the facility, workers asleep, and that the outline of DeJoy’s plan had been poorly communicated to staff, amounting to a rocky transition.
The auditors said they were “uncertain” that DeJoy’s predicted savings would be achieved. In documents filed to the Postal Regulatory Commission, lawyers for DeJoy wrote that the service issues would be temporary.
After Virginia, the Georgia mail region was next to receive improvements under Delivering for America.
Service ratings from the same watchdog now show that Georgia’s on-time delivery rate is lower than Virginia’s while it was being transitioned. The on-time delivery rate out of USPS’ Atlanta processing center is now at 64% and is the current worst in the country.
Congresswoman Jennifer McClellan said the change wasn’t good enough.
“I’m glad it’s moving in the right direction, but that’s like going from an F to an F plus,” McClellan said in an interview with the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “It should be in the low 90s, based on their own internal metrics.”
McClellan and nearly every member of Virginia’s congressional delegation have been leading critics of USPS. McClellan, who was elected last February, said her office has been receiving complaints “since day one” of her time in office.
With declining mail volume, a significant element of DeJoy’s restructuring relies on emphasizing package delivery and reducing redundant mail delivery trips.
“On paper, the transition made sense,” McClellan said. “But at the same time, it seems like they never fully explained and trained the workforce, and they didn’t get buy-in before starting the transition.”
McClellan assessed that USPS “didn’t do due diligence” before jettisoning the system that postal employees were used to. Communication with the local distribution center has improved, she said, but McClellan has yet to see data showing that delivery delays are shrinking – a report she requested after touring the Sandston facility in March.
“The Sandston facility becoming only the third worst postal facility in the United States is not something to celebrate,” Wittman said in a statement. “For months, the mail service provided to Virginians and businesses across the Commonwealth has been inexcusable, and the lack of transparency and communication by the Postal Service has been one of the most frustrating roadblocks I have faced since coming to Congress.”
Wittman said answers and solutions are “slowly trickling in” but that more work remained to be done.
On April 16, DeJoy defended the Delivering for America plan before a Senate Oversight Committee. A former private sector executive, DeJoy acknowledged that he had failed to get Washington onboard with the plan.
But he also doubled down on its necessity.
“The Postal Service had been in a financial and operational death spiral for 14 years prior to my arrival here,” DeJoy told legislators. “There are simply no alternative strategies that I have seen that holistically address the legacy ailments, with the constraints that exist, and put us on a path to long-term viability.”
In a media availability held on Wednesday, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said DeJoy began their conversation by apologizing to him for the rocky rollout of his plan in Richmond.
“He said he had hoped to make the Richmond distribution center the model for the system,” Kaine said. “He said that many things had gone wrong and now I owe it to you. I’ve gotta make this Richmond distribution center a stellar success.”