Aging fleet of delivery trucks pose new threat to mail service

An aging fleet of delivery vehicles is the latest fiscal threat to the U.S. Postal Service, which is losing billions of dollars each year.

Those old fashioned rigs that stuff your box with mostly junk mail are in their end years. They look old because they are; some are 27 years old. The USPS has a fleet of more than 200,000 vehicles, about 4,000 in the Seattle district that stretches from Seattle to northern Idaho.

The Office of the Inspector General (OIG), in a new
report this summer, warned that the fleet can meet delivery needs only until 2017. The replacement cost for the entire fleet is estimated at $4.2 billion. Ernie Swanson in the Seattle office of the USPS says right now, that’s a financial impossibility.

“We’re in a deep financial situation where we’ve had billions of dollars of losses annually for the last six or seven years so we don’t have the funds available, currently, to replace the fleet, even a bit at a time,” says Swanson.

Most of the Post Office fleet is made up of Long Life Vehicles (LLVs), but Swanson says even those can’t last forever.

“We’re doing maintenance on these as much as we can and the maintenance becomes more costly because replacement parts are harder to come by and that sort of thing as vehicles age,” Swanson says.

Postage stamp increases are probably not the total answer. Swanson says it used to be that each penny increase in postage raised $1 billion.

“We have a deficit from the last few years of probably, upwards of, $25 billion. Even if that formula was correct, we’d be looking at a stamp that probably was in the neighborhood of 75 cents.” First class postage right now is 49 cents, after the Postal Regulatory Commission approved an increase of $.03 for 2014. Rate hikes typically remain with the rate of cost of living increases, says Swanson.

Is this the beginning of the end for the Postal Service, which has not used taxpayer money in 30 years? Is privatization inevitable?

“I suppose some people will suggest that,” Swanson says. “Our Postmaster General, Mr. (Patrick) Donahoe, stated on a number of occasions that the last thing he wants to see done would be privatization of the Postal Service. Anybody that would take over the organization is obviously going to want to make a profit and I think that prices would escalate much higher, service might deteriorate, I don’t think that would be in the best interest of the American public to do that.”

The USPS insists that it has undertaken many cost-saving measures including cutting 200,000 employees, reducing delivery routes, closing facilities and cutting the hours of some post offices. The USPS is also asking Congress for some relief from burdensome pension and health care obligations. Congress is in summer recess now and appears unlikely to take action before the end of the USPS fiscal year, Sept. 30.