Lankford Questions Postmaster General on Proposed Changes to Tulsa USPS Processing Facility

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WASHINGTON, DC - Senator James Lankford (R-OK) today participated in a Senate Homeland Security hearing entitled, "Oversight of the United States Postal Service (USPS)," with USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testifying. Lankford used the opportunity to address several questions regarding concerns for proposed changes by USPS to how mail is process in Oklahoma. Many Oklahomans have expressed concern about delay in mail impacting Seniors and Veterans who rely on receiving benefits and medication through the mail, but also the employees at the Tulsa USPS facility.

Following a public meeting held by USPS at Tulsa's Hardesty Library to receive community input, Lankford, along with Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), and Representatives Frank Lucas (R-OK), Tom Cole (R-OK), and Stephanie Bice) sent a letter to DeJoy regarding their concerns on the changes in the Delivering for America Ten-Year Plan will impact Oklahoma.

Excerpt

Lankford:I do have a couple things just to be able to bring up though because as we walk through all of these different issues. I'm trying to identify when this gets better. We've talked about Richmond; we've talked about Atlanta and the decline in the service turnaround. We've talked about the increased cost on it. For the service turnaround time period, Mr. DeJoy, I know you've said over and over again. Give us a little bit more time the service will get better on it. What do you anticipate? Just take Atlanta for an example, because I've got Tulsa and Oklahoma City. There's Fayetteville, there's others that impact Oklahoma. They're about to walk through this process. Is it an expectation that every one of these locations will see a decline and then it will increase as far as the delivery time period?

DeJoy:… I expect these operations to be stabilized coming into the summer. You know into the summertime there are other aspects of things that we're doing that impact this, transportation initiatives to stop running empty trucks- 50,000 empty trucks- around the country and so forth. So there were a lot of things coming together that will prove out this model is in fact work. … So, that's what I think combined with coming up on the election, I expect that we will slow down, and a lot of the moves continue with the construction site. These MPAs that we're talking about, Reno, Tulsa which are all will get investments into them- to more appropriately serve the community in package industry and package business and so forth will most likely we're collecting all the data to put our project plan to roll out these transitions around 40 locations, and most likely will not happen until the end of the first year. Nobody's going to have to commute to Boston, nobody's going to have to commute to Oklahoma City, and we're putting money into these facilities that have significant deferred maintenance.

Lankford:So give me a little more specifics on the timeline because you're saying because of the election there's going to be a pause …?

DeJoy:These are 40 sites there are smaller mail moves. We've done this in the past. This is separate than the roll out of the network of in Atlanta and so forth. This is just picking up outgoing mail moving it to a place where we can consolidate all the outgoing mail that goes around the country and refurbishing the facilities and make them more appropriate for today's business that we're going to be doing. So, these are smaller moves. We don't expect to move people. Atlanta was moving at you know like I said 1500 people out of 10 plants.

Lankford:So, timeline when you said you're pausing these changes based on…

DeJoy:…we will put a project plan together for all these sites and most likely the any of the mail move work will start after the first of you know after the first of the year…

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