(Washington, DC) — Nevada US Representative Mark Amodei was in a roundtable meeting with Postmaster General Louis DeJoy earlier this week in an effort to halt a move for local mail processing from Reno to Sacramento.
The following is the Congressman’s statement
“The Reno postal facility issue is far from resolved. Nevadans depend on reliable and expeditious mail service to pay their bills, receive medications, get their Social Security checks, and cast their ballots. Putting any of that at risk without total objective transparency is negligent and I will continue to do all that I can to delay, oppose, and reverse the mysterious decision to relocate mail processing operations from Reno to West Sacramento.”
Over the course of the past three months, Congressman Amodei has led multiple efforts to oppose this subjective plan and support Nevada’s postal operations. He has sent two letters laying out his specific concerns and held several calls and meetings with USPS senior staff and logistical/engineering professionals.
Congressman Amodei has asked three times for USPS to clearly lay out what their contingency plans are to avoid disruptions if I-80 closes due to a weather event, HAZMAT, or other traffic closures. He has asked USPS if they have conducted an assessment on impacts to mail-in ballots sent from Nevada that would be diverted to the mail processing facility in West Sacramento before being sent back to Nevada. In addition, he has asked what the impact on processing times will be if this plan is implemented and how will they compare with current processing times. And since this is supposed to be about saving money, Congressman Amodei has requested the Postal Service provide detailed accounting data to support the claim that money will be saved by sending all northern Nevada’s mail to West Sacramento. Because the financial analysis to support the Reno plan remains a mystery, Congressman Amodei has asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to conduct a detailed forensic accounting analysis. To this day, no clear and substantive answers to these questions have been provided. The GAO audit is underway.
After substantial push back from the Nevada delegation and Governor Lombardo on the proposed changes to the Reno Processing and Distribution Center (P&DC), USPS announced that they will go ahead and transition the Reno P&DC to a to a Local Processing Center and transfer mail processing outgoing operations to the West Sacramento, California P&DC. This comes after a hurried review process and only one public meeting with limited opportunity for Nevadans to provide comments and concerns. There are no present indications that USPS has any interest in responding to Nevada’s concerns.
When responding to concerns about the plan to restructure and consolidate mail operations, USPS said “efforts to use the legislative or regulatory process to slow down or prevent our progress must be resisted. Such efforts not only interfere with the longstanding statutory independence of the Postal Service to make operational decisions, they also jeopardize the Postal Service’s financial sustainability.”
“This decision was made by Washington bureaucrats who apparently have only subjective preferences as the basis for their Reno plan. This will only exacerbate existing problems, including mail delays – which remain alarmingly high,” said Congressman Amodei. “Areas that have undergone the consolidation of processing operations, like Houston, Texas, Richmond, Virginia, and Atlanta, Georgia have experienced ‘unacceptable levels of service’ and now just receive an average of 71% of mail deliveries on time. These issues have impacts across the entire country, and I will continue to fight them from spreading to Nevada. The evidence is there: this plan must be modeled to reflect objective fact.”
