Iowa Public Radio: Rural letter carrier Roger McDonald missed driving his 150-mile route outside Scottsbluff in northwestern Nebraska earlier this year. He was injured in a serious car accident that kept him from mail delivery for three months. He had an appointment scheduled with the doctor who rebuilt his right hand on May 8, so he decided to do a dry run the day before in case he was cleared to return.
As the pavement turned to gravel on Crow Road, McDonald said long distances, low population density and poor infrastructure make rural delivery difficult and unprofitable. His point was soon proven. Among the route’s first stops are two mailboxes separated by a dilapidated bridge over an irrigation canal. Before the bridge was closed, it was a 50-yard trip between them, McDonald said at the first mailbox. He then drove nearly three miles to reach the second.
Under the universal service obligation, which mandates mail delivery to every address in the country, a rural letter carrier will drive more than 700 miles to serve those two households in a normal year.
“It’s never going to make financial sense,” said McDonald, 61, from the driver’s seat of his preferred delivery vehicle, a Dodge Caravan. “But that’s a big reason why the universal pricing system was generated. Because we knew we had to service every American’s home, not just the Americans’ homes that provide us a profit.”
As a government agency providing a public service, the U.S. Postal Service is not required to make a profit. But it is not supposed to lose money, either, which it has done every year since 2007, according to its annual reports. The inefficiencies inherent to rural delivery are blamed for much of the lost revenue over the past two decades, which totals more than $100 billion, according to annual reports by the Postal Service. The same reports say mail volume has also nearly halved in that time.
Cutting services to rural communities as a means of pulling the Postal Service out of the red has already started. The issue of privatization has also been resurrected by the current administration and regarded by business interests who see converting all or parts of the agency to a for-profit model as an investment opportunity — but not without pushback from postal workers and unions concerned with further service cuts and layoffs.
Before returning to his native Scottsbluff and joining the Postal Service 12 years ago to “slow down,” McDonald owned and operated businesses throughout the western U.S. for nearly 30 years. He said he understands the calculus of those who want to make drastic changes to the Postal Service.
“Cost-benefit analysis is going to tell them that rural delivery service is too expensive,” McDonald said. “Their loss mitigation efforts are going to tell them that this part of the service needs to be cut away.”