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3 comments on this story
I am feeling half-sick, half-confused. Grijalva, Fimbres, and Romero are all making sense on an issue…I’m starting to entertain the notion that this article may be a work of fiction because any of those three RARELY do the right thing, especially where the greater good of the Tucson community is involved.
Concerning the mail-in balloting, I have no pity. For every person who has a legitimate need for mail-in balloting, there are probably 10 using it out of sheer laziness. All it does is open us up for voter fraud…much of which keeps the three aforementioned people in office.
But, about this issue….USPS keeps trying to sell to me that this will save them money. I’m just not seeing it. Mail needs to be sorted, the same amount of mail will take the same amount of man-hours to sort, so in that respect it really doesn’t matter where it’s done, here or in Phoenix. Take away the Tucson jobs, move the mail to Phoenix, and you’ll just have to hire more people in Phoenix to handle the additional workload. Hiring and training new people costs money. And, increased distance means increased fuel costs, and more man-hours to drive the trucks longer distances. So, again, I am just not getting where the savings come in.
For the first time since he’s taken office, I actually want to see something Grijalva is calling for come to fruition. I would be very interested to read the review of the USPS’s logic in determining this is actually a money-saving move.
Regular readers of my comments will know I was saying during the short-notice forum held right after Christmas to discuss this issue that the USPS was just going to do whatever it wanted to do, and the public meeting was just for show. And, while I appreciate Fimbres’ call for signing an online petition…none of the decision-makers at the USPS are even going to look at it, let alone care about what it says. From the start they were just going to do whatever it is they wanted to do. They really don’t have to answer to anyone. That pretty much gives them impunity.
You bring up a viable point; shutting down our sorting center and consolidating it with another will no doubt bring more cost than benefit…Saving money? What about this will save money? Not to mention the 300 or so employees who are about to be disenfranchised. If there is truly just not enough money to keep our mail sorting center up and running, where will the money come from the hire, train, and pay the new employees who will have to sort Tucson-area mail? And with fuel prices on the up and up, is it really going to be effective or affordable to consolidate? @Bret Linden
at the December meeting they actually did seem to make a viable argument for saving in fuel costs. It had something to do with mail being transported from Denver to Tucson, now it will just go to Phoenix. So between Tucson and Phoenix there obviously won’t be any fuel savings, but in a bigger picture there might be.
more of the money-saving tactics involves cutting service. here’s the slide show they used: http://about.usps.com/streamlining-operations/public-meeting-presentation-tucson-12-28-11.pdf
this will be terrible for many local businesses, like printers, who rely on the bulk discounts that come with a local sorting center. non-profits too.
i’ll be damned if my mail is going to be postmarked PHOENIX
it will probably take an act of congress to stop this.
p.s. the optical readers we use for voting are prone to tampering so it doesn’t matter much if ballots are mailed or not.