RICHMOND, Va. -- Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine held a roundtable at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture (VMHC) Friday with Richmonders sharing their ongoing issues with the United States Postal Service (USPS).
"It's incredibly frustrating when people have problems with their mail service. And this has become a at a crisis level in Richmond since the fall," said Sen. Tim Kaine -- referring to when his office began receiving more complaints than usual about mail service issues around Central Virginia. "And we've been very unhappy with the Postal Service's unwillingness to really engage and give us answers about why people are not getting mail or getting mail delivered extremely late or getting a set of run arounds and excuses are unable to get questions answered."
Among those who joined Kaine for the roundtable were constituents who had reached out to his office about those problems, including the museum itself.
VMHC President & CEO Jamie Bosket said the museum began seeing a drop-off in mail delivery starting in October. That was around the time that important membership renewals and donations were starting to come in.
By December, delivery totals were nearly 100% lower than in years past, according to Bosket. In fact, he said the museum received seven pieces of mail in December, which is typically their busiest month.
"In a slightly brighter spot, albeit frustrating, in January, about a week ago after we started having these conversations and thanks to [Kaine's] help and raising attention on this -- magically, three cases of mail showed up postmarked in October and November," said Bosket, who added they were given no explanation. "That bundle of mail that came represented about $300,000 in memberships."
RELATED: Read letter from USPS to Virginia lawmakers pledging to host quarterly briefings
Nancye Hunter, who works at Master Machine and Engineering Company on the city's Southside, said that while their usual mail carrier has been great, they have been seeing a similar issues.
"Since the summer, it got exponentially worse... [It] not only impacts all of us as employees and impacts our customers and impacts our vendors, it takes time and resources away from everything that we're trying to get done," said Hunter. "This isn't a new problem. This is a problem that's been allowed to snowball and it's gotten exponentially worse."
Those and other stories resonated with the roundtable's co-host, City of Richmond Commonwealth's Attorney Colette McEachin. She has attempted to hold a public town hall with USPS on city mail issues in the past.
"All of those are great examples of what happens because right now the Postal Service in Richmond is broken," said McEachin, who plans to organize another town hall in the coming weeks. "I hope that there are conversations and workings that I'm unaware of that are moving the post office to a place where they feel as though they can at least communicate and educate constituents and their customers about what is going on."
Kaine said he hosted Friday's roundtable following a back and forth with USPS over the last few months. That started with a letter he sent with some other members of Virginia's Congressional delegation when they raised concerns and requested a town hall.
Kaine's office said that the request was declined on Jan. 7 by a Virginia district manager who said “[g]iven the breath and scope of our operations, significant attention and resources has been devoted to monitoring service performance and providing customer service. Experiences proven that extra ordinary, or one-off customer out which events complicate these efforts, rarely provide any meaningful insight to improve operations, and raise questions about basic fairness.”
The letter added USPS instead "relies on a robust program to collect, analyze, and act on service performance issues and customer complaints and questions."
The letter also stated that while dealing with staffing issues, operations at its Richmond Regional Processing Center in Sandston were among the first facilities in the nation to receive an overhaul as part of USPS' ten-year Delivering for America plan.
"These new centers will handle all of the originating and destinating mail and package processing for a large geographic region and will act as the local transportation node for the larger, national network. What is Sandston facility did experience operational complications during its set up and roll-out, these have been addressed in the facility is now position to provide the state-of-the-art mail and package processing for which it was designed. Additionally, the Sandston facility was affected by the anticipate, a dissolution of a transportation vendor that complicated the timely transport of mail to, and from the Virginia district, but this issue has also been addressed," read the letter.
In a letter Kaine wrote with even more members of Virginia's Congressional delegation late last month, he referenced veterans' medical tests that were delivered too late to get analyzed.
Kaine also requested a tour of the new operation.
"The Postal Service is embracing some systems changes and I don't I don't have any problem with that. If you think system changes are going to make things better, then we need to support those changes. And the Richmond Distribution Center is used as by the Postal Service as an example for, kind of, 'Here's the direction we're going,'" Kaine said. "Well, it ain't such a good example. If this is the direction that they're going, then the question that you all would have and I have is, 'OK, wow, they go that direction. Is that going to make things better? Or is it going to make things worse?'"
But the senator said his request for a tour was rejected.
"And I'm like, 'OK, well, if you don't want to give me a tour, then I'm doing a public meeting. And I'm going to make sure the whole world knows about what the problems are. So, you should have given me a tour,'" Kaine added.
Kaine said while is willing to give USPS grace, they need to show what they are doing to earn it.
"At a minimum, you would want the Postal Service to come out and say, 'Well, we're trying some new things we think are going to work, but we want to hear from you.' Instead, it's like, 'Pull up the drawbridge and we're not even going to pay any attention to you,'" Kaine said. "So, that's why we did this today. And we're going to continue to make it more and more public until A) we get answers and B) we get improvement."
In response to Friday's roundtable, a spokesperson for USPS sent CBS 6 the following statement:
While we were unable to provide a tour today, we want all our stakeholders to know under Delivering For America, the Postal Service’s 10-year plan, we are maintaining universal six-day mail delivery and expanded seven-day package delivery, stabilizing our workforce, and spurring innovation to meet the needs of our modern customers. The Postal Service continues its focus on improving service reliability for the American public and business customers by modernizing the outmoded operations across the nation. We are optimizing our transportation by aligning collection and transportation operations to meet the published mailing and shipping product service standards.
Each mailpiece is important to the Postal Service and we are committed to looking into each customer service matter brought to our attention. Customers who have questions about mail delivery.
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