Missing packages. Undelivered letters. If you've been having problems with your mail lately, you're not alone. The USPS is rolling out big changes across the country, from Richmond, Virginia to Santa Clara, California.
United States Postal Service mailbox is seen in Miami Beach, United States on April 30, 2024. If you've been having problems with your mail lately, you're not alone.
CHAKRABARTI: That's On Point listener, Adeline Miller there. Here's Tracy Council, who also lives in Richmond. And today we want to understand more about why that is. And before we introduce our first guest, I want to just say that we did reach out to the USPS multiple times for an interview and did not receive a response. So we're going to start with Luca Powell. He's an investigative reporter with the Richmond Times-Dispatch and he joins us from Richmond, Virginia.CHAKRABARTI: All right.
So that happened I think in the fall. So in the run up to Christmas, there started to be a real tension around this. And Senator Tim Kaine took that issue and began to ask questions about what was going on with the mail. The Virginia Museum of History and Culture was missing 300,000 in membership renewals that arrived. They're supposed to arrive around the winter, but arrived afterwards in January. And yeah, it's just been all the time different issues, but a real frustration with all types of people, from all walks of life, who use the mail for business and also just to send letters to say hi, and all of it seems to be becoming a lot more difficult.
And we've also had issues with keeping postal carriers and having deliveries as late as 10 or 11 o'clock at night. Currently, our carrier's doing a great job and getting the mail to us at a normal time of day. The issue with the stolen checks was quite a problem for us. If you think of the mail is like a circulatory system, everything is being redirected towards this one hub. And from what we can tell, causing a lot of bottlenecks and crush there.
Trying to make it solvent again is the strategy. And the idea of consolidating things, reducing trips and bringing everything into one roof is, I think, what was really attractive to DeJoy and was what was tried here. But yeah, it's clearly causing problems. One that I just want an example. POWELL: We reach out to them all the time, but they give us a pretty bland statement saying that they know there were problems and we're working on them.
And I think overall, the sense from our readers is that the Post Office they were used to and they grew up with for many years is just not the same anymore. There have been some challenges, particularly with absences in the workforce at our delivery centers here. And it's not clear that is something that you'd find in the next place to go through this transition, but certainly there is a hope that this is going to be a learning curve that we don't get with the other centers.
And basically, it's supposed to handle, It's the main artery for all the mail going through the region now, and even some parts of North Carolina. So it's where everything is supposed to be happening. But it's also, we've learned a lot about this facility and things that have gone on there from a recent report that came out by one of the watchdog agencies that looks into the Post Office.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So I want to keep straight the different points of oversight that Delivering for America has already gone through. Now, when you're talking about an oversight group, is this the Office of the Inspector General you're speaking about or another one?CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Interesting.
But once again, I just want to remind folks, we wanted answers straight from the United States Postal Service, because of course, that's the best source to understand the program that they're rolling out, but they never gave us a response to our many inquiries here., one more question about that sorting facility, because, okay, not getting buy-in from workers, having poor communication in terms of what the rollout was actually supposed to entail.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay Luca, I hope that things improve rapidly for the people in the greater Richmond area. But for now, Luca Powell, investigations reporter at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, thank you so much for joining us, Luca.CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so let's hear a little bit more from folks around the country and what they think about how their postal service has been working for them in the past year or so.
CHAKRABARTI: That's Lynn in Clearwater, Florida. And here's David in Minneapolis who says he has not seen problems with the United States Postal Service where he lives.DAVID: I have packages delivered most every week. And I've had them lost and misdelivered or just thrown on the ground somewhere random, far from my apartment. These problems were with FedEx, UPS, and others. The only service I have never had a problem with is the United States Postal Service.
I'm seeing, I'm sure most of the people have seen the news. If they haven't, it's been a catastrophe, but we're dealing with it. We're resilient postal workers. So we do what we have to do. We come to work, and we just wish we had more cooperation and participation from management. TAYLOR: Great question. They will probably need, for what they're trying to do, an additional 500,000 square feet. I would say, maybe 2 million. Because the 1.1 is not big enough for the operation. The unit has, the facility has 192 doors and they're basically full the majority of the time.
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