Industry witnesses testifying at yesterday’s hearing on postal reform legislation urged the House postal subcommittee to make some major changes in the measure that would give the U.S. Postal Service some of the freedoms it wants, while increasing the Postal Rate Commission’s authority over the USPS.
Although he called the basic structure of postal reform legislation “sound,” Jerry Cerasale, senior vice president, government affairs, Direct Marketing Association, said the measure allowing the USPS to split its operations into competitive services (overseen by a private corporation), and noncompetitive services, needed some changes to protect mailers from sudden, sharp rate increases.
Testifying on behalf of the Mailers Coalition for Postal Reform, Cerasale said the USPS should legally be prohibited from shifting products and services between competitive and noncompetitive categories. Such shifting, he said “would be unfair to competitors.”
Saying the group believes the PRC, not the USPS, should set baseline rates, Cerasale urged the panel to change a provision in the bill requiring minimum markups between competitive and noncompetitive services to be equal. Keeping that provision in the bill, he said, would cause the rates for competitive classes of mail “to go up as much as 10%…suggesting that the PRC erred in its most recent decision,” resulting in the Jan. 10, rate increase averaging just 3%.
Others testifying at the hearing included Neal Denton, Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers executive director, and Lee Cassidy, National Federation of Nonprofits executive director.
While generally endorsing the measure as proposed by subcommittee chairman Rep. John McHugh (R-NY), both called for revisions that would provide nonprofit mailers with protections for their reduced rate-postage and from what they deemed to be “onerous” USPS regulations and overzealousness in enforcing them.
