The Mailers Council has sent letters to key members of the House and Senate, proposing four “amendments” to the postal reform bills in each chamber.
In May, the House Government Reform Committee and the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee passed their respective postal reform bills (Direct Newsline, May 14).
Tuesday, the Council sent letters to Senate Majority Leader William Frist (R-TN) and Speaker of the House, J. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) as well as the chairmen and ranking minority members of the budget and postal oversight committees.
“The hope is that we’ll be able to get both house and senate bills to be identical because there are differences between the two,” said executive director Bob McLean.
At present, the bills (S 2468 and HR 4341) differ on several different issues.
The Council’s proposed new amendments concern:
* Retirement issues
* A new rate index system
* Competitive product pricing
* Service standards
On retirement issues for example, the Council calls for a compromise between the House and Senate proposals that would call for steady payments with the low initial contribution level of the House bill, and stretched over 20 years.
“This compromise would moderate rate hikes in 2006, while also moderating future payments for the Postal Service,” said McLean.
The House bill calls for the USPS to pay half of its retiree health care obligation over 10 years. The initial payments would be low, but the payments would escalate sharply over a short period of time. This would make it difficult for the Postal Service to make payments without raising rates or cutting service, argued the Council.
The Senate version calls for the USPS to pay down the full amount of the retiree health care obligation over 40 years. The initial payments would be higher and would likely lead to a substantial rate increase for mailers in 2006.
This issue of who will pay for the military pensions of former postal workers dates back to late 2002. At that time, the USPS discovered that it overpaid the federal government’s Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) fund for the military pensions of its retied employees. Military pensions for government workers are usually paid by the Dept. of the Treasury. In order to get Treasury to pay the postal pensions a new law had to be passed.
This led to intensive lobbying on the part of mailers to get a new law passed obligating the Department of Treasury to assume these pensions and setting up an escrow fund to hold the extra money. This move ostensibly freed up billions of dollars for the USPS and putting off a new rate case until 2005 (Direct Newsline, April 3, 2003).
This new law, however, was seen as a stopgap measures by mailers who argued that more substantial postal reform was necessary. Therefore, the issue found its way into the current postal reform bills.
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