The U.S. Postal Service may have broken several federal laws in its push to close the EMU post office.
According to title 39, section 241.3 of U.S. Code, “the public must be given 60 days’ notice of a proposed action to enable the persons served by a post office to evaluate the proposal and provide comments.” Following the comment window, the law then necessitates a 30-day appeal period “within the first 30 days after the written determination is made available,” allowing for “any person regularly served by the affected post office (to) appeal the decision.”
EMU post office workers asserted that neither of these stipulations were met, possibly rendering the Postal Service’s continued closure efforts unlawful.
According to the Oct. 21 official closure letter penned by Eugene Postmaster Paul Bastinelli, the Postal Service’s fiscal crisis brought about the consolidation in the size of its retail and delivery network, forcing the EMU office to be conjoined with the Southside Station at 30 E 33rd Ave. In the letter, Bastinelli assured postal customers that “the community’s input was received and carefully considered before making this decision.”
Ken Rosemarin, the EMU post office’s lead sales and services associate, oversees postal operations in the office and says community input could not have possibly been “carefully considered.” Rosemarin alleges that the required 60-day comment period in fact lasted less than two weeks in the beginning of August 2009, when only a fraction of students were on-campus.
“It definitely made it an unfair survey,” Rosemarin said. “It’s a completely unreasonable time at the University post office to gauge customer reaction to the potential closing.”
The sales associate was working in the office at the time, and remembers the comment period only lasting from August 5 to approximately August 19, less than half of the required duration.
“It should have been into October that there was time for feedback,” Rosemarin said. “Every part of the process where they were required to do something, they didn’t do it.”
Ronald Anderson, the Portland-based customer relations coordinator for the Postal Service, disagreed with Rosemarin and said the Postal Service carefully followed the law throughout the entire closure process.
“The comment period was a full 60 days; that requirement was met,” Anderson said. “I know we received comments that were included in the final review through the first week of November.”
Even if the comment period was in line with regulations, the Postal Service may still find itself in legal hot water for not publicly announcing the 30-day appeal period as stipulated by U.S. Code. Anderson said no appeals had been received as of Monday, and that the closure decision was finalized at that point.
“The process that we went through in 2009 … was all concluded back at the end of October (2009),” Anderson said. “And at that point it was simply an announcement that the decision had been made.”
However, according to the law, Anderson could not legally make the assertion that the closure is a “done deal” until all appeals were received and evaluated.
This premature assurance has given Rosemarin the impression that the EMU office was slated for closure long before any feedback from the University community was received.
“Our union believes that they did not follow the law or carefully consider the impact on the University community,” Rosemarin said. “We believe that they wanted to shut the office down from the start. They thought it was an easy target.”
And the battle is not over.
Rosemarin helped mail an appeal to the Postal Regulatory Commission on Nov. 16, barely inside the 30-day window that began with the posting of Bastinelli’s letter on Oct. 21. In an e-mail concerning the appeal, a post office customer who asked not to be named stated that the EMU post office “serves a large population of students, many of whom do not have access to an automobile (and) are international.”
“International students are the most vulnerable people if this post office closes,” Rosemarin agreed.
Included in the appeal was a copy of the signature-laden petition created by the University’s Mills International Center, encompassing international students’ frustrations that they may soon have to travel dozens of blocks to send and collect parcels to and from their home countries.
“It will make it very difficult for them to do any mailing,” Mills Program Manager Nada Alharthi said. “I haven’t heard from anyone who was even indifferent; everyone I have talked to has just been very upset.”
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