Our View: Local mail service must improve

As they say, “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

Apparently, no one figured fiscal cutbacks and downsizing into the equation when associating that creed with the United States Postal Service. Yet here we are, with our mail making a detour to Salt Lake City for sorting, even if it’s traveling from Green River to Rock Springs. That’s a trip that hardly takes 15 minutes to complete one way, but results in more than 400 additional miles for letters to reach their destination.

Whoever thought consolidating the area’s postal sorting in Salt Lake City would result in fiscal savings either used a flawed equation and resulted with an epic-level mathematical failure or had stock in a trucking company.

The mail is traveling too slow for us to depend on with critical deliveries. Those deliveries, such as medications and time sensitive documents, are being delayed because of that rerouting down Interstate 80 and back. Don’t even think about overnighting something important, it won’t make it to the destination the next day.

We understand the USPS’s desire to save money, especially as physical mail continues to lose importance in the digital world we live in.

In fact, we’re fairly certain consolidation works in more populous, urban regions. Not so much for places like Wyoming.

The USPS should recognize it can’t expect to make the moves that work in urban settings and have the same results in rural areas.

We think it would behoove the USPS to reconsider the Rock Springs sorting facility’s closure in light of the problems many of Sweetwater County’s residents have experienced regarding the postal delays.

The facility should be reopened. Yes, the it would cost more, but service to rural communities would improve.

The USPS can’t afford to conduct business in a manner that drives its customers away and if it continues to insist upon its current plan of action, that will be the end result.

If the number of people coming into our office to sign a petition protesting the USPS’s decision is any indication, a lot of residents are inconvenienced by the change.

Those are disgruntled postal customers, and their numbers will only grow.

Re-opening the postal sorting is the only way to rectify this mistake. It’s the only way the USPS will be able to restore faith in its services locally.