Postal issues dominated the first day of the Direct Marketing Association's annual Government Affairs Conference yesterday at the historic Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC.
With the Postal Reform Bill, H.R. 22, having passed the House postal subcommittee last month, the focus made sense.
Richard Barton, the DMA's senior vice president for government affairs, returned to the conference from a meeting with mass mailers and Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN), chairman of the subcommittee's parent, the Government Reform and Oversight Committee, and announced that Burton has scheduled the mark-up for May 19.
That's soon for such a complicated bill, but the feeling was that pushing it too far back would bring it into the political season and kill its chances, Barton said. He added that vigilance would be needed to counter opposition and to keep the measure moving.
The bill's author, John McHugh (R-NY), had just enough time to thank the assembled for the DMA's input on the bill before he was called back to the Hill for voting.
Postmaster General William J. Henderson said the Postal Service "reeks for reform" and needs to be "more nimble." He said he didn't think "the monopoly is sacred" but it would be unfair "to unleash a $64 billion business into the market."
Postal Rate Commissioner Ruth Goldway said she had problems with H.R. 22, mostly that it "focuses too much on protecting the marketplace from possible Postal Service competition and not enough on the advantages of competition."
The bill largely restricts the USPS from introducing new non-postal products, but Goldway said she favors loosening the definition of postal products, and wants to allow the Postal Service to do such things as provide electronic communications, sell advertising on its trucks and lease underused equipment to private firms.
"We should not curtail the ability of the Postal Service to be innovative just because we are afraid of its size and deep pockets," she said.
In his opening remarks for the day, H. Robert Wientzen, the DMA's president and CEO, said the group supports most of the bill's provisions including separating mail into competitive and noncompetitive categories, having negotiated service agreements with high-volume mailers and annual rate indexing of non-competitive products.
But, Wientzen said, the DMA is concerned that the measure doesn't have a provision "that would prevent a postal rate hike from exceeding a rise in the Consumer Price Index." The DMA supports "an offset factor for postal productivity increases," he said.
PMG Henderson delivered a strong message on the privacy front. He depicted a possible scenario in which even use of the National Change of Address file would be taken away--"and then your lists become corrupted." He added, "There's a venom on the Hill on this issue that I've never seen before."
