At least one industry postal watcher has given a qualified thumbs-up to the Senate postal reform bill put forth Thursday.
Senators Susan Collins (R-ME) and Thomas Carper (D-DE) Thursday introduced their version of The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2004, about a week after the House Committee on Government Reform approved the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2004, the first postal reform bill to get this far in 30 years.
“I haven’t thoroughly read the bill yet but noticed that worksharing discounts in the Senate bill seem more favorable to the industry than those in the house proposal,” said Ed Gleiman, postal consultant to the Direct Marketing Association.
Gleiman said he also liked language in the Senate bill that more closely linked postage rate increases to the rate of inflation.
But he cautioned that “there are 41 more pages in the Senate bill than in the House bill that cleared the House Government Reform Committee last week. And that’s 41 pages worth of differences.”
Overall the Senate bill:
*Preserves universal service to every address in the country.
*Simplifies Postal Service product and service pricing and replaces the current rate-setting process with a rate-cap based structure to allow the USPS to react more quickly to changes in the mailing industry.
*Links rate caps to an inflation indicator of the new Postal Regulatory Commission’s choosing.
*Gives the USPS Board of Governors the authority to set rates for competitive products, such as Express Mail and Parcel Post, as long as these prices do not result in cross-subsidy from the market-dominant products.
*Gives the Postal Regulatory Commission the power to institute emergency price increases due to unexpected and extraordinary circumstances such as the anthrax attacks in the fall of 2001.
*Guarantees a higher degree of transparency to ensure fair treatment of customers of the USPS’s market-dominant products and companies competing with the Postal Service’s competitive products.
*Authorizes the USPS to enter into negotiated service agreements with mailers, letting mailers perform some of the work.
*Repeals the Civil Service Retirement Service (CSRS) escrow fund provision and transfers the military retiree pension obligation back to the Department of Treasury.
*Gives USPS the authority to transfer individuals receiving workers’ compensation to a retirement annuity when the affected individual reaches the age of 65.
*Requires that all future Postal Service Governors be selected based on their demonstrated ability in managing organizations or corporations of substantial size.
Gleiman predicted that the mailing industry would lobby hard for these bills to pass this year but conceded they might not have support from all quarters.
“A bill can be stopped at any time,” he said.
And with the election looming and may other issues taking center stage in Congress now, what prospects does postal reform have for passage this year?
“I’ve never been to Las Vegas,” Gleiman said. “But we’ve never gotten this close before on postal reform so I’m upbeat.”
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