Sen. Klobuchar Tours Bemidji Veterans Home; Comments on USPS Audit

By Zy’Riah Simmons

Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar visited the new Bemidji Veterans Home on Friday and also had a chance to comment on an upcoming audit of United State Postal Service operations in the area.

The Bemidji Veterans Home opened two weeks ago to veterans a chance to come in and get a tour of their possible new home, and it will start admitting its first residents next week. Sen. Klobuchar had a chance to see what it will be like for veterans at the facility.

“It’s incredible. You know, we have a lot of challenges going on in the state, around the country,” said Klobuchar. “But when you see something like this, you realize that these are veterans that have served our country. You know, when they signed up to serve, there wasn’t a waiting line. And when they are in their golden years and they need a place to live, they should have a place to live. There shouldn’t be a waiting line for them.”

The Senator noted how impressed she was with the building and what that means for area veterans.

“I was just stunned at how beautiful this place is. And it’s beautiful not just because we got the state and federal funding, $30 million in federal funding,” she added. “It was an incredible investment, but it’s because everyone was part of it. How each of the – just the care in choosing photographs and paintings and the like. So when the veterans look at them, it’s going to remind them of Bemidji. It’s going to remind them of a small town they grew up in.”

Sen. Klobuchar also gave a statement to Lakeland News about USPS service in the state of Minnesota. Bemidji, Blackduck, and other rural areas have been experiencing postal issues since November, and Klobuchar, along with fellow Senator Tina Smith and Congressman Pete Stauber, wrote a letter to U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy outlining several concerns affecting operations in the area, such as the purportedly unjust working conditions for staff and the alleged preference for outside third-party packages over necessities like bills and prescription drugs.

“The Bemidji piece of it is going to come in the next few months, because this audit was requested earlier,” said Klobuchar. “And what I found is going to be no surprise to the people of Bemidji or the region, and that is that they found over 50,000 delayed pieces of mail. They just looked at three branches, and in three days, that’s what they found. Some were a week late.”

Sen. Klobuchar then commented potential ways these issues could be resolved.

“They also found things that could be changed even without adding more employees. The scheduling of the way that they’re scheduling employees, they found congestions at the dock. And that would just hold that mail, that mail would just be sitting there because it couldn’t be delivered. And then they’re going to do the same in-depth review in Bemidji and Blackduck and other areas across our state.”

In addition to employee interviews and observations of various post offices and mail processing facilities, the evaluation will look at the Postal Service’s processing, logistics, and delivery networks.