Sen. Tina Smith Gives Thoughts on Report About Bemidji Mail Delays

On Tuesday, an audit report requested from U.S. Senators Tina Smith (D) and Amy Klobuchar (D) was released from the United States Postal Service Inspector General’s Office. It revealed a shocking amount of mail delivery issues in northern Minnesota over a 3-day audit last December.

The Inspector General’s report of the Bemidji Post Office reveled almost 79,000 pieces of delayed mail that were found in the office between December 12-14, inaccurate reporting of that delayed mail, and inadequate planning for increased mail volume.

“My office has been hearing about people not getting their mail and the challenges of Bemidji staff and the post office for months, really starting from before Christmas time, and that’s what caused us to ask for this Inspector General’s report from the U.S. Postal Service to get to the bottom of what’s going on here,” said Sen. Smith in an interview. “There are serious problems with mail delivery because of mismanagement. We’ve had delayed packages and delayed mail, Postal Service workers that were not in a position to be ready for the onslaught.”

That onslaught came when the Bemidji Post Office agreed with a large shipper to take their deliveries. (At a symbolic strike in November, Bemidji postal workers said they were told to prioritize delivery of Amazon packages.) According to the Inspector General’s report, that resulted in an average increase of almost 2,500 pieces of mail per day, about a 131% increase compared to the previous year. The U.S. Postal Service Headquarters reportedly gave the Bemidji Office only eight days’ notice of how many extra packages they would handling.

“That was a huge increase in the workload without adequate work on the part of management to prepare people for that onslaught of packages and to have the procedures and the training in place and the people in place to be able to deal with it,” stated Sen. Smith. “And who paid the price for that? The hardworking Postal Service workers who were out there trying to get all those packages delivered. And of course, the folks in the region that were expecting their mail and packages to arrive, that’s mail that people are counting on and that they they need to be able to get on time.”

Before the increase in mail volume came, the Bemidji Post Office was already short staffed on mail carriers. When the extra packages started arriving, some mail carriers were forced to work over 12-hour shifts and sometimes use their personal vehicle due to lack of resources. This resulted in 15 carriers either resigning or retiring just between November and December of last year.

“I think the report shows that the local staff were not adequately prepared or warned about this,” Sen. Smith elaborated. “They didn’t have a chance to make adjustments. They didn’t have the training that they should have been given, and they didn’t have the manpower or the people power that they should have. And I don’t blame that on the folks in the Bemidji Post Office that were doing everything that they needed to do to be able to get those packages out the door so that they were ready with a clear deck to take the next onslaught on the next day. But I do think it’s a problem of upper management for not having systems in place to be able to track actually what’s happening.”

Sen. Smith says she expects the results from the district-wide report will show that it’s not just northern Minnesota experiencing this problem with delayed mail.

“Well, sadly, I’m expecting to see more confirmation that across the board in Minnesota, we are not seeing the post office meeting expectations for Minnesotans,” added Sen. Smith. “I just know that because of the many meetings and discussions that we’ve had around the state, hearing many of the same complaints that we’ve that we’ve seen in Bemidji be repeated elsewhere around the state. So when we get that report, we will take a hard look at it. And then we’re going to hold the post office to account for delivering the service that people expect.”

The U.S. Postal Service agreed that the increased mail volume impacted operations, but disagreed that headquarters management had anything to do with it. It wasn’t until the staffing problems arose in November that this became an issue.

Lakeland News reached out to the USPS Headquarters Office and the Bemidji Post Office for their response on the situation, but both declined to comment.