The U.S. Postal Service has announced there will be no rate increases
for market dominant products in January, according to the News/Media Alliance.
The recommendation from Postmaster General David Steiner was accepted by the governors of
the USPS.
Publishers and their organizations surely approve of that decision. But the News/Media Alliance is against a USPS proposal to exclude
delivery delays caused by extraordinary events from its service performance measurement system, and on Tuesday it sent a memorandum to the Postal Regulatory Commission to argue that point.
The
Alliance contends the USPS proposal “appears to give the Service unilateral and unreviewable authority to decide what events to exclude. That is problematic
because the proposed criteria are vague, undefined and would provide ample ambiguity for the Postal Service to manipulate and improve reported results.”
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The Alliance concludes, “If the Postal Service wants to maintain, for its own purposes, a measure of the service performance it believes it could
accomplish if common, recurring natural events such as storms, wildfires, and vendor problems did not occur, it could do so. However, such an idealized calculation should have no legal or regulatory
status and should not be part of the Commission approved service performance measurement system."