The Boston City Council slammed the U.S. Postal Service for blowing off an emergency hearing aimed at addressing service failures it says are causing residents to miss out on bills and prescriptions, and raising mail-in voting concerns.
Councilor Sharon Durkan, who called for the hearing last month, said Tuesday that the USPS chose not to engage in the day’s discussion because it saw the Council as having a “political agenda” in elevating the issue, and not being “so much about customers.”
Durkan was citing private emails that she said the USPS “accidentally forwarded.”
“That cannot be farther from the truth,” Durkan said. “We are gathered here to address an urgent concern to constituents, the deteriorating quality of USPS service.”
Other councilors piled onto USPS for the snub, which came after they heavily promoted the hearing — which drew live virtual testimony from U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley — and the topic generated widespread press coverage.
“It’s outrageous that someone from the post office has accused us of having a political agenda,” Councilor Benjamin Weber said. “Our agenda is to make sure Boston residents get their mail, that they get their checks, that they get their medication and they get their ballots, making sure that happens.
“That’s not political,” Weber added. “It’s just ensuring that residents of Boston have a basic public service.”
Weber went on to accuse the USPS of being politicized, while pointing to U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who he said was appointed by former President Donald Trump and “kept there by obstruction by the Senate for Biden to appoint anyone else to the Board of Directors.”
DeJoy, the councilor said, has “sought to run the post office like it’s a business that needs to turn a profit, which is absurd, because the post office, like the T or the water department, provides a necessary public service.”
Councilor Gabriela Coletta also got in a dig at the “deplorable leadership” at the USPS, saying that she thought it was “rich to hear from his cronies that we are politicizing the issue, when we are just trying to represent our constituents” who aren’t receiving their prescriptions or whose ballots are getting lost in the mail.
Durkan pushed back on what she saw as misleading claims from the USPS, which issued a statement last month saying mail delivery in the city was within “performance standards” during the latest financial quarter, which extended from July 1 to Sept. 30.
“The reality on the ground tells a remarkably different story,” Durkan said.
Residents throughout Boston, she said, have “experienced unacceptable delays and inefficiencies in their mail service,” which she said has left them without “critical communications, including legal documents and financial statements,” and led to delays in “vital medications.”
Durkan added in her opening remarks that the “unreliable Postal Service threatens to undermine our democratic process,” in terms of mail-in voting becoming more prominent in recent years.
She later noted, however, that Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin made remarks this past weekend that his office was “working very closely” with USPS to make sure it won’t impact the state and federal elections.
USPS union representatives participating in the hearing cited staffing issues as a major factor contributing to service problems. The union reps largely agreed with councilors on late mail and packages being an issue that warrants much concern, and even joined in on the bashing of Postal Service leadership.
They testified, however, that the unions don’t see mail-in voting as being as much of a concern ahead of next month’s elections, while pointing to what Scott Hoffman, national business agent for the American Postal Workers Union, described as an extensive vetting process that negates “gamesmanship or failure.”
“That’s the one thing that we can say, don’t worry about, but everything else, you’ve got to worry about,” Hoffman said. “That’s, I guess, the message for today.”
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