Since last summer, Palisades residents have been contacting the Palisadian-Post with their postal service concerns. The most common complaint has been late mail delivery’mail that was delivered hours, days and, in some cases, months late. In mid-January, I visited the local La Cruz station, and new Manager in Charge Jason Miles said service would improve after he dealt with some internal problems and gave employees the direction and support they needed. He also said that the closure and consolidation of the Marina Processing and Distribution Center into the Los Angeles Processing and Distribution Center last July did not contribute to the Palisades’ decline-in-service issue. Departure times for trucks leaving the plant in South L.A. for the Palisades were adjusted and the automated machines that sort the mail “are very reliable,” he said. Last Thursday, the Postal Service conducted a media tour of the plant, which is located about seven miles south of downtown. The L.A. center occupies 74 acres. With 1.1 million square feet under its roof, the facility is the largest of its kind, on one level, in the nation. It processes about 23 million pieces of mail daily. Given the latter statistic, it felt oddly empty and quiet on the workroom floor as we strolled through the First Class card- and letter-sorting area at 11 a.m. The equipment that usually sorts letters at speeds of up to 36,000 pieces per hour was turned off, and we were told that the few employees working on the machines were doing “preventive maintenance.” “Where is everyone?” I asked, having been told that 4,400 employees work at the plant on a 24-hour rotation. Most are not on the usual 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. schedule, said Delores Killette, consumer advocate and vice president of consumer affairs. They begin arriving at about 3 p.m., and the majority of mail starts coming in at about 6 p.m. “We’re close to the efficient number [of employees],” Killette said, though she emphasized that staffing shortages are not a problem because they have a “supplemental” work force of about 630 temporary employees. The Postal Service hired some temporary help when the Marina center was closed, and 380 employees from that plant’300 clerks and 80 mail handlers’transferred to the L.A. center. Clerks work hands-on with the mail, sorting and distributing, while mail handlers load and unload trucks and drive industrial vehicles. In the plant, First Class card and letter mail is processed in a separate area from the standard, flat mail, which includes large envelopes, catalogs, magazines and newspapers. Our tour did not cover the flat-mail processing area. Mail handlers transfer incoming mail from trucks to the opening unit (OU), also known as the mail preparation unit. Here, machines that look like fork lifts take over, hoisting individual hampers of mail and dumping the contents onto a conveyer belt that carries the mail “downstream,” or towards the front, northern end of the building. The mail heads to an Advanced Facer/Canceller machine, which turns all of the letters stamp-side up, and places a postmark on each piece. The letters are automatically sorted into one of seven bins, and non-barcoded mail must go through an Optical Character Reader, which reads the address and “sprays” on a barcode. A Delivery Bar Code Sorter then sorts the mail by destination into “walk sequence,” or carrier routes, so that clerks at the local stations spend less time manually sorting the mail. The L.A. plant has 84 DBCS machines; the first ones were installed about 10 years ago. These automated machines sort up to 36,000 pieces of mail an hour and require only three employees to run them. Spokesman Larry Dozier compared this to earlier mechanized letter-sorting machines, which were run by 12 to 18 employees and sorted only 2,000 letters per hour. While some mail is processed mechanically at the plant, only a tiny percentage is processed manually’the pieces that are too thick to go through or that could not be read by the machines. Sorted mail is placed in individual trays on a Low Cost Tray Sorter for final dispatch, which means it heads to the loading dock for departure. There are 142 dock doors, 100 of them outbound, each with a destination name written above it. Trucks that deliver the mail to local stations are scheduled to leave the plant at 4:30 a.m., 6:30 a.m. and 8:30 a.m., but Dozier said the latter dispatch time has been readjusted to 7:30 so that trucks arrive earlier. Asked why mail destined for the Palisades would be delayed in arriving at the local post office, Killette said it might have to do with the scheduling, or reporting times for plant employees. Some of those times have had to be readjusted as well. “Now we’re in a position we can manage, with supplemental help, to be able to deal with the volume,” Killette said. Many of the temporary employees were hired to help handle increased mail volume in recent months. While the volume of First Class mail has decreased, the Postal Service has seen an increase in advertising mail, especially in more affluent areas of the city. Dozier said that mail volume usually drops during the summer, but did not in 2005. There was a temporary increase in volume during the winter holiday season and again immediately preceding the recent change in postal rates. Postal officials attribute later mail delivery in the city to this high volume. They also point to possible problems with delivery routes, which are currently being evaluated and adjusted. Officials are also in the process of hiring 65 additional full-time mail carriers for the entire L.A. district, which is 540 square miles, but would not say specifically where those employees will be distributed. “Twenty have been hired,” Dozier said. “Another 15 are near the end of the process [testing and background checks] and within two weeks we expect to complete work for another 20.” The Postal Service maintains that the Marina consolidation is unrelated to service problems that Palisades residents have been and still are experiencing. However, officials acknowledge internal kinks’both at the L.A. plant and here at the La Cruz station’that are affecting local mail delivery as they are being ironed out.
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