Great Falls Tribune: Looks like Postal Service won’t be heeding comments
We’ve occasionally wondered if, in the course of soliciting public comments on this plan or that, government bureaucrats weren’t just paying lip service to the idea of citizen involvement.
It’s a question that surely occurs to anyone who comes out on the opposite side of a government decision.
But rarely has that lip-service treatment been more crassly evident than in the U.S. Postal Service’s decision announced Monday to proceed with plans to make snail mail even slower, backing off on the promised speed of delivery of first-class mail. The decision flows from a determination made a few months ago to study closing 252 of the service’s 487 mail processing and distribution plants, including four in Montana — Missoula, Kalispell, Helena and Wolf Point.
By proceeding with the slower-mail decision this week, then, it appears the Postal Service’s facility-closure train has left the station, even though the public comment period is still running on many of the closures, and the overall study isn’t scheduled to be done until early next year.
