Months-long delays affecting undelivered mail at Fort Myers postal processing center
When a piece of mail doesn't find its destination, the United States Postal Service is supposed to return it to the sender.
Instead ‒ if you live in Southwest Florida – it may be buried under a stack of trays in the Fort Myers mail processing plant.
A months-long backlog has left about 500,000 pieces of undelivered mail unreturned, according to local United Postal Workers Union President Sam Wood. Plant management told employees the size of the backlog on April 15, Wood said.
The unprocessed trays of mail include bins dating back to February, Wood said. Because they contain undelivered mail that should have been returned to sender, some of the the letters and postcards in the trays were originally sent as early as September, according to Wood.
“Let's just say that you mailed a Christmas card back in December to a relative," Wood said in an interview. “If you put the wrong label on it or something happened where you sent it and it didn’t get where it was supposed to go, right now that mail that you would anticipate would come back to you is still sitting at the plant.”
When reached for comment, USPS did not answer specific questions about the cause of the delays.
“The Postal Service is committed to providing the best possible service to our valued customers," spokesperson Lucia Hall wrote in an email.
According to Wood, the reason for the backlog is that USPS is unwilling to pay for enough labor hours to get the work done. In the past, the agency would either hire more employees or approve overtime to address delays, he said; now, cutting costs is the priority.
“They’re trying to do more with less employees," Wood said. “It’s like they don’t even care.”
Southwest Florida is not alone in suffering from delays at USPS processing centers. Public officials in Virginia and Georgia have recently raised alarms about late deliveries, according to local media reports.
The Fort Myers Processing and Distribution Center, located on Jetport Loop near Southwest Florida International Airport, currently handles mail for Lee, Collier, Charlotte, Hendry and Glade counties. USPS is in the process of transferring local outgoing mail to its Tampa processing facility, in what it describes as a modernization and cost-savings plan.
This article originally appeared on Naples Daily News: Months-long delays affecting undelivered mail at Fort Myers postal processing center
