Postal Service Hasn't Made Case For Rate Hike, NNA Says

By: E&P Staff The U.S. Postal Service's (USPS) proposed postage increase of 25% to 30% for the class of mail most used by newspapers punishes their efforts to speed delivery, officials of the National Newspaper Association (NNA) testified Wednesday before the Postal Rate Commission in Washington.

Max Health, chairman of the NNA's postal committee, told the commission the rates will make delivery less efficient and penalize publisher who make the USPS' job easier by pre-sorting, drop-shipping, bar-coding and documenting their mail with Postal Service-approved software.

An economist speaking on behalf of NNA argued that the USPS failed to make its case that the cost of handling newspapers has dramatically increased. Stephen E. Siwek, a principal at Economists Inc. in Washington, DC, said the Postal Service relied on "inadequate" cost sampling to support that claim.

"With no data as to the real costs of Within County Periodicals, it is difficult to see how the Commission can reach any conclusions with respect to the rate changes for the Within County subclass that have been proposed by the Postal Service," Siwek testified, according to an NNA news release. "For this reason, I conclude that the Commission would be well justified in rejecting the USPS' proposed rate increase for the Within County subclass in its entirety."

Vandalia (Mo.) Leader Publisher Gary Sosniecki told the commission that repeated instances of delayed delivery are costing him subscribers. The proposed postal increase would be a "heavy burden" for family-owned papers like his, he said.

"We are getting crunched," Sosniecki said.

NNA, which is the principal national association for community papers, has made the cost of mailing a priority issue, said its president, Jerry Reppert, publisher of the Gazette-Democrat in Anna, Ill.

He said the association's recent "postal summit" meeting had convinced NNA leadership that "the Postal Service had simply forgotten how important in-county newspaper mail is to our industry."

Reppert said he hoped Wednesday's testimony will convince the commission to hold the increase to "some reasonable range...and that we will be able to help the Postal Service to find a better way to measure our true costs."