The U.S. Postal Service has targeted nine offices in Maryland for possible closure. Read more to find out which ones might go under!
USPS is under great financial stress. On July 30, it issued a notice that it intended to study offices that were "candidates for discontinuance." While USPS was careful to say that this was not a done deal, the following offices are clearly on the chopping block:
Eastpoint Mall, Baltimore
Fells Point Station, Baltimore
Franklin Station, Baltimore
Mt. Washington Station, Baltimore
Towson Towne Center, Towson
Derwood, Rockville
Friendship Heights, Bethesda
Landover Hills, Hyattsville
Silver Spring Center, Silver Spring
See the full list here.
If you want to save any of these offices, you had better contact your Senators and Congressman pronto and make sure your friends do the same!
Monday, August 03, 2009
US Postal Service Targets Maryland Branches for Closure
Friday, May 01, 2009
Post Office Fumbles District 4 Absentee Ballot Applications
According to Pew Center's Election Line, the U.S. Postal Service failed to deliver 314 special election absentee ballot applications in its custody by the county Board of Elections deadline.
The article states:On April 15, the Montgomery County Board of Elections had received 314 absentee ballot applications that had been postmarked up to two weeks earlier, more than 10 percent of which had already been opened and stapled shut.
Jurgensen told her employees to contact every voter who sent in an application to tell them they could vote by in-person absentee or on election day. The article does not state how many voters who asked for an absentee ballot application actually went on to vote by other means.
Alarmed, Deputy Election Director Sara Harris brought samples to the post office and learned that each had been processed as incoming mail in the USPS Shady Grove Distribution Center between the dates of April 1 and 7. The envelopes should then have been sent by truck less than 5 miles to the post office in the county seat of Rockville, then placed in a dedicated post office box for absentee ballot applications that has its own 9-digit ZIP code.
However, the postal service does not track envelopes after they have left the distribution center. As a result, election officials and postal inspectors can only speculate on where these absentee applications – postmarked over the course of a week – were actually sent and how they made it back into the mail system where they were processed as incoming mail for a second time in the early morning on April 15th.
Jurgensen’s first worry is that more than 300 envelopes, which were clearly marked and barcoded for the Board of Elections with the proper 9-digit ZIP, were sent to the wrong address over the course of an entire week. Her second worry is that such a large volume of misdirected mail was then reintroduced to the mail stream without any way of flagging or tracking it.
“From their testimony before the Board,” says [Board of Elections Director Margaret] Jurgensen, “it was clear that the U.S. Postal Service does not know if the envelopes were put into a blue box or if someone hand-delivered them back to Rockville or Shady Grove. That was astounding to me”.
Both the Kramer and Navarro campaigns prioritized absentee voting and the race is coming down to dozens of votes. Will the Kramer campaign use this as grounds for a legal challenge? We are also reminded of the Navarro campaign's allegations that its mail pieces were left to sit in boxes on order from a post office manager. Those allegations now seem more credible given the temporary loss of the absentee ballot applications.
We have always believed the best thing about elections is that they end. Let's amend that to "if they end."
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
District 4 Mail Scandal Goes National
Postalnews.com, a national aggregator of stories about the U.S. Postal Service, has picked up our story on District 4 mail shenanigans.
At the moment, 30-40% of our site visits are coming from Postal News. That's rarefied territory matched only by our Crisis at the Gazette series, Saqib-Mania and our announcement of Barack Obama's last rally in Manassas.
Monday, April 06, 2009
Mail Shenanigans in District 4
Nancy Navarro’s campaign is alleging that a supervisor of a Silver Spring post office branch has been blocking their direct mail in the special election.
At least ten days ago, Navarro’s campaign initiated its first mail piece but it did not go out in zip codes 20904 and 20906. Navarro’s staff then found out that their literature was left sitting in trays at the Plum Orchard Post Office in Silver Spring on order from a station manager. That manager allegedly allowed other campaign literature to be sent out right away. We’ll see if the USPS Office of Inspector General investigates, but even if it does, no results will be known prior to the primary.
What was that we were saying about a full moon?
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Not Your Granny's Post Office
The Gazette helpfully provides information about the proposed development at the site of the Arlington Road Post Office in Bethesda:
County planners may approve renovations to the post office on Arlington Road in Bethesda that could lead to a larger facility with 111 condominiums above it.The Keating Development Company, based in Philadelphia, submitted site plans and traffic studies for the proposed five-story building to the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission on Nov. 15.
If the plans are approved, the existing 16,000-square-foot building, at 7001 Arlington Road, would be torn down and replaced with a new office, an underground parking lot for residents and postal workers, and four stories of apartments.
. . .
The United States Postal Service land in Bethesda is currently zoned for commercial businesses, and county planners would need to change the designation to a mixed-residential use.
A hearing on the rezoning has been scheduled for April 15, according to Dawn Minor, planning office administrator. Planners expected a change in the building’s use since a 1994 growth plan called the Bethesda Sector Plan.
