The United States Postal Service is moving forward with a proposal that would shift most mail processing for Peoria to the Chicago suburbs, despite calls from many local politicians and postal workers to halt the plan.
The new plan, part of USPS' Delivering for America initiative and finalized earlier this week, would have local mail be sorted and processed at the South Suburban Processing and Distribution Center in Bedford Park before returning to the post office in Peoria. The post office itself would be modernized as a Local Processing Center, with USPS saying that retail operations would be unaffected.
The postal service said that it would save somewhere between $1.7 to $2.2 million with the plan, with no changes in service standards coming as a result. The move to the Bedford Park facility comes with no plans for layoffs, but 16 positions would be impacted. USPS said that it would work with local postal workers unions through their collective bargaining agreements to determine the impact for employees.
USPS does plan to commit $8 to $10 million in improvements for the Peoria post office, with new sorting equipment and other customer improvements in the works.
USPS said that the move to the Chicago area would "(drive) efficiency and service performance improvement to fuel revenue growth and customer retention." However, politicians such as U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth and Reps. Eric Sorensen and Mary Miller have criticized the plan, saying that it would slow mail delivery times and have a negative impact on the economy of many communities in Illinois.
A letter by those politicians, plus Reps. Mike Quigley and Nikki Budzinski, was sent to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy in March and stated that the new plan could prevent people from receiving life-saving medication in a timely manner and that more research needed to be done on the long-term economic impact of the proposed move.
Postal workers and other politicians also criticized the move at a public meeting in February, where they said that the move of jobs from Peoria to Bedford Park would essentially be a forced transfer and that many workers didn't have the ability to move their families from one place to another.
Budzinski, the congresswoman in the 13th Congressional District, introduced a bipartisan bill along with Michigan Rep. Jack Bergman on Wednesday to try and halt those moves, saying that the moves in communities like Peoria, Springfield and Champaign were "misguided."
"Postmaster DeJoy has no business reducing mail processing capacity in areas that are already short staffed and struggling to receive mail on time," Budzinski said. "Today, I introduced bipartisan legislation that will halt these plans in Champaign and Springfield, and in underserviced areas across the country. I’m grateful to Congressman Jack Bergman for joining me in this important effort to protect local USPS jobs and push back on a misguided effort that could further impact poor postal delivery rates in our communities."
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