Daily News file photo
The Postal Service's high-tech, $300 million processing center opened in 2006.
Where mail goes to die
Slow/no delivery alleged at SW mail site
TWO WEEKS after the Boothwyn Fire Company, in Delaware County, mailed fundraising letters for its volunteer ambulance service last summer, director Tim Murray noticed that no checks were coming in.
The reason?
His fundraising appeals wound up in the U.S. Postal Service's Southwest Philadelphia distribution plant, where mail goes to slow down, and sometimes to die.
And it wasn't only the fire company. Customers throughout the region have complained of late deliveries and lost mail.
No wonder.
In interviews with the Daily News, postal service employees and a manager have described chaotic conditions in the chronically understaffed plant, which processes nearly six million pieces of mail a day on Lindbergh Boulevard near Island Avenue.
In recent months, a manager and several employees said, unsorted mail sat for weeks in overflowing bins on the plant floor or was stuffed into trailers in the parking lot and - in some cases - even shipped in desperation to other distribution plants, from where it often returned for sorting days later.
In some cases, the mail was destroyed, the employees said.
The postal employees and a manager spoke to the Daily News on condition of anonymity, saying they feared retribution if they spoke publicly.
The workers interviewed by the Daily News said the severe staffing shortages were the result of a year-long overtime ban.
A complaint filed by the postal workers' union with the USPS Office of Inspector General alleges that a senior manager and others ordered clerks to falsify the daily mail report, undercounting the volume by hundreds of thousands of pieces of mail, to save costs and overtime.
"The mail is here. You'd have to be blind not to see it," said a veteran employee.
"What really hurts me is the [possibility] that these [fake] numbers were used in determining how many employees were outsourced in Philadelphia," said Byron Murtaugh, APWU assistant clerk craft director and a 20-year postal employee.
In August, USPS officials here announced that 162 employees are to be transferred in January.
A lead senior manager and other managers received performance bonuses that were "fraudulently obtained, through the systematic falsification of official government reports, the diversion of mail, and the destruction of mail," the union complaint alleged.
"These [are] serious allegations of misconduct," said Nancy B. Lassen, the attorney who filed the complaint on behalf of American Postal Workers Union Local 89. "It is so systemic that it has become institutionalized at the Philadelphia plant."
The complaint also charged that the daily color codes on mail bins were changed to make it appear as if mail was not late.
Several veteran postal clerks told the Daily News that they were aware daily mail reports were being falsified and the daily color codes changed.
A union investigation, initiated by Gwen Ivey, Local 89 president, reached the same conclusion.
It appears the OIG has taken the complaint seriously.
