A forum on postal delivery woes got off to an inauspicious beginning when representatives of the U.S. Postal Service arrived late.
“Just like their mail,” muttered Donna LeBuis of Mokena, one of almost 50 residents and businesspeople who came to air their complaints last week at a forum sponsored by the Mokena Chamber of Commerce and U.S. Rep. Jerry Weller (R-Ill.).
Jim Olden, who is in charge of Postal Service operations in central Illinois, called his agency “one of the most accountable federal agencies.”
He agreed that customer service complaints shouldn’t be lost forever in voice mail. “I hate those machines, too,” he said. But he asked people to remember the successes as well as the failures. “We are doing some things right.”
In Mokena, complaints center on delayed delivery, especially of local correspondence, a problem many residents believe stems from the practice of shipping the mail from the Mokena Post Office to the Frankfort Post Office for automated sorting and distribution to carriers.
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Mokena isn’t the only town where mail goes to different post offices, Olden said.
All mail with ZIP codes beginning with 604 goes to the central sorting facility in Bedford Park. Mail to be delivered in the Frankfort-Mokena area goes back to the Frankfort Post Office, where it is sorted out and distributed to mail carriers, he said.
The system is intended to minimize the possibility of error, he said. “But every time you handle mail, that’s another opportunity for things to go wrong.”
And wrong is how they go, according to LeBuis. “We’ve had numerous problems with delivery,” she said, “and no one ever gets back to me. . . . We can’t depend on overnight express or second-day mail.”
In the perception of Mokena residents, “the level of service has declined,” said village administrator John Downs.
“The thing that gets me is the inconsistency,” said Richard Quinn, a former village mayor who now edits a magazine, a business in which deadlines are crucial.
Quinn said the magazine is mailed from Virginia, and there’s a reader in Australia who get a copy of the publication long before his shows up in Mokena.
Jena Nylec said her business and personal mail is sometimes delivered to the wrong person or lost. But Nylec’s worst problem was a box of bank checks stolen in transit. “It was a huge mess and a huge nightmare,” she said.
Olden offered some suggestions for individual mail problems and told residents the Postal Service does have some accountability checks, including surveys and “mystery shoppers” as well as public forums, to check on their performance.