WFMA DINNER MEETING
5/19/05

"The Changing Postal Service:
Rates, Reform and Reorganization"

Speaker: Joe Moeller, Manager, Specialty Pricing, Marketing Department, U.S. Postal Service, Washington, DC

[begin Side A]

. . . Yeah, so I've been around quite a bit in the Postal Service; thank you for the introduction; thanks for having me here. I love this! Coming to L.A. is great! It's getting nicer in DC, though--the weather--so it's tough to leave sometimes, but I like getting out and about seeing people and talking so that's great. A couple of things you said you wanted to talk about; some of them I know some things about, some I don't know much about at all, some I know a lot about. I've been in pricing now for 18 years at the Postal Service doing various things, but most recently I've been involved more in the special things we've been launching--I don't know if you've seen a Priority Mail box that's a fixed size and it's $7.70 postage regardless of where it's going or what's in it. So we have things like that going. We have a forwarding service that's going to start in August where if you're going away to your winter home somewhere you can have your mail boxed up and shipped once a week for a fee. So we're doing innovative things like that. But, the hard-core rate case stuff is what we're here to talk about mostly today, so we're going to talk about the proposed rate change, some of the background as to why it's happening, the specifics of the filing. You may've heard, it's what we're calling "across the board" but of course there are some exceptions. We're going to talk about the timeline -- when this is going affect you, perhaps; and what's going to happen after that. People always want to know what's going to happen--what's next? And I’ll tell you where you can go to get some more information. And then specifically for this group we're filling in some stuff on co-mailing and co-palletization in periodicals and there was also a request to hear something about the change of the organization in my area and the start of the Pricing and Classification Service Center. If you want to interrupt and ask me questions, that's fine too.

Just to give you a little background on how this whole rate case thing works--. We file what is called a Request--I think that sounds so quaint, you know? we're “requesting” new prices, and we send that over to the Postal Rate Commission. We do that when the governors of the Postal Service see that in a future year our finances are going to be such that we're going to need a rate increase or a rate change, which has the effect of raising revenue. That request is sent to what is called the Postal Rate Commission, which is an independent agency with five presidentially appointed commissioners and a staff, and they're the ones that set the timetable, set the hearings and everything for this request that we've made for rate changes. And they have up to ten months to do that. During that ten months, "interveners," they're called--people like the Magazine Publishers of America,--MPA. Our competitors, UPS… everybody, consumer groups can get involved; anybody who has an interest in postage rates either because they want them higher or lower can get involved and intervene in the rate case. Then witnesses--I've been a witness in a lot of these things-- get cross-examined by the attorneys from these organizations and that's always trying. [laughter] But anyway, so after ten months--the maximum is ten months--we're hoping this time it goes a little quicker than ten months. They have ten months by law to issue a "recommended decision," it's called, where they say “Here are the prices we're recommending. Here's the whole package, called the Recommended Decision”. And then it comes to our governors of the Postal Service who have a couple options: They can accept it or reject it, or accept it under protest and send it back to have reconsideration. I'm not real sure of all the technicalities here, but in practice, it is usually an acceptance of the decision and then implementation follows after that....