Dozens rally in Portland in support of U.S. Postal Service

A line of protesters, a plush pony and a live chicken made an appearance outside the post office near Portland City Hall on Saturday morning as part of a demonstration in support of the U.S. Postal Service.

About 50 protesters organized by Mainers for Accountable Leadership lined Congress Street shortly before noon, demanding the resignation of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and calling the recent slowdowns and removals of sorting machines in postal facilities across the nation a ploy by President Trump to boost his re-election.

The president has attacked mail-in voting in recent months, saying without evidence that it’s vulnerable to fraud.

“It’s a rather suspicious change,” Ted Mayer of Portland said of the cutbacks to postal operations. “And I think it’s clear that President Trump is trying to swing things his way, as he has with everything else.”

Mayer, a semiretired hospitality consultant, held signs calling for more funding for the postal service and for the resignation of DeJoy, a businessman and Republican Party fundraiser. Mayer said he relied on the mail for all kinds of services – prescriptions, Social Security checks and voting.

Postal workers at the U.S. Postal Service sorting facility in Scarborough last week said two of 10 sorting machines had been removed, causing delays and hampering the workers’ ability to respond to a likely surge in mail during election season. Though DeJoy said he would stop future cutbacks to postal resources in response to a congressional outcry, he hasn’t made provisions to repair the cuts he has already made – including the removal of machines, the postal workers said.

A short way down the sidewalk on Saturday, a hen named Eva clucked apprehensively in a cage next to a stuffed pony meant to evoke the Pony Express – the early days of U.S. mail.

The hen’s owner, Jennifer Jones, delivered a short speech through a megaphone a few minutes later. Jones has about 45 chickens at her Falmouth home, and is accustomed to ordering chicks through the mail. In more than a decade during which she shipped more than a thousand chicks through the postal service, only one animal had problems, she said.

That changed a few weeks ago, when Jones received a call from a flustered-sounding postal employee telling her a package was waiting for her. She went to the post office with her daughter, who is 20 and autistic, she said, and opened a box to the smell of decay and the sight of dead and dying chicks.

The incident caused Jones and her daughter emotional and financial distress, including hundreds of dollars in lost chicks and treatment and euthanasia expenses for the birds, she said. But more than that, it was emblematic of what she called an erosion of the public good by the Trump administration.

“People aren’t getting their paychecks, little creatures are dying, all so President Trump can get re-elected. It’s disgusting,” she said.

Other postal customers in Maine have reported opening packages and finding dead animals inside. In New Sharon, the owner of a family farm and chicken meat processing facility received 800 dead chicks in the mail earlier this month.

The postal crisis has emerged as a campaign issue in the U.S. Senate race between Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, and Sara Gideon, the Democratic speaker of the Maine House of Representatives.

Both Gideon and Collins say they support more funding for the postal service; Collins is co-sponsoring legislation with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., to provide $25 billion in emergency funding. But Gideon has criticized Collins over her support for the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, a 2006 law mandating that the postal service pre-fund retirement health benefits for its workers decades in advance – a requirement shared by no other government agencies and that critics believe has severely undercut the organization.

Collins has defended the law, saying that it was passed unanimously by the Senate – with support from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer – had support from the postal service and the postal labor unions, and relieved the agency of financial liabilities. She also has said that current House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, had supported it.

Cathie Crute of Portland holds a sign calling for Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to resign. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer

Marie Follayttar, the executive director of Mainers for Accountable Leadership, took shots at Collins as well on Saturday.

“We do not need to be in this crisis. It is manufactured,” she said. “Susan Collins is directly responsible for the issues facing the United States Postal Service.”

Later on Saturday, the senator’s spokeswoman, Annie Clark, called the accusation that Collins was responsible “spurious” and said the 2006 law, known as PAEA, saved the postal service from a “death spiral” of financial unsustainability. The service was on a “high-risk” list for financial liability before the law was passed, and afterward was removed from that list for a few years, she said.

“Recently, some have made the spurious argument that a provision in a law that passed Congress unanimously in 2006 is responsible for the USPS’ current predicament. This is false,” Clark said in an email. “This is a disingenuous effort by the Democrats to use the President’s mishandling of the current Postal Service situation to attack Senator Collins for what, at the time, was a remarkable bipartisan legislative accomplishment – there had not been a successful major postal reform effort in Congress since 1971.”

A spokesman for Collins’ campaign said Saturday evening that she “is a longtime champion for the Postal Service and its workers.”

Analyses since the implementation of the law indicate that it ultimately hurt the postal service’s finances. In 2012, the USPS started to default on its pre-payments required by the PAEA. In 2015, the USPS inspector general’s office attributed the service’s $15 billion in debt directly to the law.

At the time, the inspector general’s office wrote: “What if your credit card company told you: ‘You will charge a million dollars on your credit card during your life; please enclose the million dollars in your next bill payment. It’s the responsible thing to do.’ Doesn’t seem quite right, does it?”

Saturday’s event was one of several around the state, Follaytar said. Around the country, activists on Saturday planned protests to “Save the Post Office,” including in front of DeJoy’s home in Washington, D.C.