Travis Taylor | Lariat Photographer
By Josh Day
Reporter
Baylor’s Mail Services will continue to run with no changes, despite the U.S. Postal Service’s announcement to end Saturday mail earlier this month.
It’s no secret that the Postal Service is in trouble. The popularity of email and a costly retirement plan from the House of Representatives have largely contributed to the Postal Service’s financial report of a record $15.9 billion net loss the last fiscal year.
In response, beginning the week of Aug. 5, the U.S. Postal Service will stop mail delivery on Saturdays.
Despite this, Baylor’s mail system will continue without any noticeable differences, Teresa Mosley, mail services manager, said.
“We are still always going to pick up mail on Saturdays, even in August,” Mosley said.
The Postal Service’s closure of the Waco mail-processing center annex has done very little to affect the Baylor mail system. Last month, the U.S. Postal Service officially ended operations at the annex located at 7300 Imperial Drive and moved its operations to Austin as part of its ongoing internal cost-cuts.
“It has not affected the way that we get mail and we’ve been promised that it wouldn’t,” Mosley said.
Mosely is neither a federal employee nor a Baylor employee. The Baylor mail services employees do not work for the Postal Service. They are contractors from Integ, a Central Texas mail, printing and data services company.
Mosley said this allows the mail services to have a close relationship with the local post office and still pick up mail when the they would normally not deliver.
In the age of social media, email and text messaging, the Baylor mail services are still busy.
“On Valentine’s Day we had almost 1,500 packages to process,” Mosely said. “That’s not counting mail or cards, that just packages.”
The mail services picks up mail and packages from the post office every weekday, on Saturdays, and on most postal holidays.
“President’s Day, the post office was actually closed, as well as the banks. We still picked up our mail,” Mosely said.
Baylor has not publicly announced any plans to cut, downsize or end any part of the mail services. According to Lori Fogleman, director of media communications, the Baylor mail services still provides “a valuable and vital service.”
Fogleman said that the ability for students to still send and receive packages on a daily basis is a service that Baylor provides and that despite the fact that “the piece count may be going down” in terms of letters, the number of packages “is still substantial.”
“The mail services still provides a vital connection between families, parents, grandparents, and students, faculty, foundations and other researchers and staff who conduct university business on behalf of students, faculty and the administration every day,” Fogleman said.
According to Mosley, the only noticeable difference from this year and the last is a small delay from the Postal Service.
“I think I’ve seen a little bit of a delay, in general, from the Postal Service over the last few months,” Mosley said.
She said the only reason she was aware of any delays was because of phone calls from the parents of Baylor students.
However, she said that the delays were small.
“There might be a day delay, but that’s pretty much it,” Mosely said.
The Postal Service is still battling dissenting congressmen concerning the legality of their plan to cut Saturday mail delivery. The plan proposes stopping Saturday mail in August, but it would only affect first-class mail. Packages, mail-order medicine, and express mail would still be delivered.
