After substantial push back from the Nevada delegation and Governor Lombardo on the proposed changes to the Reno Processing and Distribution Center (P&DC), USPS announced that they will go ahead and transition the Reno P&DC to a to a Local Processing Center and transfer mail processing outgoing operations to the West Sacramento, California P&DC. This comes after a hurried review process and only one public meeting with limited opportunity for Nevadans to provide comments and concerns. There are no present indications that USPS has any interest in responding to Nevada’s concerns.
U.S. Senator Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Governor Joe Lombardo, Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), and Congressman Mark Amodei (R-NV-02) sent a bipartisan letter to the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors expressing their serious concerns with the plan to downsize and relocate part of the operations of the Reno Processing and Distribution Center to California. This bipartisan group insisted the Board exercise its oversight authority to stop Postmaster General DeJoy from implementing the plan.
“On April 23, USPS officially announced its decision to proceed with its misguided plan to downsize and relocate outgoing mail processing operations from Reno, Nevada to Sacramento, California,” wrote the lawmakers and the Governor. “This announcement came despite multiple requests from the undersigned for USPS to present the data that informed this decision – requests that were left unanswered for months, refused during in-person meetings with USPS staff, ignored during a United States Senate oversight hearing with the Postmaster General, and finally purported to be addressed in a May 2024 letter that failed to directly address any of the specific concerns Nevada stakeholders and elected officials have raised.”
The letter askes the USPS Board of Governors to exercise more oversight into the “ill-considered” plan, and to stop it from going into effect.
“The Board should not allow Postmaster General DeJoy to proceed with downsizing and relocating Nevada’s Reno P&DC absent critical Nevada-specific data,” they continued. “Finally, if you feel that the Postmaster General has served as an active impediment to conducting meaningful oversight, then it is time to seriously consider who leads the USPS in the future.”
After meeting with DeJoy at a House Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee roundtable, Congressman Amodei said the issue is still far from resolved.
“Nevadans depend on reliable and expeditious mail service to pay their bills, receive medications, get their Social Security checks, and cast their ballots,” he said in a separate statement. “Putting any of that at risk without total objective transparency is negligent and I will continue to do all that I can to delay, oppose, and reverse the mysterious decision to relocate mail processing operations from Reno to West Sacramento.”
Congressman Amodei has asked three times for USPS to clearly lay out what their contingency plans are to avoid disruptions if I-80 closes due to a weather event, HAZMAT, or other traffic closures. He has asked USPS if they have conducted an assessment on impacts to mail-in ballots sent from Nevada that would be diverted to the mail processing facility in West Sacramento before being sent back to Nevada. In addition, he has asked what the impact on processing times will be if this plan is implemented and how will they compare with current processing times. And since this is supposed to be about saving money, Amodei has requested the Postal Service provide detailed accounting data to support the claim that money will be saved by sending all northern Nevada’s mail to West Sacramento. Because the financial analysis to support the Reno plan remains a mystery, Amodei has asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to conduct a detailed forensic accounting analysis.
To this day, no clear and substantive answers to these questions have been provided. The GAO audit is underway.