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The
The INDEPENDENT, August 17, 2011
INDEPENDENT
Published on the first and third Wednesdays of each month
by The Independent, LLC, 725 Bridge St.,
Vernonia, OR 97064. Phone/Fax: 503-429-9410.
Deadline is noon the Friday before each issue.
Publisher Clark McGaugh, clark@the-independent.net
Editor Rebecca McGaugh, rebecca@the-independent.net
Printed on recycled paper with vegetable based dyes
Opinion
All’s well that ends…
We are glad this unprecedented period of Vernonia
political upheaval is over. Like many, we don’t think
those who were recently recalled from the Vernonia
city council are bad people, just misguided and bam-
boozled from listening to only a small a portion of the
community, and not hearing anything else.
Next week, the two remaining members of the city
council, Mayor Josette Mitchell and Councilor Randy
Parrow, will draw 15 citizens’ names from the hat to
form panels to interview those applying for the three
open council positions. The only glitch will be if too few
citizens apply to be on those panels, or if less than
three people apply to be councilors. Those numbers
won’t be known until 4:00 p.m. on Monday, August 22,
when the application period closes for both the panels
Out of My Mind…
and council. If you meant to sign up but haven’t,
by Noni Andersen
there’s still time.
Should mail be deliv-
Once new councilors are appointed, probably at a
ered
six days a week, five
special meeting on August 29, the next step for the
days, three? Should we
council will be interviewing the remaining candidates
close Post Offices in
for city administrator, Bill Haack and Dennis Rhodes.
small towns? Should we
even have a U.S. Postal
Hopefully, those candidates will be available for quick
Service? These are not
interviews. With a full council, there won’t be a tie vote,
rhetorical questions, they
which held up the process the first time.
are being asked in Con-
With a new council, a new city administrator and a
gress because USPS is
asking for some changes.
process in place to fill out the ranks of the Vernonia
A
little
background
is helpful to understand
Police Department, the city should be able to get back
the situation.
to working hard on all the projects now mostly on hold.
The postal service is self-supporting, its rev-
Then the Vernonia community should breath a sigh enues come from selling its products and servic-
of relief, and begin mending any remaining hard feel- es at the best rates in the industrialized world. It
is not supported by taxes, and hasn’t been for
ings that all of this uproar has created.
It’s back to school time
School starts in Vernonia on Thursday, September
1. That’s right, before Labor Day. School in Banks
starts on September 6, the traditional first day of
school after Labor Day.
Please be careful driving once children are back on
the streets, heading to and from school. Children don’t
always remember to look both ways or cross at desig-
nated crosswalks. It’s up to adult drivers to keep an
eagle eye out for the little ones, so everyone gets
where they are going safely.
over 25 years.
The postal service’s financial problems have
little to do with delivering the mail. Despite the
worst recession in 80 years and increased inter-
net usage, postal revenues have exceeded
costs. So, why do they need money?
In 2006, Congress passed a bill requiring the
USPS to pre-fund retirement benefits, including
health care, for the next 75 years, and to do so
within 10 years, something no other public
agency or private firm must do. Even though
USPS makes more than the system costs to run,
it isn’t enough to cover the $21 billion (about
$5.5 billion annually since 2007) they’ve put in
the retirement system.
To further complicate the situation, there have
been payments into two retirement programs,
the old Civil Service Retirement System, and the
1980s replacement, Federal Employees Retire-
ment System. Because of the overlap between
the two systems, and an outdated calculation
method, at least one Senator’s office and two in-
dependent auditing firms estimate that USPS
has overpaid the retirement systems by at least
$50 billion.
The fiscal problem could be fixed by recalcu-
lating the annual obligation based on an updat-
ed formula, and gradually return the overpay-
ment by about $5 billion a year.
Apparently that would be too easy.
USPS management has another approach: It
wants to break its union contracts, lay off at least
120,000 workers, and shift workers out of the
federal employee health and retirement plans
into cheaper alternatives. Oh yes, they have
also proposed dropping Saturday service and
closing more than 4,000 post offices.
In many ways, the Postal Service is ham-
strung by Congressional mandates, for instance
by limiting postal increases to about the cost of
living. Nevertheless, since the decrease in mail
volume with the recession, the agency has cut
costs by almost $10 billion and reduced the
workforce through attrition and early retirements
by 212,000, to 563,000.
Postal unions have made many concessions
to lower costs, and new union contracts have
provided more flexibility to adjust workers’
schedules.
Rep Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), a billionaire who
chairs the House committee that oversees
Please see page 21