Collegiate Times

The United States Postal Service will increase postage costs for the first time since 2002. The new prices apply to all mail transactions and will take effect Jan. 8, 2006. The average price that will take effect in 2006 will rise 5.5 percent from existing costs.

According to the USPS, first class mail will now cost 39 cents and postcards 24 cents. These increases are in response to a bill passed in 2003 that requires the USPS to put 3.1 billion dollars into an escrow by Oct. 1, 2006. The USPS has stated that the increase would not have happened without the federal mandate.

While students will only be affected minimally by the rate increase, Jay Long, Virginia Tech?s residential mail supervisor, said that departmental mail will be affected most on campus.

Maynard Quesenberry, the university?s mail services manager, said that whenever regular postage increases, the individual costs that he deals with will increase the same amount. He said current costs of departmental first class mail every year averages around $800,000 and can sometimes be as high as $1 million.

With the price of first class mail increasing from 37 cents to 39 cents, the new pricing guidelines will cost the university between $40,000 and $55,000 a year.

These numbers do not include other kinds of mail, such as bulk mail or foreign post. These sources only add to overhead costs and because the USPS price increase happens across the board, they will continue to affect the university?s increased overhead.
Quesenberry did not seem concerned about covering costs. Current procedures in his department call for much of the outgoing mail to be presorted. Presorting the mail already reduces the cost of doing business. Quesenberry said that departmental mailing lists were more of a concern in terms of inefficient spending.

?Departments need to clean up their mailing lists and keep updated address records. An often occurrence is when mail gets sent to wrong addresses and is returned. The money on postage, printing and envelopes for this mail is unnecessary,? Quesenberry said.

He said that for most departments the rate increase gives further incentive to find cheaper ways of doing business. It will force those departments that send a lot of mail to clean up their mailing lists. They will now have to make sure that what they are sending is going to the right person the first time the envelope is sent.

The USPS has also released on its website that it has no jurisdiction over e-mails. This is in response to an Internet hoax that claimed e-mails would now cost 5 cents to deliver. The rate changes that take effect in 2006 do not apply to the Internet. In fact, the USPS has no authority or control over the Internet and says that it would not support legislation giving it such power.