Feeling the Pain At the Post Office
April 9th, 2008 at 07:17pm Andrea Zimmermann
It’s 7 p.m., and I just got out of a marathon Senate committee hearing, where several state agencies talked about their budget proposals for next year.
I’ll have more later on the hearing’s juicier details, but a quick tidbit from Comptroller Dan Hynes‘ testimony took me by surprise.
He said his office, which is in charge of paying the state’s bills, expects to pay $1.6 million for postage in the upcoming fiscal year, which runs from July 1, 2008 to June 30, 2009. That number shocked me until I got back to the office and saw this:
Starting on May 12 from the U.S. Post Office:
| Current | Proposed | |||||
| SELECT RATES FOR FIRST-CLASS MAIL® | ||||||
| Single-piece Letter – First ounce | $0.41 | $0.42 | ||||
| Single-piece Flat – First ounce | $0.80 | $0.83 | ||||
| Single-piece Parcel – First ounce | $1.13 | $1.17 | ||||
| Each additional ounce | $0.17 | $0.17 | ||||
| Surcharge for nonmachinable letters | $0.17 | $0.20 | ||||
| Postcards | $0.26 | $0.27 | ||||
| Presorted Letter – First ounce | $0.373 | $0.394 | ||||
| Presorted Flat – First ounce | $0.699 | $0.727 | ||||
To add to the misery, Hynes said his office’s $800,000 postage budget was eliminated last year when the budget got to the governor’s office. He told the committee that the $1.6 million for postage was, “the lion’s share of the increase” he was seeking for his agency.
Entry Filed under: DanHynes, Rod Blagojevich
1 Comment Add your own
1. hokumboy | April 14th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Have you asked Hynes what the his office’s projected increase in gas cost for the year will be? Or stationery, or health insurance. Or, newspaper subscriptions?
Granted I’m not the State of Illinois, but it seems that one months worth of the latest increase in my cable bill will exceed at least a years worth of the postage increase.
I’ll be waiting to hear a “no increase in subscription price” pledge from the publisher of the RRStar.
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