As of Jan. 23, the campus mail department is responsible for the sorting and campus wide delivery of all mail sent through the USPS system, on top of its original responsibilities for academic mail.
Packages are now taking longer to reach residence halls or are being delivered to the wrong hall altogether. Residence halls have even been changing the times they say that mail is placed in resident mailboxes, pushing them back by an hour or more. This change to the mail system can be attributed to a service decrease by the Oswego Post Office.
The new system has seen a shift of responsibility for campus mail from the Oswego Post Office to the Campus Mail Department, based out of the commissary building across West Seneca Street.
According to Kathy Smith, head of the mailroom department, “Deliveries on campus for the residence halls require upwards of three to five runs [to the residence halls] per day.”
The post office justified its actions to the mailroom by stating that there is no real money available in the sending and management of letters and they must focus more on packages to keep finances clear and positive.
However, the changes have not made it easy for the campus mailroom to manage their new delivery methods. The mailroom has four full time employees, counting the department head, and relies on a fair deal of student assistance. Scheduling assistance to coincide with post office deliveries to the mailroom has proven difficult, as the mail is not delivered on a regular, repeating schedule.
On Feb. 6, the mailroom received its delivery at 10 a.m. and was finished sorting it all at 2 p.m., for a total of four hours of sorting, Smith said. With the deliveries coming in at non-uniform times every day, mail can sometimes not be sorted until well into the middle of the afternoon. The residence halls have needed to push their completed mail times back by hours.
This change does not affect just the mailroom staff, as students and residence hall staff are feeling the strain as well.
“There’s so much mail, so there are two shifts sorting it,” Johnson Hall desk attendant Sean Ryan said. “That’s where mistakes behind the desk get made.”
Michael Korzelius, a resident in Waterbury Hall, has had two packages delivered over the course of the semester.
“It’s really inefficient,” Korzelius said. “All the packages come in late. Especially with textbooks, you want those on time.”
When informed that the changes were not the result of a new college policy directly, but rather were a reaction to a drop in service from the local post office, Korzelius said, “I think it’s ridiculous that USPS is doing this. It’s their business to sort and deliver mail.”
The mailroom has changed its policies to better protect student’s incoming mail and introduced a system where the student is emailed when their package arrives on campus.
While it does not tell a student when their package is available for pick-up in their residence halls, this measure is meant as a peace-of-mind for students who may be expecting their packages on a certain day, which cannot be guaranteed at this point.
This change in delivery method does not extend beyond USPS services. Mail sent through UPS, FedEx or other private delivery companies will continue to be delivered to the residence halls by the companies themselves.
