WASHINGTON – Sen. Chuck Grassley, along with Sen. Tom Harkin and Rep. Steve King, expressed concern to the United States Postal Service about its refusal to publicly release a study about the future of the Sioux City Postal Service to the community in its current state.
The members wrote, “the lack of information will undercut the potential for a successful town hall meeting next week in Sioux City, and we expect you to fulfill the commitment you made at the March 27 meeting to publicly release all relevant data related to the proposed consolidation.” The members are requesting from the Postal Service either an updated document that protects sensitive information or information about sensitive material so members can redact appropriate sections of the study before sharing it with the community.
Grassley said that during a March meeting in his office the Postal Service indicated that they would be amenable to releasing the study.
“If the Postal Service continues to claim that the study contains too much commercially sensitive information about their monopoly 1st Class Mail business to make it public, it will undermine a potential good-faith effort to take into consideration the concerns and ideas of the community,” Grassley said.
Here is a copy of the April 13 letter:
Mr. Bill Galligan
Senior Vice President for Operations
United States Postal Service
475 L’Enfant Plaza SW
Washington, D.C. 20260-0010
Dear Mr. Galligan,
The Area Mail Processing (AMP) Study that you have released to our offices does not meet our expectations, nor does it meet the understandings reached at our March 27 meeting in Senator Grassley's office. In addition, the one-page summary sheet that you will provide to community leaders insufficiently explains the analysis behind the proposed consolidation. We are very concerned that this lack of information will undercut the potential for a successful Town Hall meeting next week in Sioux City, and we expect you to fulfill the commitment you made at the March 27 meeting to publicly release all relevant data related to the proposed consolidation.
As you recall from the meeting in Senator Grassley's office, you committed to release "all the data, analyses, or other information considered by the Postal Service in making the proposed decision". Such release is fundamental to ensuring that an open, informative, and constructive discussion takes place at next week's meeting. While we understand that your General Counsel has concerns about its release to the community, we believe that a complete withholding of all this information contradicts the spirit of your commitment to the Siouxland community leaders, Senator Grassley, Senator Harkin, and Congressman King.
While the sections of the U.S. code you cited in providing us with the AMP Study do not prohibit either you or us from making this material public, we understand your desire to protect trade secrets an/or particularly sensitive information. Therefore, we are requesting that the Postal Service either share a modified AMP document with the community prior to the Town Hall meeting, or tell us which of the information should be redacted from the current AMP so that we can instead share the modified document with the community. This modified document should be a version of the current AMP that only redacts information that the Postal Service deems too sensitive to release, for trade secret or other proprietary reasons. And it should include enough information to make it understandable to a reasonably knowledgeable party.
In making this request and by holding you to your commitment, we are hoping to keep the concerned stakeholders in this matter – our Iowa constituents – from developing the impression that the Postal Service is only concerned with appearing to consult the community in order to achieve its predetermined decision of consolidation, rather than seeking truly substantive public input. We therefore request that either the updated document or the information we are seeking be provided to us by no later than Friday, April 14, 2006. We look forward to your prompt response.
Sincerely,
Senator Chuck Grassley
Senator Tom Harkin
Congressman Steve King