For those of you still out of power – hopeful news. Con Ed has assigned 9 restoration crews to Greenburgh today, one tree crew. Yesterday, Ardsley Mayor Nancy Kaboolian and I met with the management of the Atria, an assisted living facility. Residents were FREEZING. Power has been restored. There are crews near the Greenville School today –restoring power to the school and surrounding areas. And, I am getting reports that others are also getting good news. I think lots of progress will be made today.
Sometimes your power –once restored – will go out again. The reason: Con Ed needs to temporarily shut off the power to restore power to an area near your home. So –don’t get too upset. Usually the power outage lasts only a few hours.
I am continuing to refer all concerns about Con Ed to the Con Ed and town restoration team and hope the end of this nightmare is almost here –and that you will have a good night’s sleep tonight.
ON A POSITIVE NOTE… NEW HARTSDALE POSTMASTER, MORE TRAINING, MORE LOCAL HIRING—THINK SERVICE WILL IMPROVE
I met with the regional administrator of the United States Postal Service, with the Inspector in Charge of the United States Postal Inspection Service, with key postal service leaders from the NY area and with the Regional Director to US Senator Charles Schumer and with representatives from Congresswoman Nita Lowey’s office about Postal service operations.
The postal service has been taking our many complaints about the postal service very seriously. They have appointed a new Postmaster for the Hartsdale Post Office, have senior officials monitoring delivery. They are training their employees better and have implemented new procedures. Mystery shoppers are stopping by at different post offices to monitor conditions and they are providing local postmasters with more control over hiring. I had previously suggested that they hire local residents –and they are receptive to that concept- giving the local postmasters more authority re: hiring. Local residents are more passionate about doing a great job for their neighbors. I suggested that they get phone numbers of residents in each postal service route and call residents up if there will be no deliveries on a given day. This would provide residents with the chance to pick up the mail. If they are frustrated If there are problems on specific dates they should let residents know what’s going on. They indicated that one of the problems they had in Hartsdale was that the Hartsdale office was not fully staffed and other employees were calling in sick last month.
Our meeting lasted over two hours. They pointed out that in 2016 there were 213 billion pieces of mail delivered a year. In 2017 the numbers nationally dropped to 149 billion. 1.8 billion less revenue in 2017. The Westchester regional office had a 2.5% decline in mail from 2016 to 2l017 but packages increased by 14.4% from 2016 to 2017. The growth is not in mail but in packaging.
I will continue to monitor our postal service operations. Feel free to provide me with updates.
PAUL FEINER
