Postal Service Seeks Increase of Up to 15% in Rates for Charity Mailings

The Postal Service has announced that it hopes to increase postage rates for charities early next year.

The increase, part of a plan to raise rates for all mailers,

must still be approved by the Postal Rate Commission, an independent body that approves all such changes.

Under the plan, the average rate for charity letters, known as “standard mail,” would rise 5.6 per cent. But some groups could see the cost of sending certain types of direct-mail pieces, such as magazines, rise by as much as 15 per cent.

The proposed postage increases follow a rate increase that took effect in January 1999, when non-profit rates went up by an average of about 14 per cent for letters.

The Postal Service also announced that it is seeking a change in the rates that charities use to mail their magazines, newsletters, and other publications. Instead of the separate class of mail for “non-profit periodicals” that exists now, the Postal Service is proposing that the same base rates apply to non-profit and commercial periodicals but that charities receive a 5-per-cent discount off commercial postage.

Rates for charity periodicals rose by about 8 per cent a year ago.

All in all, the proposed postage increases have angered many non-profit leaders. They had recently asked the Postal Service’s Board of Governors to delay giving the rate commission the proposal for another two months, when up-to-date information on mail volume and other facts used in determining postage rates will be available.

But postal officials said they had little choice in filing for an increase this month, because waiting 60 days or possibly more could mean that its revenues would lag behind expenses.

“If we delay implementing new rates, we could end up having to borrow funds, and those costs would be passed on eventually to mailers in the form of postage anyway,” said Greg Frey, a Postal Service spokesman. “It is not prudent to wait.”

But that argument has failed to mollify many non-profit groups. The proposed rate increases, said Neal Denton, executive director of the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers, are based on “obsolete cost and revenue data from fiscal year 1998″ that are being used to project for fiscal 2001. The data, he added, do not take into account the effects of last year’s postage increases, which produced $1.6-billion in revenue for the Service and are likely to have affected the factors that are used to determine new rates.

“It’s clearly stale and irrelevant data they’re using,” said Thomas Roylance, assistant director of print and mail production at Brigham Young University, which mails out some four million pieces of standard mail each year.

Mr. Roylance said that if the proposed rates were adopted, his institution, which sends some mail at first-class rates, would see an overall increase in postage of 6 per cent — or more than $100,000.

Such increases, he added, would be a burden, considering that his institution’s postage costs already went up by 12 per cent in 1999 as a result of the last rate increase.

Mr. Roylance said that, like many charities, his institution has already turned to the Internet to avoid spending so much on postage, but he said that he doubted he could save much more money posting material on line instead of mailing it. As recently as two years ago, he noted, the university printed 50,000 course catalogues a year; now it prints 21,000 and relies on putting the information on its Web site.

“We have said to the Postal Service, ‘If you won’t play ball with us, we’ll use the Internet and you’ll lose money,’” said Mr. Roylance.

More information on the proposed rates, and detailed rate tables, are available on the Postal Service’s World-Wide Web site, http://www.usps.gov/rates, and on the Web sites of the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers, http://www.nonprofitmailers.org, and the National Federation of Nonprofit Mailers, http://www.federationofnonprofits.org.