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North Slope bypass mail plan contested
The Associated Press
Air carriers and North Slope Borough officials are criticizing a proposal by the U.S. Postal Service that would slow mail deliveries to Barrow and possibly cut down on flights to the nation’s northernmost town.
Under the plan, the mail would be trucked to Prudhoe Bay and then flown to Barrow, instead of being flown there from Fairbanks or Anchorage.
Dispatching Barrow’s mail out of Prudhoe would eliminate many of the passenger and freight flights that connect the community to Fairbanks and Anchorage several times a day, according to Dennis Packer, chief administrative officer of the North Slope Borough.
“They want to put this region back to where it was in the 1960s,” Packer said of the Postal Service’s plan.
Bob Churchill, postal operations manager for northern Alaska, said a transportation group based at the Postal Service’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., drafted the proposal as a money-saver.
“They have an obligation to put mail on surface transportation, because of the economics, whenever they can,” he said. Savings estimated at $2 million Churchill said the transportation group estimated the trucking plan would create a net savings to the Postal Service of more than $2 million a year.
Robert Ragar, traffic and cargo director for Fairbanks-based Everts Air Cargo, said the change would be bad news economically for Fairbanks. His company flies mail and freight to Barrow five days a week. Without the mail, his company and others will have to curtail or eliminate connecting flights from Fairbanks, he said.
“There’s a lot of money that flows through Fairbanks that’s going to be affected by this shift,” he said.
Alaska Airlines, the only mail carrier with passenger service on large aircraft serving Barrow, has 14 jet flights a week into the community of 4,350. Alaska currently stops in Fairbanks for mail and passengers, but Packer said that could end if the Postal Service plan is approved. Carriers argue there would be no savings Bill Fowler, president of Northern Air Cargo in Anchorage, said the proposal won’t even save money.
Fowler, whose company also flies bypass mail and freight into Barrow five days a week, said the Postal Service pays about $6.4 million a year to Northern Air Cargo, Everts Air Cargo and Alaska Airlines to carry “bypass” mail to Barrow from Anchorage and Fairbanks. Bypass mail is an Alaska-only program through which people can send pallets of goods, many perishable or frozen, from Anchorage or Fairbanks to Bush villages at parcel post rates.
Barrow is 500 air miles from Fairbanks and 720 air miles from Anchorage. But it’s only 200 miles from the Prudhoe Bay airport, at Deadhorse.
Flying the mail out of Deadhorse would chop $2.4 million from the Postal Service’s air shipment costs, Fowler said. But the Postal Service still must pay to truck about 10 million pounds of mail annually to Deadhorse and process it there, he said.
He estimates the net savings would be closer to $600,000 to $800,000, but only for the first year. The following year, the true costs of the plan would appear when the U.S. Department of Transportation recalculates the rate that the Postal Service must pay air carriers to haul bypass mail, Fowler said.
That rate, set statewide, is based on all the air carriers’ actual costs to fly the mail.
Putting a plane at Deadhorse would cost Northern Air Cargo about $1.2 million a year, Fowler said. “That’s just for us. Everts is in exactly the same boat. Alaska (Airlines) is in the same boat.”
Postal officials discussed the plan at a meeting in Barrow last month. A second meeting is scheduled for Fairbanks on Sept. 22.
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