US Postal Service 2013 Annual Report Download - page 56

2013 Report on Form 10-K United States Postal Service 54
would replace the current Board of Governors with a panel of five full-time executives. Once the Postal Service met
certain specified financial requirements, the panel would be dissolved and replaced with a smaller Board of Governors
that would initially be comprised of the panel members.
H.R. 2748 would begin to phase out door delivery of mail in favor of curbside and clusterbox delivery, except in cases
where eliminating door delivery is infeasible, where customers pay for continued door delivery, or where customers have
a significant hardship requiring that they receive door delivery. The bill would also require above-CPI increases in the
prices of postal products for which costs exceed revenues and would not permit political committees to use the non-profit
Standard Mail rate. The bill would require postal workers to pay the same premiums paid by other federal workers for
health and life insurance benefits and seeks to clarify the compensation parity currently required between Postal and
private sector workers. H.R. 2748 would allow the Postal Service to offer state and local government services, such as,
the sale of fishing licenses. The bill seeks to create a mechanism to allow the FERS surplus to be transferred to the
PSRHBF to the extent that the surplus exceeds any unfunded liability in CSRS and would allow the use of Postal Service-
specific economic assumptions to calculate liabilities and annual payments for both the FERS and the CSRS pension
systems. It also specifies that, in the future, postal employees would be subject to the same Reduction-in-Force (RIF)
authority as the rest of the federal workforce.
H.R. 2748 would limit the closure of rural Post Offices and would require the Postal Service to consider broadband
penetration, cellular phone service, and the distance to the closest alternate access point when determining whether to
close a Post Office. It would create a Chief Innovation Officer position responsible for identifying and growing new postal
and authorized non-postal products and would also raise the current revenue limit on experimental product market tests.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee amended and passed the bill by a margin of 22-17 at its July
24, 2013, meeting. The bill is pending consideration by the full House.
BOARD OF GOVERNORS NOMINATIONS
On June 21, 2013, President Obama announced the nomination of James C. Miller, III to serve as a Governor on the U.S.
Postal Service Board of Governors for a term expiring December 8, 2017. This nomination brought to three the total
number of Board of Governors’ nominations pending before the Senate; the other nominees are Stephen Crawford,
nominated on March 12, 2013, for a term expiring December 8, 2015, and David Michael Bennett, nominated on April 23,
2013, for a term expiring December 8, 2018.