Knowing it won't affect the new postal rates for nonprofit groups in January, the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers, Washington, still filed an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals this month. Instead, the alliance filed the appeal to let people take notice of what it says the U.S. Postal Service has done.
“What I am hoping that this appeal does accomplish is to help people recognize the precedent being set here,” said Neal Denton, executive director of the alliance.
That precedent, he said, is that the USPS can ask for “any new revenue requirements it wants and then not be prevented from having them implemented. I don't believe that was the point of the Postal Reorganization Act and I don't think it says they can do that.”
The main point of the appeal, which the alliance will argue before the Court of Appeals in early August, is that by implementing what Denton calls illegal rate increases and doubling the postage costs for nonprofit mailers, the USPS will earn billions of dollars of “illegal monopoly profits.”
The USPS had no comment on the matter.
To protect mailers and consumers, the alliance said, postal rates must be set so that its total expected revenues equal the total expected costs of running the postal service.
The alliance will issue a brief to the Court of Appeals in October.
In early May, the Postal Rate Commission recommended a 10 percent increase for nonprofit mailers as opposed to the 11.3 percent increase proposed by the USPS. At the end of June, the USPS' board of governors approved most of the recommendations made by the PRC and announced the new rates would go into effect Jan. 10.
