Dear Editor:

I wrote Senator Collins in January about poor mail delivery on the peninsula. She replied that she'd written to then Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Since then, delivery has only worsened.

The Boothbay Harbor post office remains understaffed. I visit weekly to collect my mail and am met by an overworked, demoralized staff. That failure traces to DeJoy’s "Delivering for America" modernization plan. In 2020, he cut postal workers' overtime and ended the practice of running late trucks to deliver unsorted mail, the same bottleneck now stalling our mail.

Recall that Senator Collins sponsored the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which forced USPS to pre-fund 75 years of retiree benefits, crippling its finances, and capped rate increases at inflation which limited the USPS’s ability to price its services in a way that reflects their costs. She later co-authored the 2012 21st Century Postal Service Act, seeking to cut over 100,000 positions.

This is Senator Collins's pattern: mollifying words, but no real support when votes matter.

Postmaster General Steiner says the USPS will run out of cash sometime after 2027. The question voters that should be asking is can Collins be trusted to do the right thing when that reckoning arrives?

Fred W. Nehring

Boothbay