Mail carrier trucks are parked on Aug. 8, 2023, at the post office in Pendleton.

LA GRANDE — Mail delivery staffing shortages are nothing new to La Grande Post Office Postmaster Kelly Carreiro.

Carreiro, who has worked for the local post office for 24 years and was promoted to postmaster in 2012, said it “isn’t uncommon” for either the La Grande, Baker City or Pendleton offices to be short-staffed, and that, resource and time dependent, occasionally mail carriers are borrowed from other offices for assistance.

“Baker’s shortages do affect La Grande, not so much as far as non-deliveries, (but) it affects it in the fact that we may be later than normal because we send anybody that’s available … to work in those neighboring offices,” he said.

The Baker City Post Office has been significantly short on employees for several weeks, the Baker City Herald reported, causing delays in mail delivery.

However, help is on the way. A July 27 job fair in Baker City yielded 14 applicants who are in the hiring process, Kim Frum, a strategic communications specialist for the agency, said.

The Baker City job fair was one of 37 the Postal Service put on across Oregon on July 27 to try to alleviate the worker shortage that has affected cities in Oregon and in other states.

Although Carreiro said that he and his workers rarely struggle with successfully delivering to around 9,000 addresses, their office also is short-staffed.

“We run about as lean as you can be, and that’s not by choice,” he said.

A career first

Carreiro said they run mail and Amazon parcels 363 days a year, making it tough to give any staff member substantial time off.

Monday, July 24, marked the first time in Carreiro’s 24 years at the La Grande Post Office that packages were delivered late due to a staffing shortage. A mail carrier called in sick that day, and the effect was that 302 addresses on their western rural route did not receive mail or packages.

Carreiro and his staff members worked a 12-hour shift and were able to deliver everything the very next day.

This year, the La Grande Post Office posted about 15 city carrier positions and 15 rural carrier associate position openings, and Carreiro said he was able to hire two people. He hopes to hire two to three more staff members for both types of positions in the near future.

“It’s been several months since we’ve borrowed anybody because we know everybody is equally as short,” Carreiro said. “I used to be a regular city carrier in this office, so when we get super short, I don’t have a problem with getting my satchel out and going out and delivering mail. … Sometimes that’s what’s necessary, what’s needed to get the job done.”

Around the region

La Grande and Baker City aren’t the only Eastern Oregon post offices to be shorthanded.

Tamara Walchly, supervisor of customer service for the Hermiston Post Office, said slower delivery at times if caused by with staffing challenges.

“We have to break up our routes, which means we have to pivot, meaning a carrier will not only have to deliver his route, but they also have to deliver a piece of another route, which means that the mail gets delivered later in the day in other areas of town,” she said. “On days where we have a carrier out, that is the only way we can do it.”

Walchly said Hermiston is also short vehicles for carriers, forcing carriers to use their own cars.

“There are routes that the carrier provides their own vehicle in rural areas, and then there are routes that don’t where we have vehicles provided for those carriers,” she said. “We are down a vehicle, so then the carrier has to use their own vehicle and usually they don’t want to use their own vehicle. The postmaster or myself, we have to use our own.”

Walchly said she isn’t sure when the situation will improve in Hermiston.

“Unfortunately, our vehicles come from Portland and we’ve asked for a replacement vehicle and we are waiting on that,” she said. “We have a vehicle up in the Tri-Cities getting fixed, and we’re waiting on that too.”

Post offices in Enterprise and Pendleton are also short-staffed, officials confirmed.

“The postal service is not immune from the current staffing and hiring challenges encountered by nearly every industry, and that includes both our city and rural offices such as Enterprise,” Kim Frum, a U.S. Postal Service spokesperson based in Seattle, said. “The good news is the (offices have) skilled management in place overseeing the day to day operations, using every available resource at their disposal to meet the challenges and that includes staff possibly working overtime to meet those obligations.”

The Enterprise Post Office serves roughly 1,600 customers and needs at least two additional carriers to round out their staff, Frum said.

“It’s hard to compare staffing in many of the offices in Eastern Oregon because it is such a rural area,” she said. “As such, not all offices are full-time post offices like with multiple employees like Enterprise. Some are part-time post offices, which means they offer part-time window service hours to conduct retail transactions, are usually staffed by one or two postal service employees and may not have carriers. Instead, the part-time post offices have post office boxes for their customers to collect their mail.”

Not everyone facing shortages

There are currently no staffing shortages or delay issues in Grant County, although services are

somewhat limited due to the

county’s rural character, according to Frum.

“Only two communities in the county have street delivery,” Krum said. “The first is John Day, the county’s most populous community, with 1,664 residents. The second is Prairie City (842). However, Prairie City’s street delivery is done using contractors and not postal employees.”

Frum said Grant County currently has two letter carriers in John Day and one contractor serving Prairie City.

Residents elsewhere in the county get their mail delivered to a post office box or, in some cases, a cluster box unit.