Rural Post Offices

Floor Speech

Mr. CRAWFORD. I rise today to highlight a subject that is personal in Arkansas's First Congressional District: the proposed closure of thousands of rural post offices across the country.

This week I sent a letter to Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe asking him to give the House of Representatives time to pass meaningful postal reform legislation. As it stands now, over 3,600 post offices are slated for closure on May 15. In my district alone, 100 post offices have been put on the closure list.

In November, I filed the Protecting Our Rural American Post Offices Act of 2011. The bill would prohibit the postal service from closing rural post offices that do not have an alternative office within 8 miles accessible by public roads. The bill is an effort to level the field between rural and urban post office closures.

So many of the challenges we face in Washington are not Democrat versus Republican, but rather urban versus rural interests. Americans living in rural communities rely on their post offices for medicine delivery and Social Security benefits and veterans benefits, among other things. Access to postal services should not be limited to urban families.

I urge Postmaster General Donahoe to give the House time to pass meaningful postal reform legislation. The postal service cannot hope to cure all their budget woes on the backs of rural Americans.

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