00:00Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, during this week, we are going to be taking up legislation H.R. 672, an act to establish new zip codes for certain communities.
00:11This measure is aimed at fixing problems in, as I said, about eight communities all across the country where the post office's zip code allocation system just completely has fragmented these towns and cities because of the just proliferation of zip codes that have occurred and been implemented in some of these towns.
00:37It is a bipartisan bill. I'm one of the bipartisan co-sponsors, and I represent one of those towns, Scotland, Connecticut, and Eastern Connecticut.
00:47Scotland, Connecticut is a community that was established back in the 1700s. It was incorporated in the 1800s. It's a small town.
00:55The last census was 1,576 people. There's 625 residences in the town.
01:02And, Mr. Speaker, it's almost hard to get people to believe me when I tell them this.
01:09It has six zip codes in a community with 1,500 people.
01:15It creates just havoc in terms of people, you know, just doing their ordinary business through the post office.
01:23As the first selectman of the Town of Scotland described in a letter to the Oversight Committee,
01:30due to the town's zip code configuration, Scotland residents face daily frustration with packages being misdelivered, service providers being unable to find their properties,
01:39and digital ordering or registration systems refusing to accept their address information.
01:45But the issue goes beyond inconvenience.
01:47People have paid taxes to the wrong town, sent their children to wrong schools.
01:53Town party committees and voluntary associations cannot effectively reach residents by mail.
01:58Public health statistics seriously understate the burden of disease in our town, and other survey data also misrepresent us.
02:05A high percentage of absentee ballot applications that were required by law to be sent out were returned,
02:12not because the people weren't in town, but because the USPS computer scanning system rejected their addresses.
02:18This situation is clearly damaging to us individually and as a community.
02:23So what this bill does is just simply say for Scotland and a number of other communities that has been identified by the committee,
02:30that basically we're going to unify a zip code for those communities so that they don't have to, again,
02:35and experience what Mr. Dana Barrow, who's the first selectman of the town of Scotland, described.
02:42Last night, the post office actually sent out a letter of opposition to the bill to all the members of the House chamber,
02:51and they actually had the nerve to say that the passage of this bill would significantly degrade mail service in the affected communities.
02:59Mr. Speaker, it is hard to imagine how for the people of the town of Scotland,
03:04their mail service could be any worse than the situation that exists today,
03:09where they have six zip codes for a population of 1,500 people.
03:15Luckily, we have members of Congress like Mario Diaz-Ballart from Florida,
03:19who chairs the committee who's bringing the bill out later this week,
03:23who has the common sense to understand that getting the post office to get their act together
03:29and to go in to really a very finite, manageable number of communities
03:35and aggregate the zip codes so that people, again, can get the service which they rely on.
03:42I am a strong supporter of the post office.
03:44It's in the Constitution.
03:46It's mandated that we have a postal service in this country.
03:49People depend on it to get their medications, to get important documents,
03:55to get paid their Social Security monthly payments,
03:59and to have a dysfunctional system that is completely self-inflicted and man-made
04:05because of the organization of the post office is just unacceptable.
04:09So again, despite the post office's somewhat hysterical, out-of-touch opposition
04:15that they announced last night,
04:16I am here on the floor to publicly call on all my colleagues to join, again,
04:21Mr. Diaz-Ballart from the Republican side, myself from the Democratic side,
04:27and a host of other co-sponsors to get this really modest, obvious, common-sense bill passed,
04:34sent to the Senate and to the President's desk.
