Editor, Times-Union: My small company, employing 10 full-time and occasional seasonal part-time employees, custom applies herbicides on a contractual basis for state and county highway departments, drainage boards and commissions, and electric cooperatives throughout Indiana, Michigan, Illinois and Ohio. Unfortunately, the majority of our business remains reliant upon successfully bidding annual contracts. Fortunately, I have relatively successfully promoted, supervised and managed our operations for 43 years. Although I’m past conventional retirement age, I still enjoy more good days than bad ones and even most of the challenges. However, I feel obligated to share one of my recent and more significant challenges and disappointments. Quite a number of our project bid advertisements, invitations, specifications and documents arrive within our off-season without much “turnaround time.” Consequently, it’s not unusual to have to reply with overnight delivery, in order to get a bid back to the contracting authority prior to the submittal deadline. For the second year in succession the U.S. Postal Service has failed to deliver one of our bids as “guaranteed.” This year’s “nonperformance” resulted in the loss of $233,000 worth of two successful low bids (15 percent of our 2014 sales.) As you can imagine, successfully bidding enough work each year is tough enough without losing that great a percentage of your season’s work by default. I’m a slow learner but I finally get it – never, ever, ever again will I use the U.S. Postal Service for the delivery of a time-sensitive document! Why in the world must we tax payers continue to subsidize an operation which obviously should go out of “business” or privatize? Lex Dalton Daltons president Editors Note: The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations.
