USPS tech upgrades on full display at Hicksville sorting facility

As a young postal carrier in Babylon in the 1980s, Annette D’Amato said she loved the camaraderie of sorting mail with co-workers.

But, she could’ve done without the drudgery of it — and the inefficiency.

On Wednesday, D’Amato was thrilled to be part of a U.S. Postal Service news conference at the Hicksville Sorting and Delivery Center, where USPS officials unveiled a new multimillion-dollar modernization — one that includes upgraded facilities for employees, as well as a state-of-the-art sorting machine and a fleet of zero-emission electric postal vehicles.

"How much better is this?" said D’Amato, a West Babylon High School graduate who in August 2019 became the first female postmaster at Hicksville. "Oh, my God. It has impacted us so positively, saving us man-hours, eliminating backlog ... It's saving us time, it's very efficient."

The upgrade is part of a 10-year, $40-billion nationwide reform plan launched in March 2021 and geared toward a modernization of the Postal Service, which has been around since the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 26, 1775, when Benjamin Franklin was postmaster general.

As part of that plan, called "Delivering for America," the USPS is upgrading and updating facilities at post offices and postal sorting and distribution centers across the country, modernizing equipment used to sort mail and the vehicles used to deliver it.

This year alone, the USPS said it has spent $16.3 billion in improvements nationwide, including $427 million in New York. As of the second quarter for the 2024 fiscal year, those investments in New York include $277 million to renovate 522 postal facilities and $14 million to construct 22 new ones. That's in addition to $12 million to purchase 10 state-of-the-art package sorting machines that will increase efficiency, according to USPS spokesperson Amy Gibbs.

The USPS Office of Inspector General, in a report issued Sept. 30, said the "Delivering for America" modernization plan was needed "to address continuing annual financial losses, unmet service performance goals, and diminishing market relevancy" due to changing consumer trends, such as online purchasing with shippers instead of the Postal Service.

Those trends resulted in five straight operating losses as of 2016 — and first-class mail volume falling from a peak of more than 103 billion mailings in 2001 to about half that, 52.6 billion mailings, in 2020, according to the inspector general.

In its September report, the USPS OIG said of the ongoing modernization upgrades: "Key pillars of our oversight work of the DFA plan include how we assess its impact on Service, Financial Performance, Sustainability, and its Labor Force. The Postal Service's Network Modernization plans touch all these pillars."

At the Hicksville facility, which services some 53,000 customers on 57 daily carrier routes in Hicksville, Jericho, Plainview and Old Bethpage, upgrades include 57 electric postal vehicles that will take to the road next month, as well as 60 new vehicle charging stations.

The employee bathrooms and break room have been updated.

But the biggest upgrade has been the SDUS+ sorting machine, which uses a bar code scanner to process up to 5,000 packages an hour.

Installation of that machine began in January. The system has been in use since August.

D'Amato said where it once took six carriers about 50 work hours a day to sort through packages processed at Hicksville, it now takes two or three carriers about 1½ hours.

Hicksville handles tens of thousands of packages and parcels, including letters and "flats" — magazines and mailings in large envelopes — each day. Employees assigned to sorting duties used to start at 3 a.m. in order to get mail sorted by 8 a.m., D’Amato said.

Now? They begin at 5:45 a.m. — finishing by 7:15 a.m.

Huntington native and Harborfields High School graduate Michael Hotetz is post office modernization national manager. On Wednesday, he said the makeovers are intended to move the USPS into the 21st century and beyond. Many of the vehicles in the current USPS fleet are more than 30 years old, to be replaced with new COTS (Commercial Off-the-Shelf) vans and NGDV (Next Generation Delivery Vehicle) trucks purpose-built for the post office by the Oshkosh Corp.

Hicksville has 55 COTS vans and two NGDV trucks going into service in November.

Eventually, all postal delivery units on Long Island will receive NGDV vehicles, as well as new technological upgrades of sale and service devices, said Gibbs, the USPS spokesperson.

Long Island has more than 200 post offices serving 117 ZIP codes in Suffolk and 91 in Nassau. Hicksville is the second Long Island facility to receive the SDUS+ sorting machine, the first being installed last year at the Huntington Station Sorting and Delivery Center.

Three other processing centers — Garden City, Bethpage and Mid-Island, located in Melville — received different sorting machine upgrades, machines known as the ADUS and SPSS.

"It's a good feeling, to be productive and to be successful," D'Amato said, "and you don't get that without a good team and I'm going to tell you, I have the absolute best employees, I have the best supervisors, I have the best clerks and carriers because they acclimated so quickly to this machine ... It's going to lighten the load — and, it's going to lighten the concerns of getting [the job] done ... As long as a package comes in at a certain time I can get it out, rather than the following day.

"That's huge."

By John Valenti

john.valenti@newsday.com

John Valenti, a reporter at Newsday since 1981, has been honored nationally by the Associated Press and Society of the Silurians for investigative, enterprise and breaking news reporting, as well as column writing, and is the author of “Swee'pea,” a book about former New York playground basketball star Lloyd Daniels. Valenti is featured in the Emmy Award-winning ESPN 30-for-30 film “Big Shot.”