Adaptation skills crucial for Kalispell postmaster

Change has been a constant part of Rich Burley’s life for the last 23 years since he began working for the U.S. Postal Service.

For the most part, it’s been change for the better, Burley said. He’s the acting postmaster in Kalispell, a job he’s held since late October.

Working and living in Kalispell has long been on Burley’s wish list. He grew up in Great Falls and loved visiting Glacier National Park and Flathead County, always wondering if he could live here someday.

“Whenever I visited here, I found the people friendly. I like the temperate climate, all the mountains and Glacier.”

Today, it’s not likely he could get a permanent position at the Kalispell Post Office because a nationwide postal service hiring and promotion freeze has been in place since last August. That’s why the Kalispell postmaster position hasn’t been filled with a permanent employee.

The Postal Service has cut thousands of positions in recent years to reduce expenses, he said, and that practice will continue. On March 20, another 7,500 management jobs are to be eliminated. In the 1970s, the postal service had 890,000 employees; today, it has 590,000 employees.

Eventually, the hiring freeze will be lifted, he said.

When it is, the people who have been laid off from their post office jobs will have priority for hiring, he said, which makes it unlikely he could get the Kalispell job on a permanent basis.

“I’d be interested in putting in for it, though,” Burley said. Whenever a Kalispell postmaster is hired, Burley probably will return to Glendive to his postmaster job and his family, who stayed in Glendive.

Burley began working for the Postal Service on Valentine’s Day 1987 as a part-time letter carrier in Great Falls. He had worked as a station manager for Mountain States Petroleum for six years in Shelby and worked for a few years as a branch manager in Great Falls for Flying J before switching careers.

“I remember thinking I’d like an eight-hour job, to work from 9 to 5 and then go home,” he said of his decision to apply for a post office job. That hasn’t necessarily been the case, but he doesn’t regret his move to the Postal Service. These days, he logs a lot of 12- to 14-hour days.

“It was a little surprising to me when I found out how hard postal employees have to work,” he said. Most postal service workers typically log 50-hour work weeks, he said. “It’s not an easy government job. Ninety-eight percent of our employees give 110 percent every day. Our employees are dedicated and work hard.”

Burley has plenty of stories to tell from his days delivering mail.

“When I was interviewed for the job, they asked if I was afraid of dogs,” Burley said. “I said I wasn’t. And one of the interviewers said, ‘You will be.’”

Burley said he never really developed a fear of dogs while delivering mail, but did learn to recognize dog signals.

“I respect dogs and I know when or if they’ll attack me,” he said.

On one of his routes, a golden retriever at one house would always greet him and then walk the next several blocks with Burley before returning home.

One of the biggest changes in the last couple of decades in the postal service has been the installation of automated equipment.

“When I started, the carriers worked everything manually,” he said. Carriers would sort all the mail by hand into piles for each route. “Then we’d put them on the counter and put them in order for the route.” Most days that work took several hours, which meant carriers didn’t get out on the streets to deliver mail until 10:30 or 11 a.m., he said.

“We were always feeling like we’d never get out of the office,” he recalled. Once the sorting was finished, each carrier would head out to deliver his or her 500-or-so-address route.

Today, all the sorting is done by a machine, which does the work significantly faster, Burley said. When mail exits a sorter, it’s sorted by route and in order.

“That lets carriers spend less time in the office and more time on the street delivering mail,” he said. Today, an average carrier route includes 750 to 1,000 addresses.

About four years into his postal service job, Burley was asked to switch positions to become the delivery supervisor in Great Falls.

He held that position from 1991 to 1996 when he was selected the postmaster in Glendive. In 2005, Burley was appointed acting manager of post office operations for northern Montana, overseeing post offices in all communities with ZIP codes that begin with 599, 594 or 595. That job included work with the Kalispell and other Flathead County post offices, helping boost Burley’s interest in living and working in Kalispell.

Like a lot of people, Burley didn’t realize in 1987 when he started his new job that the Postal Service has been a self-sufficient government agency since it was reorganized in the 1970s. “With no federal tax dollars, we make our own way,” he said.

The recession, changes in shipping rules that followed 9/11 and anthrax scares have had negative effects on the postal service, Burley said. Most notable has been a decrease in mail sent out by credit card companies. “It used to be you’d get three or four pre-approved credit applications a week,” he said. “Not any more.”

The Postal Service had to install a “monumental amount of costly equipment” to deal with anthrax and security issues, he said.

He remembers customers who wanted their mail placed inside plastic bags they’d leave in their mailboxes so they could put the plastic bag, with their mail inside, into a microwave and irradiate it to ease their fears about anthrax exposure.

Postal employees had to wear gloves and masks to sort mail in what he called “a sad and trying time for the post office.”

Postal Service employees are regularly trained on how to recognize suspicious packages and what to do if they spot such a package, Burley said.

Years ago, Burley remembers training a clerk on how to be on the lookout for bombs or dangerous items in the mail.

“She turned to me and said, ‘I understand, but what’s the likelihood of the Unabomber being from Montana?’ I said it was highly unlikely, but we had to do the trainings, no matter how redundant or unnecessary they seemed.

“Two weeks later, they caught the Unabomber in Lincoln, Montana,” Burley said.

“It really caught us off guard that it came from Montana. It taught me the lesson we can’t be too complacent. We had to take it seriously.”

 Other noticeable changes at the post office in the last two decades that Burley has observed include a big increase in the number of people who come in to get passports, mostly because of new rules related to travel in Canada and Mexico. He said about eight passports are processed every day at the Kalispell Post Office.

In recent years the Postal Service has increased its focus on packages. Before, he said, the post office handled so much letter volume, it wasn’t overly interested in packages. But with the decline in letters, the package business has become more important.

Reporter Shelley Ridenour may be reached at 758-4439 or by e-mail at sridenour@dailyinterlake.com.