For the first time, an El Paso post office employee talks only with KFOX about what's happening with local mail delivery

For the past few months we have been telling you about the problems residents are having with mail that's either slow, or never delivered.

The worker we spoke with says perhaps the problem is that often your mail is laying around and there aren't enough workers to get the job done.

Frank Chavez says he has worked with the postal service in El Paso for about 20 years. His main job is working inside the plant handling priority mail, which he says isn't a priority to the post office.

"A wire mesh container, full of priority mail, sometimes we would get maybe one or two wires full, each of them has maybe has depending on the size, between one or two hundred, three hundred pieces, it would be left behind every night," Chavez said.

Chavez believes the problem with the mail service in El Paso, is there is not enough people to handle all of the thousands of pounds of mail that they receive daily.

"Everything boils down to under staffing, under staffing, they bring in these new machines and supposedly they are going to take care of all of the mail, but then they don't staff them," Chavez says.

And with the addition of the Las Cruces mail also being processed here in El Paso, which Chavez said is a 40 to 50 percent increase in volume to their system, but he said no one has been hired.

Chavez says that after KFOX's initial reports on problems at the main facility on Boeing, extra staff was called in from other departments to eliminate the backlog. But he believes the delays are now caused by problems at post office branches.

"I do hear there is some delays at the stations because they are under staffed," Chavez said.

KFOX tried again Friday to contact El Paso's Postmaster Felix Guerra as we have for the past month, and again he didn't return our calls.

Chavez said he was not surprised by this response.

"Post office management has always kind of had an arrogant attitude, when we made complaints, most of the time they blow us off too," Chavez said.

KFOX was able to get a spokesperson from the U.S. Postal Service in San Antonio to comment.

"El Paso continually rates as one of the highest plants in the country with excellent performance, so there again, there is no way they could obtain this excellent performance if they were holding onto mail, or reporting information incorrectly," said James Coultress, spokesperson for the U.S. Postal Service.

Coultress also tells us because of the recent complaints a district manager came down on Friday to check out the problems.

"He has assured me even today, that there is no delayed mail in the El Paso plant." Coultress tells us the postal service have hired an outside firm to perform tests for the post office by sending mail randomly through their systems, to make sure there are no delays. And he said there have been no delays.