AURORA | Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman’s inbox is more crowded this winter than it was last year.
Much more crowded.
Coffman has received more than seven times the volume of correspondence in the first quarter of this year — both digital and physical — than he did during the same period last year, according to Coffman Spokesman Daniel Bucheli. Bucheli said Coffman’s two offices in Aurora and Washington D.C. received a combined 12,000 pieces of correspondence between Jan. 1 and mid-February. That dwarfs the roughly 1,600 communications Coffman’s offices received during the same period last year, he added.
“It was considerable,” Bucheli, who joined Coffman’s staff in December, said of the increase.
Bucheli said he believes a tumultuous political environment that has thrust contentious legislation such as the Affordable Care Act into limbo has led to the increase.
Coffman came under fire in mid-January for leaving a town hall event at the central branch of the Aurora Public Library before he had a chance to meet with hundreds of people who had shown up to speak with him. In the ensuing weeks, he became the target of increased criticism, both in-person, at local events and online. This week, Bucheli said that Coffman does not have plans to hold a traditional town hall meeting immediately, but his staff is planning one for April. He is meeting privately in the next few weeks with local health care industry officials and patient advocates. He’s also going to conduct “telephone town hall” events next month, all focusing on the repeal of Obamacare.
The heavier mail bags and never-emtpy email inboxes at Coffman’s offices are not unique, however, as the amount of mail sent to members of Congress has continued to increase in recent years, according to the Congressional Management Foundation, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization based in Washington D.C.
House offices reported a 158 percent increase in mail volume between 2002 and 2010, according to a 2011 CMF report on communicating with congress. Senate offices reported a 548 percent increase during the same period.
Responses, too, have changed in the past 20 years as technology has evolved, according to the CMF. The organization reported in 2010 that, of the congressional mail that could be answered with a pre-written response, 59 percent is answered in less than one week. Of the mail that is nuanced enough to require new text in a response, about 51 percent receives an answer in one to three weeks.
In Coffman’s Washington D.C. office, Bucheli said a legislative team of about six people handle most of the letters, which are often sorted based on the issues they address. Coffman reviews each letter that goes out of his office, though many times mass responses are returned to a pool of constituents who had written about the same topic.
“Most of the time they’re writing to see what a bill does,” Bucheli said. “They correlate with everything that has been up for a vote, usually. We received quite a bit about confirmations, and obviously that’s handled on the Senate side, so we explain that.”
Bucheli said everyone who writes Coffman should get an “acknowledgment of receipt.”
“Sometimes it may not be the answer they want to hear, but we want to make sure everyone gets a response,” he said.
Apps and groups specifically dedicated to contacting members of congress are also on the rise. Denver residents Colin Bickford and Veronica Mestad started a letter-writing group in January to give people a regular venue to voice their concerns.
“I think for the most part, people want to get involved and people want their voices heard, but it’s just the fact that people are busy with their own lives and don’t necessarily have time to get involved in the ways they want to,” Bickford said. “We’re trying to make an environment where it’s kind of easy — we’re just trying to add as much ease to get involved as possible.”
The nonpartisan group, deemed the Political Action Party, plans to meet once a month at different bars and breweries around the Denver metro area, providing attendees with stamps, envelopes and the addresses of federally and locally elected officials. Bickford, who’s also planning to bring his letter-writing effort to college campuses, said about a dozen people have been attending each meeting.
Despite the rise of group’s like PAP, David Rupert, regional spokesman for the United States Postal Service, said there has not been a noticeable increase in first-class mail since the general election in November.
Rupert said that while the volume of packages going through the USPS is increasing — up about 18 percent in Colorado this holiday season over last year — the volume of first-class mail the organization handles continues to decline. Nationwide, total mail volume has dropped from 213.1 billion items sent in 2006 to 154.2 billion pieces of mail in 2015, according to the USPS.
He conceded that every election results in a temporary, expected spike in volumes — similar to tax season — but not as much as the holidays at the end of each year.
“The Postal Service can’t make any local correlation,” Rupert said. “We know people are sending more things through the mail because they’re shopping more online, and that’s really the only straight line we can make. That’s irrespective of politics or anything else.”