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Kustoff for USPS Changes 8th District congressman says time is running out on a second stimulus bill.

 e U.S. Postal Service cannot “continue to act like Blockbusters in a Net ix world.” So said 8th District U.S. Representative David Kusto in a Zoom address to the Rotary Club of Memphis.  e matter came up in relation to concerns about the e ect of reductions of postal services on mail-in ballots.

Speaking from his local o ce in Ridgeway Loop, Kusto said those reductions re ected ongoing social changes — mainly the drastic reduction in  rst-class mail caused by the cyber-revolution — and had begun under President Obama. “ e Postal Service will have to adapt,” he said.

On another matter, Kusto took note of the fact that there has been no congressional follow-up to the original COVIDrelated stimulus payments and said that the window for passing another stimulus bill had, for practical purposes, shrunk to the dimensions of the next three weeks.

Members of Congress stand ready to return to Washington to vote for a solution as soon as one is agreed to by the two parties, he said, but, “once we hit October, everybody will be in their districts and involved with campaigns.”

• COVID-19 has clearly a ected the way running for o ce has proceeded, locally. Certain races that usually involve a signi cant amount of public appearances or door-to-door contacts are more than usually dependent on social media, mailouts, phone banks, and — not least — polls.

Much polling is, of course, carried out by disinterested parties and seeks genuine opinion sampling. But increasingly candidates invest in polling, including “push polls” that are phrased so as to insinuate various points of views, for or against. And there are “benchmark” polls, designed to elicit public attitudes on various issues so as to guide the campaign strategy of a given candidate.

Two polls that were dropped last week indicate the range. One, arriving in people’s message boxes, is entitled “ e Voter Survey,” and, despite its generalized name, is not so anodyne as all that, including as it does several leading questions that “push” in the direction of some candidates as against others.  e other poll, on Facebook, asks a wide variety of questions about various candidates and o ces, and, to the degree that it deals with positions, phrases those positions more or less fairly. It, like the other poll, seems to focus ultimately on the state House District 83 race between incumbent Republican Mark White and Democratic challenger Jerri Green — indicating that the District 83 race is considered up for grabs. More on these two polls anon.

•  e Shelby County Commission is scheduled to meet next in committee on September 9th, and, if all goes as County Mayor Lee Harris has indicated, they’ll  nally have a budget book from the administration to pore over. Uncertainty over the  nal shape of the 2020-21 budget has vexed the last several meetings of the commission, and the budget book, which has been  rmly promised for delivery on September 8th by Deputy Mayor Dwan Gillom, could go far toward resolving several issues or opening up new questions. Or both.

Congressman David Kusto

In recent meetings, the commission has been asked to li a freeze on new hiring for several departments, both in the purview of elected o cials and elsewhere.  ose departments seeking relief from the freeze have pointed out that the proposed new positions would remain within  scal limits voted on earlier.  e commission has agreed to li the freeze in one or two instances but in other cases has held judgment, pending receipt of the budget book.

Budget issues have been complicated by disagreements between the commission and the administration over an abundance of matters — ranging from the actual status and amount of funds on hand to the matter of authority over revising speci c allocations.  e original budget proposal submitted by Harris for the new  scal year was rejected by the commission, which, a er a lengthy series of meetings, proposed and voted on a different sort of budget altogether. In several areas, implementation of the budget has awaited the  nal details in the aforesaid administration budget book.