By SAM GAUNTT
PHOTO CREDIT Giuseppi Lopiccolo
Some North College Park residents are complaining to city officials and on social media that their mail is not being delivered every day.
Mayor Pro Tem Denise Mitchell (District 4) said several of her constituents have come to her with concerns about the North College Park Post Office over the last few months.
“There’s maybe two or three days that a resident will not get mail at all,” Mitchell told College Park Here & Now in October. “There’s some days where the mail will come, but it will be for another address.”
Mitchell added that many College Park residents who are seniors or retirees get their pension or Social Security checks delivered by mail — and are not receiving them in a “timely fashion,” or sometimes even at all.
The North College Park location recently underwent a change in leadership, according to Keith Hooks, a local representative of the National Association of Letter Carriers, following the retirement of the branch’s previous Postmaster Tanya White.
At an Oct. 18 city council meeting, Hooks said the post office has had an “onslaught” of new, inexperienced employees, following a rash of retirements of long-time mail carriers.
“Most of the carriers that you have come to know, love, work with, have your mail delivered from, have now retired,” Hooks said. “That skill set has now retired. We’re itching to change that.”
Hooks added that union leaders want to shift the perspective of mail carriers back to “that our communities come first, that our customer base comes first.”
But, Hooks said, the union can only fix itself — starting with the membership and letting mail carriers know how important it is for customers to be taken care of.
A representative of the North College Park Post Office did not respond to multiple requests for comment from College Park Here & Now.
Mitchell said the location is working to solve its staffing issues, and also to resolve problems with more “arduous” routes in parts of North College Park with hills.
“We will see how effective that will be, but I know that they are … trying to make some inroads to our issues,” she said, “which I feel a little bit better than before, I will say.”
Some residents, including Nancy Harris of College Park Woods, said several neighbors have complained about letters, bills and other pieces of mail that were not delivered — even though the United States Postal Service’s online portal showed they had been.
The lost mail resulted in the loss of several hundred dollars in uncashed checks, Harris, a clinical social worker, said. While the checks can get reissued, Harris said, the missing deliveries have led to a several-months delay in getting paid.
“I know that we get mail for other people’s houses,” Harris added. “So I have to assume that other people are getting mail for other houses, too. It can’t just be us.”
One Dewberry Lane resident, who asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation, said problems with mail delivery in College Park have flared up in the past.
The resident did not receive any mail at all during several days in August and October, and had to report those pieces of mail as missing on the Postal Service’s online portal.
“The problems with mail delivery are chronic and have recently flared up to a … degree that we have not seen previously,” the College Park Woods resident said.
Residents facing problems with their mail delivery is not a new issue, Mayor Fazlul Kabir, who lives in the North College Park neighborhood of Hollywood, told College Park Here & Now.
In the past, Kabir said, the city has reached out to federal representatives to fix issues with the post office, but those improvements weren’t permanent.
Still, some residents have told him they’ve seen improvements in their mail delivery, Kabir said.
