For the third time this year, Bolinas residents have been told to schlep to a new location to pick up their mail.
Starting in October, they will once again have to venture to Olema for their letters and packages—a less convenient trip than they’ve been making to Stinson Beach, which is a few miles closer to their town.
Their previous tenure in Olema ended abruptly when that post office was forced to shut down due to the series of atmospheric rivers that pummeled West Marin last winter. Just three weeks after they had begun picking up mail at the facility, they were told to travel the winding road around Bolinas Lagoon to pick up their mail in Stinson Beach.
They have been making that 30-minute round-trip since late March. As inconvenient as they find the Stinson trip, Bolinas residents say the Olema drive is worse. It’s nearly five minutes longer each way, and they fear the post office there will be subject to more flooding this winter, when El Niño is expected to unleash heavy rains again.
“Olema is a much worse solution than Stinson Beach,” said Aenor Sawyer, part of a team that has been working on a plan for an interim post office in Bolinas that can serve residents until a permanent site is found. “The Olema Post Office is way too small and much further away. This is truly a daily hardship for the community.”
The Olema site has no handicapped parking spaces or wheelchair access, and there is no bus service from Bolinas to Olema, Ms. Sawyer said. Seniors who rely on the postal service for medication or Social Security checks but don’t have cars have no way of getting there.
Adding insult to injury, Ms. Sawyer said, Bolinas residents recently began receiving bills for their old Bolinas post office boxes—even though they haven’t been able to use them since February.
The post office saga began in late March, after a landlord-tenant dispute over asbestos-laden floor tiles forced the post office out of its Brighton Avenue location.
Since then, residents have been conducting a spirited campaign to pressure the United States Postal Service to open a temporary facility in Bolinas, which had its own post office for over 150 years. Residents have inundated the postal service with cards, letters, poetry and artwork beseeching them to open a temporary facility in town until a spot for a permanent post office can be found.
Earlier this year, residents formed a committee to design a temporary facility next to Mesa Park. The team had been meeting regularly with postal officials, including a U.S.P.S. contract architect, on a plan that would convert two trailers into a temporary post office. Residents had agreed to pay for all necessary equipment and rent the space to the post office for no more than it had been paying for the Brighton Avenue site.
The postal service team told them they would be sending a draft lease within a week or two after their last meeting—but it never arrived. Communication between the parties suddenly stopped.
Residents fear that postal officials might view the Olema reopening as an alternative to establishing an interim site in Bolinas. But Kristina Uppal, a post office spokeswoman, told the Light that there is no relationship between the two.
“This update regarding Olema has no impact on those efforts,” she said. “Those are two completely separate processes.”
Ms. Uppal declined to comment on the plan for Mesa Road that the Bolinas team has been working on with postal officials, nor did she explain why communication between those parties has come to a standstill.
Concerns that the interim post office campaign might be derailed first arose at the end of August, according to John Borg, a leader of the Bolinas campaign.
“Suddenly, and for reasons still unknown, our effort was put on hold, apparently by some higher-level official within the U.S.P.S. bureaucracy,” Mr. Borg said. “It’s astonishing.”
Bolinas residents will redouble their efforts to bring the interim facility online, he said. “We’re mapping out new strategies and tactics and will need to take our activism and advocacy to the next level,” he said. “There will be more citizen action until we get this done.”
Rep. Jared Huffman and Supervisor Dennis Rodoni have strongly endorsed the community’s efforts. They both sent letters earlier this month calling on the postal service to move forward with the interim plan.
“Abruptly pulling the plug on this very hopeful interim solution undermines the community’s confidence in USPS and calls into question whether your agency’s assurance of eventually reopening this Post Office can be trusted,” Rep. Huffman wrote. “I urge you to reconsider and reverse this unfortunate decision.”