The grassroots campaign to restore the tiny Bolinas Post Office—propelled by artwork, poetry, loads of letters and even an exorcism—has been brought to the attention of the United States Postmaster General.
“It’s actually really big for our little community to get that to happen,” said John Borg, whose Bolinas barn serves as a war room for a campaign that has rallied everyone from schoolchildren to retirees in the village of 1,500.
Organizers have been focusing on establishing a temporary post office at Mesa Park, and they have rallied Rep. Jared Huffman to their cause. On May 16, Rep. Huffman sent their plan to Louis DeJoy, the chief executive officer of the United States Postal Service.
“The community has developed a reasonable, well thought-out, and cost-effective solution for the post office to return its operations to Bolinas while a longer-term facility is identified,” Rep. Huffman wrote. “I believe the solution offered here works and merits careful attention from you and your staff.”
A team of three savvy villagers, including a doctor, a lawyer and an architect, spent weeks devising the proposal, which considered arcane U.S.P.S. rules governing everything from outdoor lighting to security to parking.
“We’re just a ragtag band of volunteers trying to do the best we can for our community,” said Aenor Sawyer, a physician with the University of California, San Francisco, who helped research the project along with attorney Melinda Griffith and architect Steve Matson.
Since the post office was abruptly closed in February after a landlord-tenant dispute, residents have been forced to retrieve mail elsewhere. They were briefly directed to the Olema Post Office, which soon shut down due to flooding. Then they were redirected to Stinson Beach, a 30-minute roundtrip journey that traverses a winding road around the Bolinas Lagoon.
Not everyone has a car or a driver’s license, and many people in town receive essential medications through the mail, Dr. Sawyer said. “We wanted to put across a proposal that was well informed and viable, and that would minimize friction or opposition, because we really need our post office back in Bolinas.”
During their research, the team discovered that most post offices are privately owned and leased to the U.S.P.S. They conferred with the C.E.O. of an Illinois company that owns more than 600 post offices, and he provided extensive advice on design specifications.
Backed by local officials, their plan calls for leasing a double-wide trailer that would be hauled along Highway 1 in two chunks. The minimum lease agreement is three years, which would allow time for the postal service to find a permanent location in Bolinas, where commercial space is scarce.
Community support for the plan has been deep and passionate. Campaigners have gathered more than 1,600 petition signatures and sent more than 500 cards and letters to the U.S.P.S. district supervisor in San Francisco. On May 20, they held a rally outside the former post office building, which bears no sign of its previous life as a treasured community resource.
“Every single remnant of our post office has been ripped out,” Mr. Borg said. “The post office boxes ripped out, the 94924 zip code, ripped off the wall. It’s all gone.”
So far, the community has been disappointed by the response from postal officials, with whom they would like to collaborate on a solution. Mr. Borg said the local postmaster has been invited to community meetings but has failed to show.
Roosevelt Sargent, the Bolinas postmaster, told the Light that he met with community members more than once shortly after the landlord terminated the lease agreement last February. He said he had not received invitations to community meetings since then.
If additional meetings were posted online, nobody informed him or asked him to come. He said he intends to write a letter to the community this week to address its concerns.
“I have shown up,” he said. “I didn’t get an invitation to the most recent rally. You’ve got to invite me to show up and support the cause.”
Mr. Borg stressed that the situation is urgent. “This is not a sustainable burden on our town,” he said. “It’s just been a big, big disruption for everybody.”
Convinced that the shuttered post office and adjacent building are inhabited by a dark force, members of the Bolinas Cannabis Club recently performed an exorcism at the site, attempting to cleanse it of evil.
Villagers have been trying to keep their campaign upbeat, and people of all ages have been rallying to the cause. Roughly 150 people attended the May 20 demonstration, where students from the Bolinas-Stinson School displayed a colorful 4-by-8-foot poster composed of individual postage-stamp drawings.
The poster is now stashed in Mr. Borg’s barn, where people have gathered to write letters, compose artwork and even write poetry appealing to postal service bigwigs.
“We need our post office,” one letter pleaded. “It’s how I get my life-saving meds!! It’s terrifying to think I can’t get my heart meds!”
Some 50 citizen activists submitted poems to Mr. Borg. Howard Dillon, a local actor, read several at the demonstration, including Beth Nelson’s “Ode to the Bo Post Office,” which began:
They’ve closed the Bolinas Post Office down
Forgetting our isolated, far away little town.
The elders need their pensions and checks
And wonder what on earth will be next.
The Stinson parking lot is full to the top
The queues of cars have come to a stop.
We wonder at this mess we are in
The post is the right of every citizen.
To sign the petition, visit www.change.org/p/save-the-bolinas-post-office.