That’s the order from the Gilroy Postmaster, so if a car or
trash can blocks your mailbox, don’t plan on getting a delivery
Gilroy – Neither rain nor sleet nor snow will keep your mail from getting to you, but expecting letter carriers to traverse parked cars and recycling bins may be too much to ask.
Gilroy residents are fuming – and starting to turn on one another – because some local carriers won’t service curbside mailboxes when they’re obstructed by a parked car. And residents are incensed that Gilroy postmaster Penny Yates is standing behind her carriers even though their delivery methods flout United States Postal Service policy.
“I wouldn’t make a big deal out of it if it happened once in a while, but they’re telling me they don’t have to and will not deliver my mail,” Gilroy resident Dennis Chatham said. “I know for a fact it’s illegal.”
Chatham lives with his family on Arapaho Drive in northwest GIlroy. He said he’s had delivery problems for two to three years, but that it’s been worse lately. His carrier, Patricia Finley, has told him that she won’t stop at his box if there’s a car in front of it, which violates postal rules.
According to Gus Ruiz, a spokesman for the postal service’s Bay Valley District, which includes Gilroy, letter carriers are to make every effort to deliver mail to every residence, and should get out of their vehicles when they need to.
“When the approach to a mail receptacle on a curb is somehow temporarily blocked,” Ruiz said, “our policy is for a carrier to dismount and effect delivery if it’s safe.”
But in response to numerous complaints, Postmaster Yates told residents last week that getting out of the car takes too much time and isn’t cost effective. Local carriers, she wrote in a letter distributed in Chatham’s neighborhood, “are instructed that they are not to dismount to blocked mail receptacles.”
Rules governing delivery vary depending on the type of service a resident has. There are still many areas of Gilroy that receive door delivery on walking routes, but newer developments have either cluster boxes, where the mail for about a dozen residents is dropped at one location, or curbside boxes. Homebuilders install mail boxes at the post office’s discretion.
According to Ruiz, a curbside box is obstructed if a carrier can not simply drive along the curb and reach into the box. But residents who have boxes a few feet off the curb are entitled to walk-up service. On Lone Deer Way, also part of Finley’s route, some residents have curbside boxes, and some have walkup service. Finley must get out of her truck to deliver to some of her customers, but she won’t deliver to Lone Deer residents whose curbside boxes are obstructed.
“I don’t have time,” Finley said Friday while delivering to Lone Deer homes with walkup service. “My route is timed to get out here. My route is timed for every minute, every second.”
Finley’s delivery methods illustrate how dependent some carriers are on their vehicles. Rather than walk to the handful of houses that ring the cul-de-sac at the end of Lone Deer, she drove to each one, turned off her truck, got out and delivered the mail. Friday was trash day in the neighborhood, and Finley used her truck to shove empty trash bins out of her way.
Lone Deer resident Jody Duell said she’s had a rocky relationship with Finley since she moved from Karen Court to Lone Deer two months ago. She said it often takes several extra days to receive her mail and that she once waited four days for Finley to deliver a paycheck because her box was blocked by a car that did not belong to her.
“They wouldn’t give it to me at the post office either,” the woman said. “I can’t control where other people park. I can’t sit outside every day guarding my mailbox.”
Duell said she also has a tense relationship with her next door neighbor, whose box is on the same piece of curb. Last week Duell posted a sign on her box pleading with neighbors and visitors to not block the two mailboxes.
“She thinks this is my fault,” Duell said of her neighbor. “The mail lady told her those were my cars.”
Chatham said that his usually quiet and friendly street also has grown tense in recent weeks, with neighbors exchanging accusing looks and wondering who’s been stirring up trouble with the post office.
“Right now people are frowning at each other,” Chatham said. “There’s a little bit of friction.”
Chatham is trying to change that. He wants to organize a community meeting so his neighbors will band together to fight the post office and not each other. He’s also trying to enlist the help of U.S. Congressman Mike Honda.
“I just want people to get information and know what’s going on,” he said. “I’m not going to stop fighting this. If they won’t help me [in Gilroy], I’ll go over their heads.”
He may not have to. Yates was not available for comment Friday, but Terry Medeiros, a Gilroy postal supervisor, said that the local post office is reconsidering it’s policy on curbside service.
“There’s been a lot of confusion,” he said. “We’ve been looking at different manuals and they don’t say the same thing. We’re going to change our policy.”
Ruiz said Finley’s actions seem “strange” to him because not delivering everyone’s mail only makes her job more difficult.
“The last thing she wants to do is not effect delivery,” he said. “It’s very inefficient for her because she still has to make that delivery.”
