Above: Photo of Treadwell Post Office sign taken in July 2011 by Flickr user Carolyn Simmons of West Laurens, NY. Reproduced by permission.
Treadwell resident Linda Norris got a nasty shock while picking up her mail this week: This Saturday, March 31, will be the last day her post office will be open.
"I went to get my mail yesterday and they said, 'Next Monday, you won't get your mail here,'" Norris said.
Unlike several other rural post offices in the area -- like Chichester and Fishs Eddy -- Treadwell's wasn't on a list released last year by the U.S. Postal Service of offices that may be closed soon. The closing, the result of a failed negotiation between the U.S. Postal Service and the owners of the small business that runs the post office, comes as a surprise to local residents.
Currently, the Treadwell office is being run as a "contract post office" by the owner of Barlow's General Store, which houses the post office. This January, retiring owner Helen Mitchell sold the general store to Rachel Phillips-Gaetano and Glen Gaetano, who effectively rescued the store from closing.
Phillips-Gaetano told the Watershed Post that she thought they would have the chance to negotiate a new contract with the U.S. Postal Service, which she said had not changed the terms of the agreement with Mitchell for the last ten years.
But, she said, U.S. Postal Service officials wouldn't even talk to her about it.
"I'm really disappointed," she said. "We were told to do all the paperwork, everything for the contract modification, and we'd have the opportunity to negotiate the contract rate with the office out of Denver, Colorado. But we were told last week that the rules had changed, this was the offer and that was that."
The postal service's offer, she said, wouldn't cover the cost of running the post office and stocking it with supplies.
"It's unfortunate. But we also had to look at what we can do for our business, there's only so much we can do. Essentially it's like volunteer work," she said.
Phillips-Gaetano said the couple offered to run a village post office, which would provide fewer services and be less costly, but that their offer wasn't acknowledged.
When a regular post office run by the U.S. Postal Service closes, the community must be notified, and there is an appeals process. But a contract post office run by a private business can close with very little advance notice.
"What's bothering people the most is they really have had no warning about this, because we had no warning," Phillips-Gaetano said.
To make matters worse, she said, she was told by U.S. Postal Service officials that packets of information about the closing that were to be given to Treadwell postal customers had been lost.
The blog Save The Post Office, which keeps track of post office closings around the country, wrote in January that hundreds of contract post offices closed their doors in 2011. Running one isn't a great proposition for a small business owner, the blogger writes:
The Postal Service provides basic equipment for the CPU, and the CPU provides the rest, including furniture, a counter, cash drawer or register, and a postage meter, which is an ongoing expense of about $20 to $30 every month. So, if a CPU brings in $2,000 a month in postal revenue, and it has a good 10% contract, that’s $200 a month. Out of that the business has to pay for the time its employees spend helping to run the CPU, the postage meter, and other operating supplies. That’s just not enough money to make the CPU a popular idea among small businesses.
Below: Barlow's General Store, which houses and runs the Treadwell Post Office. Photo by Flickr user Doug Kerr; published under Creative Commons license.
