Private post office rises in place of shuttered facility

KNIK-FAIRVIEW — Local residents lined up a half-dozen deep to sign up for replacement mailboxes at the former location of the Settlers’ Bay contract post office Monday morning.

A private post office — the U.S. Postal Service-contracted post office closed about three weeks ago amid an investigation into complaints of slow mail delivery — will be up and running as soon as owner Nina Vignola gets a new address.

Vignola, the former manager of the contract office, plans to manage a new private post office in the same location. Each customer will receive a box number listed under a central address. Customers will have to change to their new address from what they previously used at the contract office. The USPS will send notifications to the new private location when first-class mail and packages are available at the Wasilla location, and Vignola will retrieve the packages and sort them for each customer and place them in yet-to-be installed PO Boxes. UPS and FedEx delivery will cost $10 extra.

The contract previously held by Chuck Spinelli to run a contract office has been terminate, and the Postal Service said last week that it hopes to have a new contract awarded to another vendor soon.

The new private location did steady business Monday morning, despite gaping holes in the wall, stacks of undelivered telephone books, and empty mail bins. Most customers were long-time patrons looking to reserve the same boxes they’d always had, and eager to avoid a drive to Wasilla and long waits in line.

Barry Lowe came in before the Post Office before the 11 a.m. opening announced via Vignola’s Facebook page.

“I came to be the first one to sign up to show support,” he said. “I waited outside so I could be first.”

He was anxious to see service returned because of congestion at the Wasilla post office.

“My daughter went there one time and she said there was two lines: one line to wait to get in the other line, and she left,” he said.

A banner thanking Vignola and the other members became something of a prism for anti-government sentiment. Messages of thanks had been scrawled alongside “USPS Sucks!” and other slogans.

Ralph Winterrowe was among the first 10 customers the post office ever had. The post office’s first box was box 100. Winterrowe is Box 109. He’s considering suing the Postal Service for breech of contract after his PO Box was closed without notice.

“We had a contract, signed, to go in and have a key. It was guaranteed to get mail here, and they broke all that,” he said.

He thinks the other boxholders at the post office might have grounds for a lawsuit, too, though they might hesitate to sue.

“I’m a man of action, man,” he said.

Others, like mechanic Sean Dunham, suggested the Postal Service might have outlived its usefulness. Dunham said he faced possibly losing his contract for a post office box he’d paid months in advance. If he wanted a neighborhood-style cluster box, like those seen in the borough’s core area, a third party contractor was months away from establishing them, and would need to go through the borough permitting process. He also didn’t want to change the mailing address for numerous businesses who send to him, and didn’t want to travel in to Wasilla to get his mail.

“Why not just get rid of the postal service?” he wondered aloud. “Privatize it and save the government a whole boatload of money, because it ain’t working for the everyday working man, I can tell you that.”

Other customers, like Ken Newman, questioned why an investigation had ended service to the location.

“Look how you inconvenience people because of what? What fact? We don’t know. If I threw out the baby with the bathwater in my little business back in Kansas, I went out of business.”

The Settlers’ Bay contract post office had a waiting list of 200 people when it closed abruptly Sept. 18 after years of expanding the number of boxes to meet demand, without a corresponding increase in employees, Vignola said.

“Where all the holes were, that’s where all the PO boxes were,” she said. “We’ve had 1,698 (customers), and I’ve had the same amount of employees the last 10 years.”

Postal service officials have said the facility is under investigation after complaints of slow mail delivery and have withheld comment on the investigation. Based on the state of disrepair evident at the post office Monday, Vignola didn’t hold out for vindication.

“They told me it’s going to take a long time,” she said.

Contact reporter Brian O’Connor at 352-2270, brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com, or on Twitter @reporterbriano.