U.S. Postal Service works with customers to merge physical, mailing addresses

MAT-SU — To the list of things for which Alaska presents particular challenges, add mail delivery.

For about a decade, the U.S. Postal Service has worked to convert Mat-Su addresses still delivered on rural routes — those who have “HC” followed by a set of numbers — to city-style addresses — the traditional house number followed by a street name.

“We started working on it probably, I want to say the ’90s — ’98 or ’99,” said Joshua McCoy, manager of address management systems for the post office in Anchorage. “It’s usually not a long process in simple places. Alaska makes it difficult.”

City-style addresses are useful for a number of reasons. For one thing, a lot of companies with online retail outlets won’t deliver to P.O. boxes or rural routes. Having a street address fixes that problem. Another benefit is rural routes change periodically as the postal service reorganizes them. With street addresses, postal customers won’t have to go through those periodic changes.

But the real driving force behind the change was emergency services. When the phone company only has a rural route number, dispatchers can’t, as they do in more densely populated areas, just send ambulances to whatever address is paired to the phone number that pops up in their system when a call comes in.

McCoy said that Kodiak, Anchorage and the Kenai Peninsula have successfully made the switch. But the Valley is a different story. The hold up is due to a number of things.

First is the way the postal service works in the Valley. There are a lot of communities out here — Houston, Big Lake, Meadow Lakes, Chickaloon — but only a handful of post offices.

Post offices that deliver mail are only in the communities of Wasilla, Willow, Palmer, Sutton and Skwentna. For mail to be delivered, the city name at the bottom of the address has to correspond to the mailbox it is heading to.

Which means that right now, McCoy said, there are a lot of people in Big Lake who get mail addressed to them in Wasilla, along with Wasilla’s area code of 99654. People who get their mail at post office boxes at the smaller post offices in those communities — the postal service calls them contract offices — have it sent to Big Lake, 99652.

All of this is confusing for a lot of people who would rather have mail delivered in their home communities. And it’s not just a sense of neighborhood pride. A lot of businesses use the postal service’s database to calculate what to charge a person.

“I hear from people saying their insurance company wants to charge them a higher rate because they have a Wasilla address,” McCoy said.

A second problem with implementing the change is just a matter of sheer geography.

“The area we’re having problems on is probably working up toward Houston, Meadow Lakes area, out Knik-Goose Bay (Road) and that area because it’s vast and by being vast it takes a lot of time,” McCoy said.

A third problem comes with relying on customers to provide the new information. To switch from a rural route to a physical address, the post office needs to know what that physical address is. Some people just don’t respond to those solicitations.

And, lastly, there is the problem of just plain obstinance.

“We face some opposition from customers who do not want their physical address known, but the majority of the customers cooperate with us,” McCoy wrote in an e-mail.

He said the process is ongoing and the postal service doesn’t really have a set time to complete the process.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.