Still Pond Md Post Office: A Fire Means Opportunity to the USPS and Dislocation for a Village

BY CRAIG O'DONNELL

Still Pond Maryland is a National-Register-listed country village in Kent County, with most of its commercial crossroads still intact. A smoky fire in Sept. 2010 at the Still Pond Market caused the USPS to “suspend” the one-room PO and remove all the equipment, signs, etc. As of October 2011, a community nonprofit has been formed to try and buy and rehab the building. It is structurally sound though one corner of the rear wing is damaged.

The fate of the post office was probably preordained the day after the fire.

Articles reproduced below appeared in The Kent County News, Chestertown, Md. By permission of the author. Clarifications are [in brackets].

I. Report on first meeting, held March 24, 2011.

STILL POND  -- Half a year after a fire left the village post office in limbo, the U.S. Postal Service contacted residents for a meeting about "a study process."

The March 24 meeting was at 5 p.m. in the Chestertown post office. About 50 residents attended. Operations Manager Brian Landry barred photography or recording by the public, saying it is illegal. Asked if it was a public meeting, he said it was, but "only for the people of Still Pond."

Most of those there said they never received the short, one-page notice letter. Several pointed out that the legally required notice was never posted in Worton, where Still Pond residents have been picking up mail for the past six months. Landry, based in Easton, called it a "miscommunication."

The letter said the meeting was to discuss "alternatives" to a village post office. Most of the time, he talked about a single alternative, rural delivery as a "rolling post office." Landry told the crowd that he would "listen to their concerns and communicate them to the higher-ups." He said specific questions would be written down and people will "receive correspondence from the Baltimore District answering your questions."

Still Pond, established in 1854, is the fourth-oldest post office in the county after Chestertown, Rock Hall, and Millington.

Former Delegate Dick Sossi attended, representing Congressman Andy Harris. He said he knew Ingleside and Templeville post offices are up for closure. Commissioner Alex Rasin came, after hearing about the meeting from citizens. He told Landry, "I represent the county. The local government didn't get any notice." Many said they got a postcard mailed by a village resident.

Facing criticism for a meeting 12 miles from the village, at a time when people were just leaving work, Landry said he has no budget to rent meeting halls.

The crowd named a half-dozen possible public meeting spots, including 400 High St. [the county office building one block from the Chestertown Post Office]. Graham Ero said his Medders Store has a room that holds 50. "If someone had contacted me I would have let you use it for free," he said.

Contacted by phone yesterday, Landry said he is looking for a meeting location in the village so another one can be held at a more convenient time and place.

The people were clear about the post office's central role in village life. Everyone who spoke opposed replacing it with rural delivery. It's "an ongoing study and that's all it is right now," said Landry, "a study to determine if alternative service can be effi-ciently provided."

Mike Brunner asked if they are looking for a new location in the village.

"We're waiting for the study," said Landry.

"What sense does it make to close a profitable post office?" Brunner asked.

"It's a study to determine if we can provide efficient service to Still Pond customers," countered Landry.

Who determines what's efficient? Landry said, "The postal service deems whether it's efficient."

"Who makes the decision? What office?" he was asked. The headquarters in Washington D.C., said Landry.

Worton, the temporary location, drew criticism for standing water and potholes in the parking lot. [Landry later said the landlord won’t fix the parking lot, and the county zoning enforcement office has said they don’t issue violations on private property.]

Among the topics raised is boxholders' 12-mile round trip to Worton; Serge Pepper noted it's a 16- to 18-mile round trip for him to mail a package. Landry suggested he put a mailbox at the end of his driveway, and meet the delivery driver at the box: "Usually the carrier honks his horn." Pepper said his farm lane is about a mile and a half long.

Ero, who owns the restored crossroads Medders Store, offered space for a post office or "contract postal unit" in his building but Landry replied, "Tonight's the community meeting. The questions go back to Baltimore." Ero said he would contact the postal service to fill out paperwork.

Walter Bowie said the meeting was clearly meant to be part of discontinuing the Still Pond Post Office: He asked for "the names of people, people we can apply pressure to."

Asked to outline the decisionmaking process, Landry said, "I can't tell you the exact process."

Tim Anderson, in a statement that brought a round of applause, said, "Can we have some revenue numbers? I've never had a meeting where there's no hard data. It seems like you came to the meeting unprepared ... you say 'I'll get the answer.'"

Landry did not know whether the post office was profitable or not, had no information on the situation of other small Eastern Shore post offices, and could not estimate the cost of replacing the post office with rural delivery out of Worton. "You're not pre-pared to answer any questions," Anderson insisted.

"I'll get the information," Landry replied. [Note: no figures were ever forthcoming.]

II. Second meeting, late April

April 14

USPS to discuss Still Pond site

STILL POND  -- A meeting about the proposal to discontinue the Still Pond Post Office has been scheduled by the United States Postal Service for April 28 at 6 p.m. at the Still Pond United Methodist Church. Bryan Landry, Easton operations manager, will be there.

Residents demanded a new meeting after the first USPS meeting about service to Still Pond was held with insufficient notice in Chestertown at 5 p.m., March 24.

May 5

STILL POND – After a false start in March, the U.S. Postal Service Eastern Shore operations manager was back in Kent County for a public meeting about plans to permanently close this village post office.

Manager Bryan Landry drew criticism last month when a meeting, improperly advertised, was set up in the Chestertown post office at 5 p.m. Despite the inconvenience, about 50 people were there.

Last Thursday, nearly 70 people came to the Still Pond United Methodist Church. Among them were Commissioner Alex Rasin and staffers from offices of Senators Cardin and Mikulski, and Congressman Andy Harris.

In March Landry also caught flak for showing up without any supporting materials. This time, he used a PowerPoint slide show to describe the financial plight of the U.S. Postal Service, which loses $23 million per day, or $8.5 billion last year.

He said closing the village post office will save $34,400 a year. Neither he nor Freda Sauter, from Baltimore District corporate communications, would specify how the figure was calculated. In an e-mail, Sauter wrote, “The $34,400 savings is based on position, rent, transportation, eliminate duplicate of work and reduction in excess capacity.”

The rent was about $3,000 a year. No delivery trucks operated from Still Pond, and the contract hauler will still pass through the village twice a day on the way to Betterton.

The village study comes at the same time as a move to close as many rural post offices as possible. In January, officials announced studies to determine which should be closed; the target is about 2,000 post offices, the Washington Post reported in January. The Postal Service has about 32,000 locations.

On Thursday Landry said repeatedly there’s been no decision to close Still Pond permanently. He repeated that rural route drivers are “rolling post offices.” In March, and again Thursday night, people questioned how Worton drivers could stop at an additional 100 mailboxes each day without costing more in gas and salaries. [Landry could offer no documentation for the USPS analysis. None has ever been provided to the people who attended the meetings.]

Because of fire damage to the store that has housed the village post office for decades, customers have been sent to Worton since the beginning of October. Landry suggested local business could buy postal scales and buy postage over the Internet, and then let the delivery driver pick up the packages.

At least a half dozen people, some more pointedly than others, commented that they believe the public meetings are for show.

Landry insisted public comments will be compiled before any decision gets handed down from Washington. A final decision is in the hands of Dean Granholm, vice-president of Delivery & Retail Operations, he said.

Landry also told the crowd public comments on the discontinuance had to be postmarked by May 2.

Landry’s handout identified the contact as Phil Ventura, who said Friday he will take written comments until the discontinuance is “posted” in Worton. After that there is another 60-day public comment period. He said he does not know if, or when, the “posting” will occur.

Send comments to Philip Ventura, Discontinuance Coordinator, Baltimore District, 900 E. Fayette St. Room 510, Baltimore MD 21233-9333 or philip.ventura@usps.gov.

The Baltimore District Manager is William Ridenour, 900 E. Fayette St. Room 510, Baltimore MD 21233-9333 or william.l.ridenour@usps.gov.

The USPS plan to close locations is unpopular with many postmasters.

On the National Association of Postmasters website, President Mark Strong said on April 1, “… the Postal Service is trying through regulation to accomplish what it has not been able to accomplish through legislation. They are trying to get the unfettered ability to close …. small rural Post Offices … without taking into account all the reasons they are there, to serve the needs of rural America. The Postal Service has filed formal notice through the Federal Register of a pro-posed change to the Discontinuance (closing) process for Post Offices.”

The changes would eliminate, for example, public meetings of the kind held in Still Pond.

Efforts to obtain the required file of Still Pond documentation compiled so far by the Baltimore District office have been unsuccessful. An “expedited” FOIA request from the Kent County News, e-mailed April 6 to Ridenour, was acknowledged on April 18 by an office in Washington with a letter giving its tracking number.

On April 28, just hours before the meeting, an e-mail from Danné Cummins of the USPS Records Of-fice in Washington arrived. It said: “This is an acknowledgement to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request of April 18, 2011, in which you seek access to Postal Service records.  Your request was received by this office on April 28, 2011, and assigned FOIA Tracking Number 2011-FPRO-00688.”

Meanwhile, Ridenour wrote to Sen. Ben Cardin April 21: “District management officials are currently researching (the request) and plans to respond directly to him.”

No one from the Baltimore District office has contacted the newspaper since the April 6 FOIA request.

On April 29, Sauter said the Kent County News should contact Dennis Elliott, Baltimore Operations Manager, at 410-347-4484, “because he has all the FOIA information.”

Contacting Elected Officials

Letters in support of the village post office should be sent to Sen. Ben Cardin, 129 East Main St., Suite 115, Post Office Box 11, Salisbury, MD 21803 or by fax, 410-546-4252; to Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, 212 W. Main St., Gallery Plaza Building Suite 200, Salisbury, MD 21801 (fax 410-546–9324); and Congressman Andy Harris, c/o Heather Duma, 100 Olde Point Village Suite 101, Chester, MD 21619, fax 410-643-5429.

III. Proposal to Discontinue

The news brief below was actually partly wrong. Despite several dozen phone calls between March and July I had with Postal Service functionaries at all levels, and conversations with Landry in person, I still wasn’t able to understand “the process” they kept going on about. This was the notice of proposal to discontinue, along with the so-called “documentation” created for the record. So, technically speaking, a “decision” to close would not be made until after Labor Day.

So “the process” includes a study to see if they should discontinue; a report accompanied by a proposal to discontinue (or not); sixty days for the public to comment on the proposal, which comments would theoretically be taken into account when they issue the memo about discontinuing; then a notice of closing; then a 30 day period for the public to file an appeal. While this seem unnecessarily complicated, it isn’t hard to understand if it’s explained in plain English.

But based on the ongoing vortex of misinformation coming from every office in the USPS I contacted, my understanding was that the decision was made and only had to be ratified after the mandatory comment period (which is, after all, essentially true) and the time to file an appeal was during the 60 day “comment period.”

Not so – I filed the appeal but it was dismissed because it was filed before the “suspension” was officially a “closure.” I do have to say that the people I spoke to at the PRC were very helpful and professional, unlike the people at the USPS. Those universally either (1) parroted talking points over and over again, likethe identical letters that Freda Sauter was sending to local newspapers or (2) acted like a citizen and/or reporter was an interruption and a pain in the butt. They showed no creativity, initiative, understanding of the community or its situation, in brief, treated the Still Pond community as if it was and is a hog wallow and the larger community, Kent County and the Eastern Shore, as if its existence is trivial.

My FOIA request (article above) for the administrative record was denied as was a FOIA request for financial information on the other village post offices in the county.

After the July posting of the “proposal to discontinue” I also had to involve federal elected officials – contacting Sens Cardin and Mikulski and Rep Andy Harris -- in my effort to get a copy of the “proposal for discontinuance” without paying money. Senator Cardin’s office provided the most help, for some reason.

The “proposal” document has to be available to the public for 60 days in nearby post offices. I went into the post office and read through it; I photographed the postmistress in Worton holding it. PO-101 says anyone can have x number of pages free, and then pays for additional copies. Not that it’s worth money. It was 96 percent xeroxes of the questionnaires returned by “postal customers” along with the canned responses about the glories of the “rolling post office,” and a few pages of supposed cost analysis.

Nevertheless I filed a FOIA request as a reporter to get the document without paying any extra, for obvious reasons. I was covering the story. Remarkably, I was told that it wasn’t available through FOIA because it was “predecisional.”

So a document which by regulation must be publicly available wasn’t available through FOIA because the public can’t see it because it’s “predecisional,” because the Postal Service hadn’t yet sent the memo around to close the P.O.

After raising hell for another couple weeks, and being shuttled from one office to another (Balto-DC, Balto-DC), and discovering that the USPS wasn’t even communicating within its own regional offices, I finally got a xerox of the document at no charge. Honestly, you get tired of being frustrated and angry with these people whether it’s as a reporter or a resident.

As far as I’m aware, to date, 13 months after the suspension started, no effort was ever made by Landry and the Baltimore people to set up a contract operations or what they’ve so euphemistically been calling a “village post office” to replace the one that was suspended. This is despite one or more offers of space from building owners in the community.

I have also learned that a replacement for the Neavitt post office further south on the Eastern Shore, the only successful resurrection of a damaged post office hereabouts, was assisted by free land from Talbot County and a community effort to raise about $150,000 for the multipurpose building.

Of that, about half came from a since-deceased DuPont heiress.

None of these factors apply to Still Pond. Well, it may be that an heiress or two could help Still Pond Preservation Inc. raise the $55,000 to buy the damaged Covington Store/Still Pond Market. (See www.stillpondmd.com).

July 7, 2011

U.S. Postal Service to close Still Pond post office in 60 days

WORTON  A notice dated June 30 from Bryan Landry, Eastern Shore operations manager for the U.S. Postal Service, says the USPS will close the Still Pond Post Office in 60 days.

The post office in the historic Covington store was "suspended" last September after a fire caused smoke damage. Still Pond residents were told to go get mail in Worton or put a mailbox on the street and Worton was designated as the temporary replacement for Still Pond.

The community turned out for several well-attended meetings and asked for the post office to be re-established in the village.

According to the USPS website, the public has 30 days from the posting of notice to appeal the decision to the Postal Regulatory Commission.

Over the nine years ending in 2007, there were 676 post office closures.

Community members filed 25 appeals. The PRC upheld 19, said it lacked jurisdiction to consider two, and sent just three back for reconsideration. One appeal was withdrawn.

The August 2009 Congressional Research Service report "Post Office and Retail Postal Facility Closures: Overview and Issues for Congress" provided the statistics. The report does not say if the three reconsiderations were successful.