PHELAN — Postmaster Victor Maldonado and other postal officials listened to Phelan residents’ complaints this week at the Rose O’ Leary community center in the latest of a series of ongoing meetings regarding packages being undelivered or returned to sender.
“I think there is something going on here,” Phelan resident Mike Simpson-Rogers said during Thursday's meeting. “I am losing more stuff that is tracked than untracked.”
One of the issues is mail theft. Mike Dawson, of the office of Inspector Genera,l said he took a person into custody last year for using a crowbar to pop open P.O. boxes. But he says the current ongoing problems sound like a combination of employee mistakes and possible theft.
"Some are theft issues and some are customer service issues,” Dawson said. “Some are just mail issues of being careless and not looking, and I am taking all of those issues seriously.”
Residents say the complaints had fallen on deaf ears until Thursday night's meeting.
“I haven’t felt like I was heard,” resident Chris Asta said. “I understand that we live in a widespread community and it’s a different game out there. But we are being treated like we are the problem and we’re not.”
Phelan residents have organized themselves on social media in the community to combat mail theft and ongoing problems with the post office. They coordinated a picket protest on April 15 in front of the post office.
Maldonado, the Phelan postmaster, said the agency has had a problem of "misdelivering" in an approved system of delivery known as “taco delivery,” where the employee pre-arranges the mail in the truck and then quickly slams it in the stand-alone boxes at the end of the street according to sequence numbers.
“When you have 700 deliveries, it’s a lot quicker for them to do that,” Maldonaldo said. “So it could be mis-sequenced in the truck.”
The problem, he says, is that if you get one box wrong, the whole system is thrown off.
“The problem could be misdelivering,” Maldonado said. “We don’t have sequenced flats. We may not be double-checking in the middle of the street.”
Sequenced flats is the next generation of automated mail sorting that helps eliminate human error, and not having it is part of the problem, Maldonado said. But Phelan has had its share of outside issues as well, making the exact problem difficult to narrow down.
“Externally, we are also having issues with mail theft in the High Desert,” Postal Inspector Lisa Cummings said. “People are fishing out of collection boxes and centralized boxes. We are aggressively trying to combat this. We have a command theft inspection team focusing on preventing that.”
Residents were mostly unsatisfied with the explanations, stating there should be no or minimal errors with mail delivery. The officials listened intently and assured the residents that they were going to fix the problem.
“It’s definitely a challenge because it sounds like there are a few issues going on here,” Cummings said. “One is misdelivery on the street and possibly in the P.O. boxes. We’ll have to take this issue back to the employees. Misdelivery issues can be dealt with. There are ways we can deal with it.”
The Phelan post office falls into the U.S. Mail's Los Angeles jurisdiction when it comes to mail theft cases. Cummings is from the L.A. office and works personally with local law enforcement and other mail-theft personnel.
“With this situation, it sounds like mostly misdelivery issues,” Cummings said after the meeting. “The employees are not (placing) it into the P.O. box correctly and someone else is taking it, and it could take weeks to get back.”
She did add that the region "does has a problem with mail theft."
This is the first time the inspectors and postmaster were present at one of the meetings.
“We’re proactively working on it," Cummings said.