Update on Post Office: No date yet for reopening
While there is no date for the reopening of the Boca Grande Post Office, the USPS has updated the island on repair status for the Beacon.
“The repairs at the Boca Grande Post Office are ongoing,” said Carol Hunt, a strategic communications specialist with the USPS in Texas and Florida. “Customers can be assured that when repairs have been completed, the Postal Service will make a final assessment of the facility to ensure it is safe to re-occupy. Then a tentative date for resumption of services will be determined. We thank our valued customers for their continued patience.”
Many visitors have been buzzing that there might be a “soon” reopening of the Boca Grande Post Office, as they have reported seeing what appears to be a front desk counter under a tarp behind the Placida Post Office. Whatever is under the tarp, it is not yet in Boca Grande. In Boca Grande, the building appears ready, with new shiny brass keys in many of the post office boxes, all behind new hurricane-safe windows.
Boca Grande is now among 428 post offices around the U.S. that are suspended as of this year. To keep track of these temporary closures, the Postal Regulatory Commission, a separate agency from the U.S.P.S., has created a dashboard of suspended post offices. In that database, it reads that as of Sept. 30, 2024, Boca Grande is closed due to “natural disaster.” Other nearby closed offices include Pineland, downtown Fort Myers and Chokoloskee, which sits on a small, remote island in the Everglades. The Chokoloskee closure does not give hope for the situation in Boca Grande, however. That remote office has been closed since Feb. 13, 2021.
The new dashboard put together by the PRC shows currently suspended post offices, including their locations, the date of suspension, and the reason for suspension. The map does not include locations that were permanently closed or reopened, only ones that are intended to reopen.
The Postal Regulatory Commission says that Title 39 of the US Code requires the Postal Service to “establish and maintain Post Offices to ensure postal customers throughout the U.S. have ‘ready access’ to postal services.”
The government oversight website on May 17, 2023, remarked on the issue.
“The Postal Service’s policy requires a post office suspension be resolved by either re-opening or permanently closing the facility, which is typically completed between 180 to 280 days.
Roughly 280 days is in early July.
The Beacon reached out to Steve Hutkins, who founded the website SavethePostOffice.com, to detail news about small post offices around the country.
Hutkins says that while there are standards in postal regulations that put a maximum time on closures, they are rarely enforced.
“Even if they have violated the requirement there is hardly anything people can do about it,” said Hutkins.
“If the building is ready to go, they ought to get it open again,” said Hutkins.
He said that at one time, the Post Office had a backlog of about 600 or more suspensions, some of which were 10 to 15 years old. Some dated back to 2015. That has decreased.
“They were de-facto closures without going through the closure process,” said Hutkins. “They were avoiding the process of closing them by putting them in a permanent notice of suspension.
Most of the closures that are hard to resolve are when a post office loses a lease. That has not happened in Boca Grande; indeed here, the building is ready.
“Most of them, when they are weather-related, they reopen,” said Hutkins.
Around the country, small towns have tried creative means to keep their beloved Post Offices open.
A report by Anne Vilen, writing on the rural news website Daily Yonder, said that residents of Swannanoa, N.C., had held a party at their brew-pub to write their state representatives and other officials about the situation.
They all mailed postcards.
