My family got a post office box about 15 years ago because our mail service to our house was horrible. We had a mail carrier who didn’t believe she should have to suffer any kind of inconvenience in delivering the mail. She was already fighting with several of our neighbors – she wanted them to move their mailboxes from their front porch to the street, so she wouldn’t have to get out of her vehicle. She was driving onto my next door neighbor’s lawn to access her front porch, and my neighbor was understandably annoyed at the mud ruts that were forming across her lawn.
Our problem was that the title company and recorder’s office had not recorded our address correctly and the mail carrier kept leaving notices saying she couldn’t deliver our mail because it wasn’t addressed correctly. We tried to get the recorder and assessor to deal with it, but just his past year we found out it’s still a problem – when the house next door burned down, the building inspector’s office and the assessor both contacted us instead of the actual owners. But, we dealt with the mail problem – we got a PO box, and slowly directed all our important mail to that address.
The post office annex is an easy bike ride through the park, right there next to Safeway Mangrove, so we can get groceries too. But as I’ve posted in past, this is Bum Central. In fact I just complained about the Vallombrosa post office earlier this month:
https://chicotaxpayers.com/2017/10/08/please-stop-feeding-our-bums/
They’d broken the annex door, and I saw two different lock smiths working on it over a period of a week. Now this:
The old sign said 6 am to 10 pm. Before that the annex was open 24 hours.
This is disturbing. Another instance of my rights being abridged for the bums.
I’ve had a PO Box there for over 30 years. I could receive packages and mail securely when traveling and wouldn’t be home for a while.
One morning I found that someone had camped out in there using the free boxes as bedding material. It was just after that they went to limited hours.
And this is the response from the post office – cut off paying customers.
I blame both the post office and the city. First, that annex looks terrible – more like Detroit that what most of us old timers consider “Chico”. The floor, partially repaired after some sort of accident a year or so ago, isn’t really cleanable, the tiles are worn and loose in areas. The old ceiling tiles are stained from leaks – they fixed the roof last year, but I’d bet that ceiling is from the 1970’s. Second, the city needs to crack down on illegal camping, loitering and other business-hostile activities around the Mangrove Plaza, including the post office annex and those other businesses. In Redding they have done sweep after sweep of homeless camps in public parks and along the river and made arrests
http://www.krcrtv.com/news/local/shasta/park-sting-results-in-arrests-trash-seizure/646675871
when will we see that kind of action in Bidwell Park, Mangrove Plaza, and other areas around Chico besides just Downtown?
Thanks for commenting Jim.