For more than two years, a large wooden panel in the county of West Marin has shown a set of painted numbers, has conscientiously changed every morning.
“Days without Bolinas Post Office,” said the panel. The number Friday: 806.
The panel was a charming, although sad reminder, to the 1,200 residents of Bolinas of the loss of their beloved post office, which was started from its city center building in the middle of a spray between the American postal service and its longtime owner.
At the end of last month, however, John Borg, a resident of the Bolinas, nailed a new message at the top of the panel – the wooden equivalent of a PS on a letter. He reads
The post office will soon return to the wooden building without frills in Brighton avenue where he had operated for six decades.
On April 17, the postal service signed a 10 -year lease with the owner Gregg Welsh, of the county of Ventura, his lawyer, Patrick Morris, in an email.
For the rural residents of the postal code 94924, the reopening is a major victory – in particular given President Trump’s reflections on the privatization of the postal service, which lost $ 9.5 billion during the year 2024 and cuts thousands of jobs.
“For this to be approved during the massive federal cuts of the Trump administration, it is really a little surprising for many of us,” said Borg, 63, who helped lead a campaign of citizens to reopen the establishment.
A group of residents dressed as postal employees for a July 4 Bolinas parade. The city joined together to call for the reopening of the post office.
(Provided by John Borg)
“I think that the last two years have given our city a taste of the potential privatization of postal service could mean for other poorly served and rural places across the country,” he said. “This includes a reduction in retail operations, delays and disadvantages, an increase in prices … (and) more concentration on the greatest communities which can generate more profits.”
In Bolinas – A paradise for poets, painters, writers and actors – residents have shown creativity in their efforts to reopen the post office.
They did a picker with signs reading: “Real Mail not by email!” They walked in local parades disguised as letters, composed of songs and writes more than 2,000 letters in hand -painted envelopes they sent to managers of the postal service.
And they wrote dozens of poems to read during rallies aloud. Like this one, with the accent put by the author:
They closed the Bolinas Post Office down
Forget our isolated little, distant city.
The ancients need their pensions and checks
And wonders what will be devil following.
Most people from the Bolinas, a city to highlight the Reyes sea point, do not receive home mail delivery. Residents were counting on daily trips to the post office for parcels, pension vouchers and correspondence sales orders for a long time, not to mention the local gossip.
Since the closure of the post office, their mail has been delivered to the smallest town in Olema – a 40 -minute round trip route through the forest on motorway 1 – where the post office has closed several times due to floods. And sometimes he was released to Stinson Beach nearby.
The relocations were more than a simple drawback for the city’s elderly residents, many of whom cannot drive. There are little public transport and 47% of city residents are 65 and over. Residents reported problems to obtain correspondence sales orders, laboratory results, health care coverage updates, payroll checks and other packages.
A sign reads “Save Bolinas Post Office” in the county of West Marin.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“It may seem a small thing, but it really had a considerable impact on our city,” said Borg, 63, a type 1 diabetic that had insulin delivered by post before closing. Over the past two years, he has led two round trips to San Rafael every month to recover his medicines in a pharmacy.
Representative Jared Huffman, a Democrat from San Rafael who put pressure on the former American post master, Louis Dejoy, on behalf of the Bolinas, called the “big news” that the reopening post office. But, he said in an interview on Friday, the process took too long.
“They shouldn’t have had to live all of this and to resist all the bureaucracy and bulls – who prevented them from having a post office,” said Huffman.
The Bolinas post office stopped on March 3, 2023.
The residents of the Bolinas sent more than 2,000 letters to hand -painted envelopes to postal service managers to request the reopening of their post office.
(John Borg)
Welsh, whose family confidence has the building, acquired it about 50 years ago. Postal service was already a tenant. According to a press release scheduled last year by the Welshman through his lawyer, Patrick Morris, postal service for years violated his lease, which forced him to maintain and repair the floor covering at his expense.
The agency discovered asbestos in the floor tiles in 1998, according to the press release, but essentially kept it hidden from the owner for more than two decades and did not publish warning panels. The Welshman and the postal service fought to find out who should pay for the reduction in asbestos and the repair of worn and broken soil tiles.
The lease of the postal service, according to the Welsh Declaration, ended in January 2022, but the USPS continued to occupy the building, without lease, as “tenant to suffering”. In February 2023, Welsh demanded that the post office had left the building in a month.
Morris, the lawyer, said in an email last week that, although the parties signed a new lease, the postal service had not said to the Welshman when he expects to return to the building.
Morris said that, although most of the floor coverings seem to have been replaced and “asbestos authorization has been provided”, the postal service has not provided the details of its customers on work.
Kristina Uppal, spokesperson based in Bay Area for USPS, Times told an email that she could not provide details on lease negotiations, but that postal services should resume Bolinas “early 2025 once the construction is necessary.”
On March 13, the postmaster Dejoy of the time, wrote in a letter to several members of the Congress that the postal service would eliminate 10,000 positions within 30 days through a voluntary early retirement program and that it had eliminated around 30,000 jobs since 2021. The letter indicated that it had signed an agreement with the administration of the general services and the members of Billionaire Elon Musk’s White Government efficiency, to identify more and more costs on costs.
Dejoy resigned on March 24.
Friday, the Board of Directors of the Postal Service announced its selection of David Steiner, member of the board of directors of Fedex, a direct competitor of the USPS, to be the next post office. Criticisms, including national assistance. Transporters of letters, the union representing some 295,000 messaging carriers, said that they feared that its selection accelerates the privatization of the independent agency.
Huffman said that when the Bolinas Post Office was fighting, he found that the postal service – a department at the online firm which worked as an independent agency for half a century – does not respond and, sometimes, “deeply inexplicable”.
But privatize him, he said, “would empire things.”
The Bolinas had a post office since 1863.
After closing the post office, there were no viable commercial real estate in town to which it could be moved. And a moratorium of the 1971 water counter – set up because the Bolinas have a limited water supply – has effectively prohibited new development in the last 54 years.
At one point, the residents wrote a detailed proposal for a temporary installation – a mobile office trailer in a parking lot next to the fire station – and offered to collect $ 50,000 for its installation. They sent the plan to a support Huffman, who sent him to Dejoy, in vain.
Kent Khtikian, a 39-year-old resident of the Bolinas, said that the hopes of his friends and neighbors for a new post office was attenuated after Trump returned to the White House in part because they live in the county of Ultra-Liberal sailor, where 81% of the voters voted for Kamala Harris during the November 17% For Kamala Harris in the November presidential election compared to 17% that chose Trump.
John Borg hangs on a sign on Friday outside the post office soon to reference in Bolinas, California.
(Chris Borg)
“It is certainly a relief to recover the post office,” said Khtikian, a retired lawyer who helped the citizen campaign. “Although there are certainly much more important problems in the world, this is an example of what can be done by people who do not abandon and do not be discouraged and believed in their ability to be effective.”
Enzo remained, a long -standing resident and founder of Bolinas Film Festival, compared the Bolinas post office to an Italian piazza – a place of run -in -laws and “the poetry of community engagement”.
“It is quite beautiful to see all horizons, all demographic data, all age groups, all personal interests, all cultural interests are unified to meet: this part of our community counts,” said Resta.
On Friday, there is a new hand painted sign in town.
Postulated on the outside wall of the still closed post office, it reads
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