No Permanent Letter Carrier For at Least a Year, on 1200 of E

I asked Carol Larson, spokesperson for the U.S. Postal Service, to update us on the status of the letter carrier on the 1200 block of E Street NE. Jim Laise (1248 E St. NE) wrote in an article on March 9 that his block has no permanent letter carrier, and he wrote that he receives mail normally after 5 p.m.

Ms. Larson said, in a telephone conversation: "We periodically do what we call route inspections, where we evaluate every carrier's route, and because of certain new businesses coming in, routes tend to increase or decrease [in size]. Our aim is that every carrier has an eight-hour route. When the route inspection [for your area] was done in March, there was a two-hour segment of a route that [was left over].

"We would not hire someone for a career position for a two-hour segment. We call that an auxiliary route. So this particular area is served by a temporary carrier, and what it means is that there is no definite time of the day when the mail is delivered. I asked the station manager, `Have you had any complaints from customers.' He said no, but if he gets complaints, he can attempt to have the mail delivered closer to the same time every day. However, we can't promise that, because it's a different person that would be delivering it [every day].

"It's a temporary or a casual employee [who has other assignments throughout the day]. He said he would try, if this is a problem for a lot of the residents, to get the mail delivered either earlier in the day — but it would not be a regular six-day-a-week, same time [thing].

"[Residents with concerns] could address them to the [V Street Annex] station manager, Mr. Payne, at 523-2108.

"It's going to take a while for this route to grow, to be assigned to either a carrier who would have this route, or that this would be added in a future route adjustment to another route. This will probably be for at least a year or so.

"We try to deliver all mail by 6 p.m. or sooner. The very latest should be 6 p.m." §