Amagansett Residents Want Home Mail Delivery Amid COVID-19 Fears And Overwhelmed Post Offices

Residents of Amagansett, spurred by concerns about public health amid the COVID-19 epidemic and the needs of an aging population in general, are exploring a request to the U.S. Postal Service to add home delivery of mail in the hamlet.

One of just four South Fork Zip codes that do not have home mail delivery, Amagansett’s tiny post office has been beset in recent months by long lines, concerns about social distancing and even a physical confrontation between two residents over the town mask mandate.

After several residents voiced support for the effort recently, James MacMillian, the chairman of the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee, said that he expects to meet with United States Postal Service officials later this week about what residents would need to submit to the federal agency to spur an analysis of whether the hamlet could institute mail delivery.

“That building is a health and safety risk to everyone in Amagansett,” Mr. MacMillian said. “It’s a very dangerous situation there, and I think it would actually relieve a lot from them.”

His view was shared by a number of residents, some of whom said that trips to the post office have been the most threatening to their health during the epidemic.

“It’s not like it used to be, especially now with COVID,” said Dawn Brophy during a recent discussion. “I think you could make the case to them now for delivery, even with a lot of the old timers who like going to the post office.”

Like the residents of some of the other small hamlets that that do not have home delivery — Bridgehampton, Quogue and Sagaponack, to name a few — residents of Amagansett were asked at some point, decades ago, whether they wanted home delivery or centralized delivery and chose the latter, preferring the post office to a village green and community kiosk.

In others, like Bridgehampton and Sagaponack, sparse development patterns long made delivery service unworkable, though after years of transforming farm fields into neighborhoods they would probably meet USPS calculations.

A spokesman for the USPS, Xavier Hernandez, said that the Postal Service takes a number of factors into account in determining whether home delivery is feasible under USPS criteria and capabilities.

The wishes of residents is not the least of the considerations that is weighed in the balance, he said, along with calculations of the number of residents per mile of roadway that would have to be traveled, the availability of a secure location for parking mail delivery vehicles at night and, of course, the costs.

With the department in a long-running financial crisis that has it operating at billion-dollar deficits annually, economic considerations are more weighty now when considering new services than they might have been a couple decades ago.

“It is not the only consideration, but it is something we have to think about since the Postal Service is in such a precarious financial position,” Mr. Hernandez said. “Whatever option is most economical. But it can be reviewed.”

Some residents wondered if closing the post office building and establishing home delivery out of distribution location might not actually be more economical, if the agency could shed the current post office property.

“If the central post office understands that it is less expensive to them, they will jump on it — if it isn’t, they are not going to,” said Deborah Wick.

Others, said they would like to see delivery offered and the centralized post office maintained.

“The best solution would be to have a post office and the people who love to drive there and get the mail every day, could do that, and if the people who want home delivery could get it,” Ms. Brophy said.

East Hampton Town Councilman David Lys said that he would like to see the Postal Service give the delivery idea attention.

“Multiple means of reliable delivery of parcel mail is very important in our rural community,” he said this week. “Many like the process of going to the [post office] but others don’t have as much ability to do so on a regular basis. Adding another option of home delivery can support Amagansett residents and also our local economy, as we are finding there are more individuals working from home even prior to the health pandemic. But without parcel post delivery, many of the home office business models just can’t be as efficient as needed. Now, during COVID, we are witnessing the importance of our postal service, its employees and its effects on our community as a whole in real time.”

The call from Amagansett residents comes as the USPS is struggling nationwide to keep up with the surge in deliveries as online shopping has taken over an even larger percentage of the market during stay-at-home orders, business closures and health concerns about going out in public — and falling deeper into debt, after getting only $10 billion of the $30 billion boost in funding the department said it needed from the federal aid packages to keep up with evolving demand.

Package delivery volume is up 60 percent over comparable time period last year — leaving post offices operating at “Christmas peak week volumes” for going on five months, Mr. Hernandez said.

With that, delivery of mail and packages has flagged at times. Some residents have registered complaints recently about packages stalled for days in local post offices before they can be sorted and handed over to their recipients, either at the post office or at home.

“I have packages that the tracking says have been in the post office since July 20 and I’m still not able to get them,” said Danielle Fromm, who uses both the Amagansett and Montauk post offices regularly. “My brother in Massapequa gets a package in a day or two. So now I have stuff sent to him and I see him [at work] and get them from him.”

Mr. Hernandez said that the same conditions that have led to the deluge of packages, the agency has had to deal with staffing shortages from those who fall ill with COVID-19 or have been forced to time away from work because of child care or elder care problems, leaving the agency often unable to send additional staffing to overwhelmed small offices like it typically would.

“Typically, the Postal Service backfills leave or extended absences in East End offices … by borrowing personnel from other nearby offices,” Mr. Hernandez said in a message. “This summer has made that practice more difficult. Post offices across Long Island, as across the nation, have not been immune from the impacts of COVID-19 with personal wellness, child care, elder care or quarantines that may be unrelated to work contacts. In addition, as all of our local offices are dealing with greater parcel volumes directly related to escalated online ordering by local residents, it is difficult to identify which nearby offices can spare the extra hands to loan to another office. While we are flexing our resources as possible, it is not business as usual for us in this regard.”

There are those in the hamlet who doubt that the agency will come down on the side of offering the service anytime soon.

“That office has been dysfunctional for decades, adding home delivery is not going to make that any better,” said John Broderick. “I’m not a big fan of that facility, but home delivery or not, there’s still going to be a ton of boxes coming to that post office.”

“I would think in the post office’s charter, they have a legal obligation to deliver if a certain number of residents want it,” a neighbor, Michael Jordan said. “They have no reason for existing if they don’t.”

Another resident, Bill Discipio, said that Amagansett residents should demand home delivery and use every avenue of influence they can find to pressure USPS administrators to bend to their needs.

“We need Lee Zeldin, we need to call his office and make all the points we made about the safety of the parking lot, the comparisons to nearby hamlets,” Mr. Discipio said. “We’ve been talking about it for 20 years. We need to take action.”