Editor:
I guess this is history. Our nation has gone from taking care of its own people, the legal people that pay taxes, to taking care of the world. I’m sure our politicians would call this progress.
We can send people to the moon, but the United States Postal Service (not the use of “service” with all its implied meaning) cannot replace a $1,000 trailer and deliver mail to Cascadia residents.
We have this generous offer to drive to Foster, 13 miles at least one way, or have cluster boxes set up somewhere on Highway 20 (USPS decides where they will be).
This is on a two-lane, busily traveled highway – not at our homes where we can watch for the mail carrier and get our mail safely, but where crooks can pull in behind the carrier and steal the mail. Plus, Highway 20 is crooked and is often icy in the winter.
The USPS stated that they wanted to reduce their carbon footstep, so how can they justify making 50 cars drive all those extra miles to pick up their mail while having no impact on their representative emissions? I guess the politicians would call this progress as well.
Either way, it doesn’t sound like common sense to me. A rural contract carrier delivers to Cascadia Drive, or at least the first mile; the other 1½ miles, or about seven families, do not receive delivery. Instead, the carrier turns around and backtracks to Highway 20 rather than continue to Short Bridge, back to Highway 20, which would reduce the distance of her route and provide service to those seven families.
It will be three years on Nov. 17 since Cascadia’s post office burnt to the ground. The USPS has made so many studies and surveys on this – a waste of time. Congress made a law that said no rural post office can be more than 10 miles apart, but with no way to enforce it, and so it has been ignored.
I think this same “do-nothing” Congress is working towards privatizing the postal service, which clearly has more chiefs than Indians. It’s time to put the “service” back into this agency.
Thank you.
Betty Stokes
Cascadia