Postal Service hires more Santa Rosa mail carriers

Santa Rosa residents who have been getting their mail delivered unusually late should see the situation improve due to the recent hiring of more mail carriers in the city, according to a top postal official.

The Postal Service hired 20 local mail carriers in the past month and an additional nine new carriers are joining the staff in the next few weeks, Postmaster Michelle Tucker said. The new hires have finally brought Santa Rosa’s mail-delivery staffing to the point where it needs to be, Tucker said, so it should alleviate problems with mail arriving later than normal.

For northwest Santa Rosa resident Shelley Stewart, the problem has been particularly vexing.

“We’re not just talking about mail coming later in the afternoon, we’re talking about mail coming in at 7, 8, 9 o’clock at night. Absolutely crazy,” Stewart said.

The late delivery got so severe and prolonged that Stewart filed two complaints with the Postal Service’s consumer affairs wing.

She said the problem has gotten a little better in recent weeks but she still receives mail “well beyond dark” and “way past dinnertime.”

Generally speaking, delivery delays stemmed from a staffing shortage driven by the departure of experienced mail carriers, Tucker said.

“Because we were having some staffing issues, those routes were vacant, so they were having to be carried by other people at the end of their route, so that’s where the late delivery starts to come in,” Tucker said. “We didn’t shift times that we put the routes out, especially into the darkness ­- we don’t plan that way. It ends up, unfortunately, happening, and we do apologize for that.”

The problem has been worse this year because a large number of employees left in Santa Rosa - some departures expected, some not, according to Tucker.

“In a matter of months, we lost some very senior people, so we lost a lot of experience,” she said.

The holidays are an added crush. Santa Rosa mail carriers expect to deliver 206,180 packages in the city during the two weeks preceding Christmas, Tucker said.

Santa Rosa postal officials continue to hire to ensure they have sufficient staffing in the event of future retirements or resignations, Tucker said. The local postal service also plans to change how it processes mail so carriers can start delivering it earlier, she said.

The postal service has 74 city routes and four rural routes served from its main office in Santa Rosa, with an additional 79 routes served from its office on McBride Lane, according to Tucker. The postal service delivers mail to more than ?89,200 businesses and residences in the city, she said.

Tucker could not put an exact number on how many residents have been affected by late mail delivery but said about 10 routes from each office were vacant when late deliveries peaked.

Though vacant routes had led to some late deliveries earlier in the year, the problem became particularly acute at the end of summer when volumes increased, according to Tucker.

Tucker said the Postal Service does not have a particularly difficult time hiring city mail carriers, who are paid $16 an hour, but the late-delivery problem persisted because the Postal Service did not post any Santa Rosa job openings for a while.

“That was a decision that was not a local decision,” Tucker said. “It was something that was outside of my control, and once we started hiring, the floodgates have opened.”

You can reach Staff Writer J.D. Morris at 707-521-5337 or jd.morris@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter ?@thejdmorris.