School officials at Monsignor Scanlan High School in the Bronx had 650 report cards to mail yesterday. So they did the obvious thing. They drove to the post office in Mount Vernon -- 20 minutes away in Westchester County.
Although the United States Postal Service poetically proclaims that nothing stays its couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds, the Bronx has been plunged into a postal mystery in the last several months as residents and local officials report chronic problems with letters being misrouted or taking weeks to arrive at addresses in the city -- even between points within the Bronx.
At Monsignor Scanlan, Sister Marie O'Donnell, the principal, said she learned her lesson in June when mail sent from the local post office near the school in Throgs Neck took 14 days to arrive at addresses in the city. Budget documents mailed to Manhattan in September took 13 days to arrive, she said, causing the school to miss a budget deadline and forcing it to charge $7,000 in expenses against the next year's budget.
"It is a sorry state of affairs when citizens of Bronx County cannot rely on their Postal Service," she wrote last month to Marvin T. Runyon, the Postmaster General. There has been no letter back -- at least, not one she has received.
While postal problems seem to roam the region, alighting here or there without simple explanation, the problems in the Bronx are, as they say at the post office, oversized. Postal officials have grown sufficiently alarmed about the number of complaints in the Bronx to undertake an investigation.
James C. Walton, the manager of customer services for the metropolitan area, said the Postal Service was planning an unusual series of test mailings to determine the extent of the problems, and was setting up a toll-free telephone number for customers to report misdirected mail.
He said the tests should show whether service in the Bronx was worse than in the rest of New York City, where about 75 percent of first-class mail is delivered on time, usually within three days of being mailed.
400 Residents Complain
Meanwhile, some postal officials say a combination of factors could be in play. Service could be slower because Bronx mail has been processed since September with new equipment in Westchester and Queens. (The new equipment could not fit in the main Bronx post office.) Many experienced letter carriers were recently transferred out of the Bronx. And bad weather could have been a factor, at least recently.
Postal officials said they were not ready to blame a systemic problem, but they could hardly ignore the message from the 400 people who confronted them 10 days ago at a meeting called by Community Board 10, in the eastern part of the borough, to discuss postal problems.
Diane Todd, a Postal Service spokeswoman, said statistics on service complaints were not available. But she said it was "highly unusual" for people to attend a meeting just to complain about mail. "I've been working in New York for seven and a half years, and I can't remember one time where people gathered together like that," she said.
Jack Featherstone, a Bronx firefighter, had a bit of romance thwarted by the postal system. He mailed Valentine's Day cards to his wife and two young daughters fr a local mailbox on Feb. 1. But on the big day, the cards had not arrived at the Featherstone house.
"I don't know what their problem is," he said. "But it's bad."
Marge Jeffries, a school aide at Public School 71, arrived at the meeting last week hauling a shopping bag full of mail that had been delivered to the school that day, even though it was addressed to residents throughout the Bronx.
Postal officials apologized, she said. But on Monday, 20 pieces of mail intended for other addresses arrived at the school.
'We Have Your Mail Again'
Lynn Gerbino, the chief of staff to Assemblyman Stephen B. Kaufman, a Bronx Democrat, said that mail -- including staff paychecks -- intended for the Assemblyman's office on Bruckner Boulevard was often delivered to the office of Dr. Alan Kaufman, an allergist on Tremont Avenue, about eight blocks away. "I get calls from his office saying, 'We have your mail again, Lynn,' " Ms. Gerbino said.
She said mail sometimes took 14 days to arrive from Albany, invitations to events often arrived after the events took place, and constituents complained of long delays in receiving Social Security checks.
Just as common political wisdom says voters who distrust Congress like and often re-elect their own representatives, many confirmed Postal-Service-haters praised their own letter carriers.
"His name is Willie," said Carolyn Gross, the owner of a card and gift shop in the Bronx. "I couldn't ask for better service."
That said, she recounted a period of five weeks last summer when no regular carrier was assigned to her route and she received mail only about once a week. She never received -- or paid -- her utility bills, and one weekend the electricity in her store was shut off.
After Ms. Gross complained, postal employees discovered weeks' worth of her mail stashed away in the corner of the post office. "They found my mail in a soapbox," Ms. Gross said. "All my mail smelled like soap they use in the post office."
'It's Gotten Worse'
Clint Roswell, a spokesman for the Borough President, Fernando Ferrer, said that "the Bronx mail service has been maligned for good reason for years, but it's gotten worse." Problems reported in eastern Bronx are mirrored in the University Heights neighborhood, community organizers there say. And United States Representative Jose E. Serrano, a Democrat from the South Bronx, wrote to Mr. Runyon in February that since their last exchange of letters in December, complaints had increased and one executive had threatened to leave the borough because delayed mail "put him at a competitive disadvantage."
"This is an absolutely intolerabl<4>OE of people, smaller pockets of problem areas come and go frequently in other parts of the city.
Bronx residents might find some hope in the experience of Dorothy Goldberg, who lives in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, who said no mail was delivered to her apartment building on at least eight days last year.
"One day they claimed that literally two different postmen had been bitten by dogs," she said in January.
Now she reports that despite the bad weather, her service has improved recently. "In fact we got mail delivery on two Sundays, which astonished us," Ms. Goldberg said. "Of course, we got some mail that was from October, but better late than never."
