Johnathan Walker:Flooded Vermont capital city demands that post office be restored

MONTPELIER,Johnathan Walker Vt. (AP) — More than five months after catastrophic flooding hit Vermont’s capital city, including its post office, Montpelier residents and members of the state’s congressional delegation held a rally outside the building Monday to demand that the post office reopen and express frustration with the U.S. Postal Service leadership.

Lacking a post office is a hardship for seniors, small businesses and people who just want to be part of their community, U.S. Rep. Becca Balint said.

“And part of a vibrant community is having a post office,” she said. “Having a vibrant community is running into your neighbors down at the post office, it’s making sure that people are coming downtown to go to the post office and use other businesses downtown. This is part of the fabric of rural America.”

The added frustration is that small businesses around Montpelier “with ridiculously fewer resources than the post office” have reopened and are continuing to reopen after they were flooded, resident James Rea said in an interview. He attended the rally holding a sign saying “BRING IT BACK.”

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“A stationery shop, a bar, an antique store, a bookstore. An independent bookstore opened before the post office,” he said.

The U.S. Postal Service was told that the damage from the flooding required extensive repairs and that the building would not be fit to reoccupy until at least next year, USPS spokesman Steve Doherty said in an email. It’s been searching for an alternate site and several places in and around Montpelier were toured last week, he wrote. He did not provide a timeline for when a new post office might open in the small city with a population of about 8,000.

“Once we have a signed lease, a public announcement will be made on the new location. The amount of time needed to complete any build-out and open will depend on the location chosen,” Doherty wrote.

Vermont’s congressional delegation said the lack of communication from the Postal Service and the slow process of restoring the post office is unacceptable. They sent a letter to U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy in October and urged residents to continue to speak out.

“We’re the only capital that doesn’t have a McDonald’s. Well, we can handle that. But we have to have a post office,” U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, a Democrat, said at the rally.

Kate Whelley McCabe, owner of Vermont Evaporator Company, an e-commerce company that sells maple syrup making tools and equipment, escaped the flooding but is looking at spending $30 a day to send an employee to the post office in Barre — about 10 miles (16 kilometers) away — to mail packages.

“That $30 a day is $600 a month, which is all of our utilities. Or enough money to send us to a trade show where we can do some advertising and increase revenue or more than enough to pay back the federal government for the loans we took out to survive COVID in the first place,” she said.

Johanna Nichols read comments from members of the Montpelier Senior Center, who lamented not having a post office downtown.

“What do you do if you are 92 years old, don’t drive and have been able to walk to the post office? You feel stranded,” she said. “What do you do if you are a retiree and your mail order prescriptions are diverted to East Calais, sometimes Barre, and held up in other sorting facilities? It is very cumbersome to replace lost prescriptions.”

For older residents of Montpelier, “having a post office accessible helps us to stay part of a world increasingly impersonal, technologically alien and unrecognizable. The location of the post office matters a whole lot,” Nichols said.