Boom Town Woes : No Rain, No Sleet, Just Delayed Mail

TEMECULA, Calif. —  Every other day, Les Adam receives someone else’s mail at the magnet manufacturing plant he owns in this booming Riverside County community. But that’s normal, he said.

“What scares me is that it takes first-class mail three months to get here,” Adam said, holding a fistful of prepaid mailers postmarked in March that did not arrive at his A to Z Industries until June. “It’s ridiculous.”

Betty Ray, owner of Ray & Ray Insurance Co., has started calling clients to make sure they have received their policies in the mail.

“We never know anymore if our mail is getting there,” she said. “For the amount of people in Temecula, it shouldn’t be this way.”

Indeed, most people’s complaints about the U.S. Postal Service would pale by comparison to what appears to be happening in Temecula.

A real estate company, Rancho Consultants, received a bushel basket of mail 60 days late, including $250,000 worth of checks. A resident complained of receiving mail for five condominium units in her mailbox on the same day. A Chamber of Commerce official said that in at least one instance it took three weeks for a letter to get from one end of town to the other.

The situation in Temecula has even reached the ears of Postmaster General Paul N. Carlin, who launched an audit of the post office in May.

Why the chaos in Temecula’s post office? No one has been able to figure it out.

Population Explosion

But William Harker, president of the Temecula Chamber of Commerce, for one, thinks the area’s exploding population just overwhelmed an unprepared and understaffed post office work force.

He may be right. The Temecula-Rancho California area’s population has skyrocketed from 8,324 in 1980 to near 20,000, according to a Riverside County Department of Development report, creating a tidal wave of business for mail clerks and carriers--and a headache for Temecula Postmaster James Cates.

Cates, who took the job in 1983, has received a lot of heat from the community in recent weeks. “I don’t feel it was entirely justified,” he said. “I came into the office, and all of a sudden the population exploded.”

But that does not explain all of the problems--such as unusually late deliveries. “I cannot explain why it is coming in months late,” he said. “We process our mail daily, outgoing and incoming.”

Staff ‘Overburdened’

Although he said the U.S. Postal Service’s audit in May “revealed no serious problems of the magnitude described” by angry business owners, Cates has been adding recruits to the staff that he said was “overburdened.”

“At the time I started, I had six clerks, six carriers and no supervisor,” he said. “Now I have 11 clerks, a supervisor and a minimum of eight carriers . . . but the problems will not disappear overnight.”

Ray Siebert, director of customer services at the U.S. Postal Service’s San Bernardino Management Sectional Center, which oversees Temecula’s post office, agreed that there had been problems. But, he added, “98% of the mail in Temecula is coming through in a timely fashion.”

While some residents said they had no complaints about the post office, many others would agree with Kathy Blackburn, who described it as “the pits.” She blamed the post office for landing her on the Internal Revenue Service’s delinquent payment list.

Attaches Apology

Adam, the manufacturer, has resorted to stapling a letter of apology on responses to business inquiries from potential clients. It says, in part, “Due to the incompetence of our Postal Service, we are only now receiving inquiries that were postdated as far back as March of this current year.”

And the Chamber of Commerce’s Harker has been compiling a file of examples of late mail and wrong deliveries.

“I’m going to send the file to Washington via UPS (United Parcel Service),” he said, “to make sure it gets there.”