PO lobby hours change

People will not have access to PO boxes 24 hours a day

Visitors to the downtown US Post Office are being met with new signage on the doors announcing new hours. People will no longer have access to their post office boxes anytime they want due to the hours change.

The front doors to the main post office will be open from 4:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 4:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday. The doors will be locked all day Sunday. The change was implemented on Friday, April 13, after the Porterville office received the go-ahead “to secure the doors” from supervisors in Southern California.

“We know some people are not going to like it,” said Amber Davalos, supervisor of the Porterville Post Office. “But hopefully this will deter people.”

The change came about because people were vandalizing and breaking into post office boxes overnight after the postal employees had left for the day.

“People were vandalizing the boxes after hours and defecating on the floor and on the walls,” Davalos said.

This was a sporadic issue for a while, Davalos explained, but “had gotten worse the last few months.”

Davalos said they are working on installing timelocks on the main doors that would allow the office to extend the hours and give people more time to get their mail from the boxes inside.

The historic Porterville Post Office at 65 W. Mill Ave. was built from 1933 to 1937 in Art Deco style. It is one of three Art Deco post offices remaining in the state. The post office was added to the National Register of Historic Places as US Post Office–porterville Main on Jan. 11, 1985.

Upon entering the main doors people can either make their way to the west side of the building and conduct business with a postal employee at

the counter or go to the east side of the building to their post office box. Prior to April 13, people could access the east side 24/7, while the west side was open — 9 a.m. to 5 p.m Monday through Friday and 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday. The counter-service hours remain unchanged.

Loman Atkin and his wife pay for a post office box at the Porterville site and said their box was broken into and mail was taken. They filed reports with the local Post Office and their inspectors and with the Porterville Police Department. They also talked with U.S. Congressman Kevin Mccarthy’s (R-CA 23rd District) office to see what could be done.

The Atkins like many who had their mail stolen did not realize it until something important went missing.

“Some people still may not know,” Loman Atkin said.

For the Atkins it was paperwork they needed to file taxes. It wasn’t until they began making calls to find it that they learned it had been sent and then discovered after talking with the local postal employees that the post office boxes were being broken into and the area was being vandalized.

“They have all of my information,” Loman Atkin said. “It puts me in a very bad spot for ID theft and I don’t like it one bit.”

The Atkins learned through talking with other people that the same thing was happening to their boxes.

“In some cases it had been going on for a year,” Loman Atkin said. “People had orders and checks that they never received. In digging further, we learned that over 200 boxes had been broken into or vandalized.”

Over the course of April 8 and 9, 28 post office boxes were broken into or vandalized, the Atkins said they learned.

Coincidentally, the Atkins started getting their mail delivered to the Porterville U.S. Post Office because the physical mail box at their house was being vandalized.

Last week, people expressed their concerns with the post office boxes being broken into during a monthly meeting that Mccarthy’s office holds in Porterville.

Edith Lavonne, who serves as the treasurer of a nonprofit organization, said that the organization has had a mailbox at the US Post Office in Porterville for over 40 years and was concerned with its security. Lavonne said she was told by a postal employee that mailboxes were getting broken into. She asked this postal employee how could she tell if her box had been broken into.

“She said if you don’t get something that you regularly get,” Lavonne said. “I said we are a nonprofit, we get donations and we don’t know when we are going to get donations.”

Because she was expecting Disneyland passes that the nonprofit was going to raffle off, Lavonne decided to visit the post office more frequently. Lavonne said she received the Disneyland passes, but noted that she also got the nonprofit’s water bill three weeks late.

“So I had to hurry up and pay it,” Lavonne said.

Cole Karr, Mccarthy’s field representative, said the same thing was also happening in Bakersfield, and that post offices there and elsewhere across the US are limiting the hours mailboxes are available for residents as a result.

“We’ve started getting calls on this, this week,” Karr said, adding that his own mailbox has been broken into five times. “So I understand the frustration.”

The Atkins are glad to see something is being done in Porterville, but are still worried and for now are picking their mail up from the counter when it is open.

“Something had to be done,” Loman Atkin said. “It’s not right for our post office to be disrespected like that.”