April 3, 2001 — Back on March 22, St. John businesswoman Lonnie Willis got a lot of mail. She remembers the day for two reasons. First, she hadn't gotten much mail for a while. Second, some of the correspondence she received had some pretty faded postmarks.
One letter was sent a week before from St. Thomas, three miles away. Another was sent March 7 — two weeks earlier — also from St. Thomas. A third was postmarked New Jersey, Feb. 28.
Willis headed over to the Post Office to make a complaint. She was told she needed to go around back to pick up a form. When she did, she got an eye-full.
"There's all these tubs of mail piled high to the ceiling," she said. And no complaint forms. "That's when I went fairly crazy."
Willis said she knows the post office is short-staffed and the workers who are on the job "are really stressed. They can only do so much."
But that doesn't help her run the five businesses she manages. "It's a real serious thing not to be able to get your mail."
Paula Hooper, who operates St. John Insurance and Holiday Homes, had similar "real horror stories" including one about a letter that took three weeks to be delivered from St. John to St. John.
"It's never been good, but right now it's atrocious," she said. "We still can't complain because we don't have the official form."
While St. John seems to have the biggest problems, some St. Thomas residents are also complaining.
Tom Unger of Nisky Mailboxes and Business Center said priority mail that is supposed to take a few days from the mainland, sometimes takes two weeks. And he has a log of delayed and lost packages that have been sent via various methods — among them, a single CD sent first class mail from Oregon on Feb. 19, 2000, that arrived on St. Thomas last week.
"A lot of our customers are complaining," said Carol King, who runs Red Hook Mail Services. "We've had priority mail take anywhere from two to three weeks." First class letter mail is also a problem. "One guy said it took three weeks to get a check from the States. He brought in the envelop with the postmark."
But V.I. postmaster Louis Jackson said, "To my knowledge there isn't any delay in mail at all."
He did say that the volume has increased and that the service is short-staffed.
St. John mail is routed through the main St. Thomas post office at Sugar Estate, and barged to St. John four times a day, Jackson said.
"There are some vacancies in the St. John post office," he said. It has 11 employees and three vacancies, though the Postal Service hires "casuals," — part-time workers — to help fill in. The permanent jobs have been vacant for about a year.
Jackson said the parcel volume throughout the Virgin Islands has increased between 27 percent and 30 percent over the last year as Internet and catalog sales have skyrocketed. "The growth has been phenomenal," he said. And "St. John is more of a parcel or a mail order house than St. Thomas or St. Croix."
In late November, "to alleviate the mail volume we have put in a trailer there," he said. It houses the overflow from the St. John post office.
Plans for building a new post office on St. John are stalled.
"There's a budget crunch," Jackson said. The service is facing a $2 billion deficit nationwide. "All capital projects have been put on hold."
