CASEY: Readers roast slow mail and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy

She lives in the area of U.S. 221 and Cotton Hill Road. Unlike many of late, she’s not complaining about sporadic postal deliveries to her house.

Poff’s upset about delivery of mail she sent from there. As an example, she cited a card mailed to a friend, Shelby Grisso Munro, in Cave Spring. The two women live less than 4 miles apart.

Poff put the card in the mail Dec. 10. Poff knows because that was the date on the postmark when the card arrived at Munro’s home on Jan. 5.

That’s a timespan of 26 days. To be fair, there were four no-delivery Sundays plus two Monday federal holidays in that period, which means we should probably count the delivery times as only 20 days, for 4 miles.

Poff could have walked the card over to Grisso’s house and back to her own home in less than half a day.

She was one of many readers — from Martinsville to Christiansburg to Glasgow — who responded to last Tuesday’s column about curtailed deliveries by the Postal Service.

Some said they’re receiving mail at their home only two to three days per week, rather than six days as required by law.

When I asked the Postal Service about that, spokesman Philip Bogenberger said the agency has roughly 20 unfilled positions in the Roanoke area, and that it’s trying to hire people at local job fairs.

“Most post offices are adequately staffed and delivery routes are covered in the Roanoke area,” Bogenberger replied by email. “We have contingency plans when employees are on leave. Still, staffing challenges can arise, which has resulted in brief periods of sporadic mail delivery on a few routes.”

Here are some other readers who’ve experienced mail problems recently. Most, but not all, concern sporadic delivery.

Ibby Greer of Virginia Heights: “We’ve had the same problems for years and years.... it started about 5 years ago. We don’t get our mail most days, and if we get it, it comes at night, in a pile. Boxes are delivered on the porch after we’ve gone to bed, and uh, who knows if they ever reach us?

“Important First Class mail is so irregular that I’ve pretty much stopped using mail. But I’m expecting a new credit card in the mail today — and there’s no mail today.”

Dave McRoberts, Christiansburg: “Same thing with mail happens here, in Christiansburg. No mail when it is on [Informed Delivery] website. Arrives in bunches.”

Dianne Simmons, southeast Roanoke: “For a period of time, I felt like I was only getting mail every other day, but wasn’t keeping a record. Then a friend who called the Post Office about a problem she was having was told they were attempting to deliver each route every other day.

“… The week of December 19-24, I only received mail two days. I subsequently discovered that I was missing a distribution check from a 401-K, two credit card bills, and who knows what else. I took care of the bills online, but the financial institution would not do anything about the check until it had been missing for X number of days. I requested an electronic transfer instead of another check, and finally received the funds on January 10.”

Florence Rea Wright of Martinsville: “We’ve been going through this in Henry County, Virginia, for about a year, maybe longer.”

Peter Jennings, Smith Mountain Lake: “My problem is, I get other people’s mail at least three, four times a month. And I make it my business to either put it [back] in the mailbox with a note, take it to the post office, or if it’s a neighbor, I deliver it to them.

“But I get mail for people in Vinton, Thaxton, Botetourt County, even Roanoke. And, uh, I don’t know, I think it’s this compressed way they sort the mail, whether it’s in Greensboro or Roanoke, but I think the letters are stuck together.

“I just wonder how much of my mail I never get, because I know there are people on my mail route who say that, you know,’ misdelivered mail is junk mail,’ they just throw it away. That’s a real problem, especially during tax time when you’re waiting to get 1099s and stuff.”

Bill Haynie, Raleigh Court: “I’ll miss my mail three to four times per week and then get a batch one day. I subscribe to the Informed Delivery service and can see that I am supposed to get mail every day.

“I, like you, went to the Grandin Road Post Office to see if they could let me know what’s going on. Apparently our regular mail carrier is out with an injury and her manager is on leave for some reason so they are definitely short staffed.

“An additional problem is that there are so many different subs that deliver to our neighborhood that they are not familiar with house addresses and we never get mail until after dark anyway and I know they can’t see our house address.”

Genevieve Henderson, southwest Roanoke County: “We’ve been having problems on 12 O’clock Knob Road.” (The most frequent one, she added, is carriers don’t close her post-mounted roadside mailbox when delivering mail).

“And I’ve had problems when I took a Christmas card to the main post office there at Cave Spring, on the 16th of December. It had three checks in the Christmas card as a Christmas present for my nephew and his family. They didn’t get it for almost a month. They just recently received it outside of Atlanta, Georiga. … But it was not just my card. Another aunt had sent a card through the Cave Spring Post Office, it took a month to get to that nephew.

“I go back to when [First-Class postage] was three cents,” said Henderson, 87. “And let me tell you something: Mail service was a lot better then.”

Boyd Walker, of Glasgow said mail delivery problems don’t seem as bad in Rockbridge County as in Roanoke. But he noted that a birthday card he’d sent to a friend who lives outside Lexington took five to 10 days to be delivered. (It’s about 16 miles from Glasgow to Lexington.)

Walker tracked that delivery. “It went to Roanoke to Greensboro back down to Sandston, Virginia, back to Lexington and then [to] the rural carrier from the main post office in Lexington.”

Other readers wondered why Postmaster Louis DeJoy, a North Carolinian hired under ex-president Donald Trump, still holds his job more than two years into after President Joe Biden’s inauguration.

“This fool’s been appointed,” said Wright, the reader from Martinsville. “I don’t know why [U.S. Sens.] Tim Kaine and Mark Warner can’t fire his a–.”

“I thought the president had replaced this postmaster,” Charles Reynolds of Roanoke said in a voicemail. “Isn’t he the one who gutted machines and people out of the post office? So if the mail is slow, isn’t he responsible? I thought they had moved him out of office. If not, maybe it’s time.”

In 2017, DeJoy was one of three deputy finance chairs for the Republican National Committee. The Trump-appointed U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors hired him as U.S. postmaster general in May 2020.

The postmaster serves at the board’s pleasure, not necessarily the president’s.

One of DeJoy’s first initiatives was a 10-year cost-reduction plan critics predicted would slow the mail in advance of the 2020 presidential election. That was only a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when record numbers of voters were expected to vote by mail.

Late in the summer of 2020, DeJoy said the cost reductions would be suspended until after the 2020 election. That October, the Postal Service announced his initiatives would be reversed.

Congress later passed a federal law requiring six-day deliveries except under emergencies such as blizzards and hurricanes.

Currently, the Board of Governors is dominated 5-4 by Biden appointees.

“If people need to go, DeJoy ought to be the first,” wrote Jeff Wendell of Roanoke. “Question is, why is he still there?”