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Campbell Residents Complain Of Slowdown In Mail Service

CAMPBELL (KPIX) - Signed, sealed and delayed.

A spokesperson for the United States Postal Service confirmed Monday there have been mail service issues in Campbell. The problems have become so bad that a council member told KPIX the USPS plans to hold a town hall meeting with the community in March.

Residents have been complaining for months about a slowdown in mail, saying they aren't getting mail at all some days, and that packages that are marked "delivered" aren't actually getting to their doorstep until at least the next day.

"It's a recurring problem," said Vikki Essert who the president of her neighborhood association and claims she's experiencing delays herself.

"My son's check from a government agency took 8 days to get here," Essert said. "He was pretty upset, because he's counting on that money."

Campbell councilman Rich Waterman said he began to hear the complaints about six months ago about residents failing to get prescriptions or social security checks in the mail. He said he thought the delays might be because of the holiday rush, but when the delays continued after the New Year, that's when he reached out to the Postmaster General.

Waterman said he heard from a USPS supervisor that staffing issues and a new system were the cause of the problems.

"A big thing she says is just the issue of having enough people, they're having a hard time trying to hire, so she said over and over to me, 'We need to get more people here,'" Waterman said. "This problem is more systemic."

The mail delays, as first reported by San Jose Inside, are so bad that residents posted a letter written by Congresswoman Anna Eshoo to the Postmaster General on NextDoor.com.

In the letter, Eshoo cites "massive failures in postal deliver" with one person who received mail only one day in a week's period, and that calls to the Campbell post office go unanswered.

USPS Spokesperson Augustine Ruiz Jr. wrote KPIX in a statement that "the delivery issues seem to be concentrated in the Campbell area" and that "district management is looking into it to make sure it is only an isolated case."

Essert hopes the USPS delivers solutions soon.

"We really rely on the United States Postal Service," she said. "Mail is very important, and it's not like we have other options for delivering most of our mail."

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