By CHRIS POWELL
Within living memory there were five post offices in East Windsor, one in each of the town’s villages — Warehouse Point, Scantic, Broad Brook, Melrose, and Windsorville. But there was no East Windsor post office in East Windsor. The only post office with East Windsor in its name, East Windsor Hill, was in South Windsor.
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Of course those days were slower and somehow the postal system made it work. Time and growth have consolidated postal things in East Windsor. The villages retain their identity on the U.S. Postal Service’s delivery lists but now there are only two physical post offices in town: East Windsor in the Warehouse Point village on the west side of town, and Broad Brook, for the eastern half of town. Perhaps to prevent things from getting too simple, the postal service maintains its East Windsor Hill office in South Windsor.
But quaintness is no fun anymore over in little Scotland in the eastern part of Connecticut, which, while it has fewer than 1,600 residents and 625 households, is served by six post offices and their ZIP codes. Only about 225 of Scotland’s households have a Scotland postal address. The rest have been given addresses in Baltic, Canterbury, Hampton, North Windham, and Windham Center.
This long has caused Scotland residents great confusion and inconvenience, the more so since the names of some roads in Scotland are the same as the names of roads in neighboring towns. Commerce by mail and private courier in Scotland is often misdirected or delayed because a recipient’s address doesn’t exist in postal and commercial databases. Tax payments, prescription medications, and absentee ballots have gone astray.
One might think that a telephone call or letter from Scotland’s first selectman or members of Congress could have gotten this straightened out — but no. For years the postal service has pleaded “operational” problems and has pledged to study the matter but has done nothing about it.
Scotland’s U.S. representative, the even-tempered Joe Courtney, has tired of the postal bureaucracy. Courtney and Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy recently had enough and introduced legislation with other members of Congress to force the postal service to provide a single town address and ZIP code to everyone in Scotland, as well as to 13 other communities across the country with similar problems.
A few months ago the legislation was approved by the House for a second time and again awaits action in the Senate, which failed to act on it during the last session of Congress. Courtney says he hopes the Senate will cooperate soon “to fix this dysfunctional system that is completely self-inflicted by unacceptable disorganization at the post office.”
Can the Senate, which may be, like the House, more riven by partisanship than at any time since the Civil War, unite at least on this basic matter of improving government administration?
Courtney, who has spent much of his 18 years in Congress mastering the complex details of the nuclear submarines built in Groton in his district, says dealing with the Navy is a breeze compared to dealing with the postal service. The postal service should be mortified that it requires special legislation to ensure that the mail gets to where it needs to go. But maybe Congress should be providing the postal service with as much scrutiny as it gives the military. When your mail doesn’t go through, quaintness is no excuse.
THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD: Massive illegal immigration may not have originated as the political left’s scheme to change the country’s political demographics by increasing the number of Democratic-leaning districts in the U.S. House of Representatives, but the scheme’s potential for doing that is very much recognized among Democratic leaders.
Comments made last year by U.S. Rep. Yvette Clarke, a Democrat from Brooklyn, were recently discovered on video and publicized nationally. Talking about “migrants,” Clarke said, “I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes,” adding that migrants “could clearly fit here.”
That’s what’s called saying the quiet part out loud.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 