For over two years, West Marine County’s large wooden signs exhibited a set of hand-drawn figures, and were faithfully transformed each morning.
The sign reads “The Days Without a Bolinas Post Office.” Just Friday: 806.
This sign reminded us, if sad, about 1,200 residents of Bolinas, that they had lost their beloved post office.
However, at the end of last month, Bolinas resident John Borg nailed a new message to the top of the sign. “We did that, Bolinas!!! A new post office will open by fall 2025.”
The post office will soon return to the unadorned wooden building on Brighton Avenue, which has been operating for 60 years.
On April 17, the Post Office signed a 10-year lease with his attorney, Patrick Morris’ Ventura County landlord Greg Wales.
For country residents with ZIP code 94924, reopening is a big victory. Especially considering President Trump’s meditation on the privatization of postal services, which lost $9.5 billion in 2024 and cut thousands of jobs.
“It’s really surprising to many of us that this will be approved during the Trump administration’s massive federal cuts,” said Borg, 63.
A local group dressed like postal workers for Bolina in the July 4th parade. The town gathered together and asked for the post office to reopen.
(Provided by John Borg)
“I think over the past two years our town has experienced what the potential for privatization of postal services means for rural locations with poor other services across the country,” he said. “That includes reducing retail operations, delays and inconveniences, and rising prices… [and] It focuses more on larger communities that can provide more benefits. ”
In Bolinas, a shelter for poets, painters, writers and actors, residents became creative with the push to reopen the post office.
They read, “A real email, not an email!” They marched in local parades dressed to the lettering airline, composed songs, and wrote over 2,000 characters in hand-drawn envelopes sent to post office officials.
And they wrote a lot of poems to read aloud. Thus, with emphasis by the author:
They closed the post office in Bolinas
We forget our isolated, distant small town.
Elders need pensions and checks
And what exactly will be next?
Most people in Bolinas are not receiving home mail delivery in a town adjacent to the Reyes National Coast. For a long time, residents have relied on daily trips to the post office for parcels, pension checks and mail order prescriptions, not to mention the opportunity to catch up with local gossip.
Since the post office was closed, their mail has been delivered to the small town of Olema, a 40-minute round-trip drive through the forest on Highway 1, where the post office has been repeatedly closed due to floods. And sometimes it was rerouted to nearby Stinson Beach.
The relocation is not merely an inconvenience for the town’s older residents, many of which cannot be driven. There is very little public transport, and 47% of town residents are over 65 years old. Residents report problems getting mail order prescriptions, lab results, healthcare coverage updates, pay and other packages.
The sign reads “Save Bolinas Post Office” in West Marine County.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
“It may seem like a bit of a thing, but it really had a huge impact on our town,” said Borg, a Type 1 diabetic who sent his insulin by mail before the closure. For the past two years, he took two hours of round trips each month to San Rafael and picked up medicines at the pharmacy.
Rep. Jared Huffman, a Democrat of San Rafael, who lobbyed former U.S. Post Officer General Louis DeJoy on behalf of Bolinas, called the post office reopening “great news.” However, he said in an interview Friday that the process took too long.
“They went through all this and shouldn’t have had to survive all the bureaucracy and just bulls. That’s preventing them from having a post office,” Huffman said.
Bolinas Post Office closed on March 3, 2023.
Bolinas residents sent more than 2,000 characters to post office officials in hand-drawn envelopes in order to ask for the post office to be reopened.
(John Borg)
Wales, where family trust owns the building, acquired it about 50 years ago. The postal service was already a tenant. The post office had been violating its lease for many years, and it had to maintain and repair the floor, according to a statement provided by Wales through lawyer Patrick Morris last year.
According to the statement, the agency discovered asbestos on floor tiles in 1998, but essentially remained hidden from the landlord for over 20 years and did not post warning signs. Wales and the Post Office fought over who should pay to reduce asbestos and repair tiles on worn floors.
According to a Welsh statement, the postal service lease ended in January 2022, but USPS continued to occupy the building as a “tenant of suffering.” In February 2023, Wales requested the post office to open the building within a month.
Attorney Morris said in an email last week that the parties signed a new lease but that the post office had not told Wales when it expected to return to the building.
Morris said that most of the flooring had been replaced and “asbestos clearance was provided,” but the postal service said it had not provided details about his client’s work.
USPS Bay Area-based spokesperson Christina Uppal told the Times in an email that he could not provide details on the lease negotiations, but that Bolinas expects postal services to resume “in early 2025 after all necessary construction is complete.”
On March 13, then-Postmaster DeJoy wrote in a letter to several members of Congress that the Postal Service would eliminate 10,000 positions within 30 days through a voluntary early retirement program.
Dejoy resigned on March 24th.
On Friday, the Post Office Governor announced that the choice of David Steiner, a board member of direct USPS competitor FedEx, will become the next postmaster. Critics including the national assn. Of the letter carriers, a union representing around 295,000 postmasters, he said his choice would speed up the privatization of independent institutions.
Huffman said during the fight over the Bolinas Post Office he discovered that the Post Service, a former cabinet-level division that has been operating as an independent institution for half a century, has responded and sometimes “unexplained in depth.”
But privatizing it, he said, “It’s going to make it even worse.”
Bolinas had a post office since 1863.
After the post office was closed, there were no viable commercial properties in the town to relocate. And the 1971 water meter moratorium – installed due to limited water supply in Bolinas – has effectively banned new developments for the past 54 years.
At one point, residents drafted a detailed proposal for a temporary facility (a mobile office trailer located in the parking lot next to the fire station) and offered to raise $50,000 for installation. They sent the plan to the supportive Huffman. They shipped it to DeJoy.
Kent Kutikian, a resident of Bolinas in 1939, said that after Trump returned to the White House, his friends and neighbors’ hopes have darkened for the new post office.
John Borg signs outside the soon to reappear post office in Bolinas, California on Friday.
(Chris Borg)
“It’s certainly a relief to get the post office back,” said Kutikian, a retired lawyer who helped the citizens campaign. “There are certainly far more issues in the world, but that’s an example of what people can do that don’t give up and don’t believe in the ability of those who aren’t disappointed to do so effectively.”
Enzoresta, a longtime resident and founder of the Bolinas Film Festival, compared the Bolinas post office to Italian Piazza.
“It’s so beautiful that every life course, every demographic, every age group, every personal interest, every cultural interest come together and united: this part of our community is important,” said Letta.
As of Friday, the town has new hand-drawn signs.
It is pasted on the exterior wall of a still closed post office and reads, “Bolinas Post Office 94924 for Fall 2025. Hooray!”
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