Home Delivery? : Return That Idea to Sender, Say Fans of the Sunset Beach Post Office

SUNSET BEACH —  A few homeowners living on this sliver of sand tucked between Seal Beach and Huntington Beach have again proposed the unthinkable: home mail delivery.

The idea doesn’t sit too well with many of the unincorporated area’s residents, who say their 1,300-square-foot post office on Pacific Coast Highway is more than just a place to pick up and send mail. It’s a community gathering place, where friends and neighbors in the 26-block beachfront village stay in touch.

“It’s not congested and it’s not a hassle here,” said contractor Mitch Collins, who stopped by the diminutive post office Monday morning to pick up his mail with 2-year-old son Luke. “It feels like a little town in here.”

Collins forgot his post office box key, but he still got his mail. Well-known customers get that kind of treatment here.

“Everybody’s family,” said clerk Fredia Travis, who has spent three years behind the counter at the 38-year-old branch and knows most of her customers by name. “I try to be personal with all of my customers. I’ve worked in larger post offices, and it’s a big relief to work here.”

Sunset Beach and the neighboring Seal Beach community of Surfside are the only two areas in Orange County that have no home delivery of mail, according to U.S. Postal Service spokesman George Marsh.

At the smaller Surfside branch, postal officials say there has been no recent request for home delivery. But in the 2,250-resident Sunset Beach community, a small group of homeowners is asking the association that governs homeowner affairs for the community to request home delivery.

Home delivery proponent Wayne Mills said he likes the local post office but also wants the option of home delivery. A 20-year Sunset Beach resident, Mills said not being able to use a street address can cause a credibility problem when applying for a credit card, an insurance policy or a driver’s license.

“The first thing they say is, ‘We think you’re a flake because all you have is a post office box,’ ” Mills said. “I’ve had my mail sent back because all it had on it was my street address. There’s got to be countless stories here like that.”

Mills and other supporters also say the branch is hard to reach by car. With limited parking and high-speed traffic whizzing by on Pacific Coast Highway, they say the potential for accidents is high.

“It’s a dangerous situation,” Mills said. “The post office is fine, but being required to go there every day to get your mail is the problem.”

But some fear the move would prompt the closure of the 1,406-box post office.

“The closing of our post office would almost certainly be a result, and that would be terrible,” said 22-year resident Phyllis Maywhort, past president of the Sunset Beach Community Assn. “At Christmastime, they put out cookies for their customers. That’s just amazing. If we had to go to the Huntington Beach Post Office, we’d be totally anonymous.”

Collins agreed. “No home delivery,” he said flatly.

If Sunset Beach were to begin home delivery, Postmaster Dick Deyarmond said, the mail would probably be delivered to cluster-type mailboxes, not to individual homes. And for those who still preferred post office boxes, he said, the cost could climb from the current $8 a year to as much as $70. The price is kept artificially low, according to Deyarmond, because residents have no alternative except general delivery.

Deyarmond and four clerks work at the branch, where the community association message board keeps residents up on the latest news.

“It’s like the old-fashioned post office that was kind of a community gathering place,” Deyarmond said. “It’s a fun place to work.”

Next door, real estate broker Walter Sawyer has spent 20 years watching people pass by on their way to the post office, sometimes stopping in his office to visit. As vice president of the community association, Sawyer does not see a strong demand for home delivery. Only a few people spoke in support of home delivery at the last association meeting, he said.

The association board plans to vote on the issue at its next meeting, in April or May.

“After the last meeting, I’ve had people point their finger at me and say, ‘No home delivery.’ So I think I know how this is going to come out,” Sawyer said. “But if we get a majority of people requesting it, then we’ll go to the post office and get their feelings on that.”

Longtime resident Jane Ayers, whose parents built their Sunset Beach home in 1911, said the idea of home delivery surfaces every decade or two.

“The newer people feel like we’re backward here,” she said on her way out of the post office Monday morning. “We are, and we like it that way.”