Dan Horn Cincinnati Enquirer/USA TODAY NETWORK
On a cold December afternoon, standing next to the empty wood frame where his mailbox used to be, Chuck Klein tried to explain why he’s spent so much time the past few years sending emails to government officials, writing letters to a president and a congressman, working with a private investigator and a lawyer, and, finally, suing the U.S. Postal Service.
“This is where it was,” Klein said, motioning to a mailbox-sized hole in the frame. “This is where we want the box to be.” It's as simple as that, Klein said. He wants his mailbox back. But after years of arguing with the Postal Service, the seemingly minor bureaucratic dispute over the fate of Klein’s beige stainless steel mailbox has become something more. It is now, quite literally, a federal case that challenges the mission and obligations of an institution as old as the nation itself.
But after years of arguing with the Postal Service, the seemingly minor bureaucratic dispute over the fate of Klein’s beige stainless steel mailbox has become something more. It is now, quite literally, a federal case that challenges the mission and obligations of an institution as old as the nation itself. Klein didn’t set out to ask those questions, but his years-long campaign to win back his mailbox is raising them all the same.
In Klein’s view, none of this was necessary. For several years, the Postal Service delivered mail to his old mailbox on the edge his 130-acre property in Brown County, about and hour east of Cincinnati. If he received a package too big for the mailbox, the carrier brought it to his door. Then one day in 2017, the Postal service stopped doing both of those things.
Klein and is wife, Annette, now travel about three-quarters of a mile from their house on Hillman Ridge Road to a cluster of mailboxes in front of a neighbor’s house to collect their bills, letters and catalogs. If they get an oversized package, they drive 10 miles round trip to the post office in Georgetown, Ohio to claim it.
Klein, who is 82, the arrangement is a hassle he doesn’t need in retirement. He drives his Jeep to get the mail these days and plans delivery orders with the precision of a military operation, trying top break up orders so they arrive in smaller packages that fit in the mailbox rather than big packages that require a trip to town. “It doesn’t make any sense,” he said.
CHANGES IN RURAL DELIVERY MAY BE COMING
It does, however, make sense to the Postal Service, which is reconsidering what way it serves rural communities as part of a broader effort to improve efficiency and save money. The Postal Service views centralized delivery, like the cluster of boxes where Klein now gets his mail, as more practical than delivering to every home and farm in every far-flung corner of rural America. Postal officials also limit service on unpaved or narrow roads they deem unsafe for carriers, and earlier this year they said they may cut costs by slowing delivery to some of the 41 million homes and businesses they serve in rural areas.
In Klein’s case, a Postal Service spokeswoman said, the problem is the road. Hillman Ridge is a paved, but narrows to a width slightly larger than a pickup truck as it approaches Klein’s property.
A Postal Service safety specialist described Hillman Ridge as a potential hazard for mail carriers after surveying the road in 2017, a conclusion the Postal Service said led to the removal of Klein’s mailbox from his property. “I feel my carrier is being forced into an unsafe situation.” Georgetown’s then-Postmaster, Scott Compton, wrote in a 2018 letter to Klein. Klein doesn’t buy it. He noted that the lightly traveled road now has several spots where drivers can pull aside to allow another car to pass, and he said drivers from UPS, Federal Express and the company that delivers propane have no trouble navigating Hillman Ridge all the way to his house.
Klein’s lawsuit, filed last month by Cincinnati attorney, Rick Ganulin, argues that other Brown County residents get mail delivers to their property even though they live on roads more treacherous than Hillman Ridge. The suit claims the Postal Service’s refusal to deliver mail to the old mailbox location on Klein’s property line is “arbitrary and capricious.” Klein said he’s not seeking monetary damages and didn’t want to file as lawsuit. He just want his mail and packages delivered to his property again.
“The people I’ve had to deal with. They’re nice people,” Klein said of the many postal workers he’s exchanged calls and emails with over the years. “But boy. They just, in essence, said sue us.”
YEARS OF FIGHTING WITH NO RESOLUTION
Klein doesn’t consider himself a litigious person, but he is not afraid of litigation. More than two decades ago, Klein, a former police officer, sued elected officials in Ohio over the state’s ban on carrying concealed weapons. He ultimately lost that case in the Ohio Supreme Court, but he succeeded in drawing attention to the issue and, years later, Ohio lawmakers change the law.
Klein never has been shy about speaking his mind. He’s written columns for years for publicatons like the Cincinnati Enquirer and Gund & Ammo Magazine about the Second Amendment (he’s a fan), mainstream media (he’s not a fan) and a host of other topics that offend or embrace his mostly conservative worldview. “I’m a confronter. I confront things,” Klein said. “I’m not an appeaser.” But in a politically divided nations, Klein is something of an outlier. He counts liberals among his friends and said he’ll talk to anybody about anything, regardless of their politics.
Ganulin, his lawyers, met Klein when they were on opposite sides of the concealed carry lawsuit. After Klein and is wife moved from Cincinnati to their country home, which they’d owned for years but didn’t occupy full time until 2015, they invited Ganulin for a visit. Ganulin said Hillman Ridge Road seemed safe to him then, and still does. At the time, the remoteness of the location was a feature, not a problem. Klein liked being away from the city, and his grandkids visit often to fish the pond and explore the woods and creeks that run through the property.
The Postal Service previously had not delivered mail to the house, but Kleins’ request to deliver to the box on the edge of his land was granted in 2015. The arrangement seemed to work fine until late 2016, when, a now-former neighbor got into an argument with the mail carrier on Hillman Ridge Road, refusing to pull her car over to allow him to pass. She eventually did, but no one left the encounter happy. The neighbor claimed a tree branch scratched her car and the mail carrier later complained to is supervisor.
By late 2017, after some back and forth between Klein and the Postal Service, postal officials told Klein they were moving his mailbox back to the cluster boxes. Klein said he didn’t understand how a road that was safe for mail delivery for several years suddenly became unsafe. He traded emails with Postal Services officials and wrote letters to President Trump and U.S. Re. Brad Wenstrup to complain about the decision. He also hired a private investigator to poke around. Ina recorded phone conversation, Klein said, Georgetown’s postmaster told his investigator, who was posing as a potential buyer of hishouse, tha the “big fight” with the neighbor on the narrow road prompted him to act. To Klein, that means the road didn’t become less safe, it meant the Postal Service didn’t want to deal with the annoying neighbor.
THE STAKES MAY BE HIGHER THAN ONE MAN’S MAILBOX.
Ganulin said that’s not a good enough reason to move Klein’s mailbox. What’s more, he said, Hillman Ridge has been improved since 2017 and now includes more spots where drivers can pull off to allow other cars to pass. The neighbor moved away years ago. “Until the U.S. Postal Service provides us a policy or an analytic study, it appears arbitrary and capricious,” Ganulin said of the decision to move Klein’s mailbox. “The road is safer not than it was.”
While the lawsuit focuses on Klein’s dispute, it makes arguments that could, if accepted by a federal court, change the way Postal Services does business. Rural delivery always been a challenge for the Postal service, which has developed guidelines over years for how to balance its customers’ needs with the need to operate safely and efficiently. That’s where Klein’s lawsuit could lead to change. One of the arguments he makes revolves around the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision overturning the so-called “Chevron doctrine,” which allowed government agencies to make reasonable rules not explicitly spelled out in laws. Because of that ruling, the lawsuit claims, the Postal Service’s rules about rural mail delivery may no longer apply to rural residents like Klein. “Theroetically,” Ganulin said, “the issues Chuck raises are significant.”
So far the Postal Service is unmoved. “Our policy is to protect our employees, customers, and property by avoiding unsafe situations,” Postal Service spokeswoman Naddia Dhalai said in an email. “USPS identified safety concerns with the request for a mailbox placement on Hillman Ridge Road.”
In early December, after driving his Jeep to the cluster of mailboxes, Klein contemplated where all this might be heading. He said he’d happily drop his lawsuit if the Postal Service moved his mail box from its current location to the now empty wood fram on his property line. He knows the daily trek to collect his mail won’t get easier as he get older. “I’m 82,” he said, climbing back into the Jeep. We don’t walk up here.”
Klein said he was hoping to avoid filing a lawsuit as recently as October, when he got word the Postal Service had made a decision after reviewing his request a final time. He found out about the decision, which he later learned went against him, from a notice in his mailbox informing him that a certified letter from the Postal Service would explain everything. The letter didn’t come to his mailbox, though. He had to drive to the Post Office in Georgetown to get it.
Retyped and formatted from the 24 December 2024 print edition of the Cincinnati Enquirer.