Residents of some Southeast D.C. neighborhoods say they’ve dealt with poor mail service for years–even before the U.S. Postal Service’s pandemic woes.

“I am a part of an organization, and there was a vote coming up. I totally missed the vote because I didn’t get my mail until two weeks after the vote was supposed to happen,” says Sheila Bunn, a Bellevue resident who added that she had to pay late fees on some of her bills due to the delays. (Bunn is the chief of staff to Ward 7 Councilmember Vincent Gray.)

While operational changes to the US Postal Service under the Trump administration caused national mail delays, residents of Bellevue and Far Southwest neighborhoods say their concerns about delayed, missing, and mishandled mail have been going on much longer. It’s not uncommon for the mail to be delivered just once or twice a week in some neighborhoods, residents say.

“This is nothing new. We always have talked about this, and this happened before all that Trump stuff. We’ve always had these issues,” says Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Monique Diop, who represents the Bellevue and Far Southwest neighborhoods in district 8D. “I’ve lived here for six years, and I’m going to say maybe about four years ago it started getting really bad.”

The list of concerns are long, including bills arriving late and stimulus checks delivered to the wrong addresses. There are also reports of USPS staff allegedly dumping mail at apartment buildings for residents to sort. Business owners say they worry about lost packages no one seems to be able to track.

D.C. Postmaster Eddie Masangcay did not respond to DCist/WAMU’s request for comment about irregular mail service and other concerns.

One Bellevue resident, 53-year-old Charlene Battle, says that the mail handler comes once a week and doesn’t sort the mail. Instead, she says the carrier leaves three USPS bins of mail to be sorted by the 50 residents in the building, who are mainly seniors. What is delivered is also often misdirected, Battle says – it’s not uncommon for Battle to find mail delivered to her building at 20 Chesapeake Street SE that belongs to someone at 20 Chesapeake SW.

“I had to take someone’s stimulus check to them,” she says. “Anybody can just pick it up, try to sign off on it and take someone’s check.”

Battle says that mail problems have been “terrible” since 2019, when her handler changed.

But the concerns don’t end there. Wait times at the local post office — 400 Southern Ave. SE — are so long that some residents bring folding chairs, says Diop, who adds that a couple of weeks ago she waited 47 minutes in line to receive just one package. It’s not unusual for there to be just one postal staff member working at the site, she says.

Back in 2019, Diop says, USPS staff came to an ANC 8D meeting to address residents’ mail concerns. “Nothing has changed,” Diop says.

Diop decided to escalate her concerns to D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D). Norton attended an ANC 8D meeting on April 22 specifically to discuss mail issues, and requested Masangcay  attend as well.

During the meeting, Norton said that part of the issue is USPS’s leadership.

“We still have Donald Trump’s Postmaster General [Louis DeJoy],” said Norton during the meeting. “We’re trying to change the composition of the Postmaster’s forum, so that we can get progress here in this town.” Democrats in Congress have been trying to oust DeJoy.

Congresswoman Norton did not respond to DCist’s request for further comment about other specific concerns with the post office.

Masangcay says part of the issue is that residents aren’t filing formal complaints.

“I’m not saying it’s zero complaints. But, [complaints] have decreased,” he said during the meeting. “[During] February and March, there were a lot of issues that have since declined.”

Bunn says that she didn’t make a formal complaint, but she did reach out to Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White about a recent incident, and he alerted Congresswoman Norton. (Bunn was formerly Norton’s chief of staff.)

“The mailmen wear street clothes, so the only way we know [that] they’re mailmen is because they’re in the USPS truck,” Bunn told DCist. “But once there was a black SUV behind the truck, two to three people got out and were helping with deliveries.”

(Councilmember Trayon White did not immediately respond to DCist’s request for comment.)

Diop says that some residents do complain to each other instead of making an official complaint. “Even when I was standing in [the post office] line, I said ‘There’s no reason for us to be complaining among ourselves if they don’t hear it,’” says Diop.

When residents shared complaints on the call, Mascangcay promised to tour the Southern Ave. post office the next day. (Diop says that she’s called and emailed Masangcay to ask about his findings but has not heard back from him.)

In Northeast D.C., residents recently faced similar issues which were resolved after persistent complaints.

A majority of Carver/Langston and Trinidad residents didn’t receive any first-class mail from March 22 to April 26, says Latoya Moore, ANC 5D Commissioner. After months of asking staff at her local post office for answers and seeing no change, she decided to go to the Washington Post, WTOP, and the Washington Times to spotlight concerns.

“It worked, because the DC Postmaster General reached out to me at 8:30 a.m. in the morning, and he assured me that … our issue would be resolved,” says Moore. “We have a new dedicated carrier [as of] Monday April 26, and he’s assigned to our neighborhood indefinitely because he’s one of the top mail carriers.”

Some residents began receiving mail dating back to November, she says. “People were just astonished, surprised, and excited that they were getting the bulk of mail that they were receiving,” says Moore.

She suggests that Southeast ANC commissioners and residents continue to speak up about the issue.

“If you sit back and let this ride, it won’t get any better,” she says. “You have to let them know that you will fight for your mail.”

That’s what ANC 8D commissioners are now encouraging residents to do.

Diop says that residents have to continue to make formal complaints to USPS. “I think people need to complain. The squeaky wheel gets the oil,” says Diop.

Norton, meanwhile, says that her office has asked Masangcay’s office for a written response by April 30 about problems and corrections regarding mail delivery in DC.

“I think that the postal service needs to do an internal audit of all of its systems to see where the problems are and come up with a strategic solution for those problems,” says Bunn.