The Burton branch of the US Postal Service (USPS) — ensconced in its present location in the Larsen Marina building since 1975, and a fixture in other locations since the establishment of the Quartermaster branch in 1890 — is set to close its doors at the end of April, according to USPS spokesman Ernst Swanson.
The branch is currently staffed from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. Monday through Friday and contains a bank of approximately 300 post offices boxes used for mail delivery to nearby residents.
In an email last week, Swanson provided scant details on the closure, only saying it would come soon.
“USPS has ‘lost’ the lease on the Burton Post Office and we must vacate by April 30,” he wrote. “We may move that operation temporarily to another nearby USPS facility while we work to find a more permanent location.”
Swanson did not respond to a follow-up email from The Beachcomber, asking more questions about the closure.
But Harry Larsen, who manages the property that is owned by a trust in the name of his late mother, Ellen Larsen, had earlier alerted The Beachcomber about the situation and had much more to say on the subject.
Larsen said that his family’s most recent lease with the post office had expired on Feb. 12, and negotiations for a new lease had broken down over a single issue — a stipulation in the lease that he give 24 hours notice prior to conducting maintenance on the property.
Larsen said he was unwilling to accept this requirement, as electrical panels for the building are located within the post office facility. Instead, he had proposed that he be able to enter the postal facility for this type of maintenance work whenever the post office was open and a postal employee was present.
These requests, he said, were denied by post office lease negotiators, who told him the stipulation regarding 24-hour notice was standard across their leases of all postal facilities, and an exception could not be made in the case of the Burton post office.
Larsen also denied there was any reason for the post office to vacate the building by April 30, as Swanson had stated was necessary, and shared email correspondence, dating back to November, from a representative of the leasing office of the USPS detailing this consideration.
In one of the emails, dated Nov. 17, Becky Adams, a USPS real estate specialist working in Denver, Colorado, told Larsen that because the USPS needed 18 to 24 months to relocate a post office, stipulations in his current lease allowed USPS to extend its use of the space, paying rent on a month-to-month basis, for up to 24 months until the post office could be relocated, in the event a new lease was not signed.
The email exchange also detailed Larsen’s frustrations that he had been denied access to the post office by Vashon’s then-current postmaster to carry out maintenance including repairing a cracked window.
In an interview on Friday, March 18, at the post office, Larsen also pointed out that the U.S. flag had not flown at the post office for about a year. A simple repair by a post office maintenance crew to fix a broken clip holding the flag had now become much more difficult, as flag pole halyard ropes to hold the flag had become unattached to the top of the flagpole.
The flagpole maintenance, he said, was the responsibility of USPS, which had generally neglected the Burton facility, to the point that he had been the one to even change light bulbs in the post office.
In regards to his reluctance to sign the lease, he said he was acting on principle.
“This is almost a protest, in a sense,” he said. “We don’t like being treated this way and we’d like to see the post office management be directed to clean up their act — and in this case, [we want] to be able to go in there to do maintenance.”
Larsen said he hoped Washington’s two U.S. senators would intervene and take action, in this case, to keep Burton’s post office open.
The terms of the unsigned new lease for the building, which Larsen shared with The Beachcomber, included an annual rent payment of $9,030, paid monthly in equal installments.
Larsen said that USPS’s last rent check had covered 12 days, for half the monthly amount due, leading him to believe the post office planned an imminent departure from the premises, though he had not been notified of their plans to leave.
A USPS employee working behind the counter at the Burton branch and the new acting postmaster of Vashon, David Milano, declined to comment on the situation.
A brief history of the mail on Vashon
According to local historian Bruce Haulman, Vashon’s main post office was established in 1883 and has continually operated ever since. Over the years, 16 post offices have operated in various island neighborhoods and towns, including Dockton, Portage, Chautauqua and Lisabuela.
But by the late 1970s, only the main post office and the Burton substation were left.
The Quartermaster/Burton branch was first established in Burton in 1890, in the Sherman house on the north shore of inner Quartermastmaster Harbor.
In 1892, the post office moved to a new store, operated by W.H. Clarke and Jason Whylie in the new Hatch building. In 1921, the post office moved to a new building, built by postmaster Augusta Hunt, on the east side of the highway south of the Burton Store. The building has been extensively remodeled and still stands, as a residence.
In 1975, the Burton post office became a substation of the Vashon Post Office, and in 1975, moved to its current location in the Larsen Marina building, which also houses eight apartment dwellings.
