‘We Did It, Bolinas!!!’ Remote Northern California town gets its post office back
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For more than two years, a big wooden sign in west Marin County has displayed a set of hand-painted numbers, dutifully changed each morning.
“Days Without a Bolinas Post Office,” the sign reads. The number Friday: 806.
The sign has been a charming, if sad, reminder to the 1,200 or so residents of Bolinas of the loss of their beloved post office, which was booted from its downtown building amid a spat between the U.S. Postal Service and its longtime landlord.
Late last month, though, Bolinas resident John Borg nailed a new message to the top of the sign — the wooden equivalent of a P.S. on a letter. It reads: “We Did It, Bolinas!!! New Post Office Opening by Fall 2025.”
The post office soon will move back into the unadorned wooden building on Brighton Avenue where it had operated for six decades.
The 1,500 citizens of Bolinas, ZIP Code 94924, lost their post office more than 15 months ago. They are fighting to get it back with their most cherished tool: creativity.
On April 17, the Postal Service signed a 10-year lease with landlord Gregg Welsh, of Ventura County, his attorney, Patrick Morris, said in an email.
For the rural denizens of ZIP Code 94924, the reopening is a major victory — especially given President Trump’s musings about privatizing the Postal Service, which lost $9.5 billion in the 2024 fiscal year and is cutting thousands of jobs.
“For this to be approved during the massive federal cutbacks of the Trump administration, it’s really somewhat astonishing for a lot of us,” said Borg, 63, who helped lead a citizens’ campaign to reopen the facility.
“I think the past two years gave our town a taste of what potential privatization of the Postal Service could mean for other underserved and rural places throughout the country,” he said. “That includes reduced retail operations, delays and inconvenience, increased prices ... [and] more focus on bigger communities that can deliver more profit.”
In Bolinas — a haven for poets, painters, writers and actors — residents got creative in their push to reopen the post office.
They picketed with placards reading, “Real Mail Not Email!” They marched in local parades dressed as letter carriers, composed songs and wrote more than 2,000 letters in hand-painted envelopes that they sent to Postal Service officials.
And they wrote scores of poems to be read at aloud rallies. Like this one, with emphasis by the author:
They’ve closed the Bolinas Post Office down
Forgetting our isolated, far away little town.
The elders need their pensions and checks
And wonder what on earth will be next.
Most people in Bolinas, a town abutting Point Reyes National Seashore, do not get home mail delivery. Residents long relied upon daily trips to the post office for parcels, pension checks and mail-order prescriptions, not to mention a chance to catch up on the local gossip.
Since the post office closed, their mail has been delivered to the smaller town of Olema — a 40-minute round-trip drive through the forest on Highway 1 — where the post office has repeatedly closed because of flooding. And sometimes it has been rerouted to nearby Stinson Beach.
The relocations have been more than just an inconvenience for the town’s elderly residents, many of whom cannot drive. There is little public transit, and 47% of the town’s residents are 65 and older. Residents have reported problems getting mail-order prescriptions, lab results, healthcare coverage updates, paychecks and other packages.
“It may seem like a little thing, but it really did impact our town greatly,” said Borg, 63, a type 1 diabetic who had his insulin delivered through the mail before the closure. For the last two years, he has driven two hours round-trip to San Rafael each month to pick up his medication at a pharmacy.
Rep. Jared Huffman, a San Rafael Democrat who lobbied former U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy on behalf of Bolinas, called it “great news” that the post office was reopening. But, he said in an interview Friday, the process took too long.
“They should not have had to experience all of this and to weather all of the bureaucracy and just bulls— that has prevented them from having a post office,” Huffman said.
The Bolinas post office shut down on March 3, 2023.
Welsh, whose family trust owns the building, acquired it about 50 years ago. The Postal Service already was a tenant. According to a statement provided last year by Welsh through his attorney, Patrick Morris, the Postal Service for years violated its lease, which required it to maintain and repair the flooring at its own expense.
The agency discovered asbestos in the floor tiles in 1998, according to the statement, but essentially kept it hidden from the landlord for more than two decades and did not post warning signs. Welsh and the Postal Service fought over who should pay for asbestos abatement and the repair of worn and broken floor tiles.
The Postal Service lease, according to Welsh’s statement, ended in January 2022, but USPS continued to occupy the building, sans lease, as a “tenant at sufferance.” In February 2023, Welsh demanded the post office vacate the building within a month.
Morris, the attorney, said in an email last week that, although the parties have signed a new lease, the Postal Service has not told Welsh when it expects to move back into the building.
Morris said that, although most of the flooring appears to have been replaced and “an asbestos clearance was provided,” the Postal Service has not provided his client details about the work.
Kristina Uppal, a Bay Area-based spokeswoman for USPS, told The Times in an email that she could not provide details about lease negotiations but that postal services are expected to resume in Bolinas “early fall 2025 after all necessary construction is completed.”
Delivery times for your mail and other packages could change as the United States Postal Service and UPS change their operations.
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 and that it had eliminated about 30,000 positions since 2021. The letter said he had signed an agreement with the General Services Administration and members of billionaire Elon Musk’s White House advisory group, the Department of Government Efficiency, to identify further cost savings.
DeJoy resigned March 24.
On Friday, the Postal Service’s Board of Governors announced its selection of David Steiner, a board member for FedEx, a direct USPS competitor, to be the next postmaster general. Critics, including the National Assn. of Letter Carriers, the union representing some 295,000 mail carriers, said they feared his selection would hasten privatization of the independent agency.
Huffman said that, during the fight over the Bolinas post office, he found the Postal Service — a onetime Cabinet-level department that has operated as an independent agency for half a century — to be unresponsive and, at times, “deeply unaccountable.”
But privatizing it, he said, “would make it even worse.”
Bolinas had had a post office since 1863.
After the post office closed, there was no viable commercial real estate in town to which it could be relocated. And a 1971 water meter moratorium — put into place because Bolinas has a limited water supply — has effectively prohibited new development for the last 54 years.
At one point, residents drafted a detailed proposal for a temporary facility — a mobile office trailer on a parking lot next to the fire station — and offered to raise $50,000 for its installation. They sent the plan to a supportive Huffman, who shipped it to DeJoy, to no avail.
Kent Khtikian, a 39-year Bolinas resident, said his friends’ and neighbors’ hopes for a new post office dimmed after Trump returned to the White House in part because they live in ultra-liberal Marin County, where 81% of voters cast their ballots for Kamala Harris in the November presidential election compared with 17% who chose Trump.
“It is certainly a relief to have the post office back,” said Khtikian, a retired attorney who helped with the citizens’ campaign. “While there are certainly much bigger problems in the world, it’s an example of what can be done by people not giving up and not being discouraged and believing in their ability to be effective.”
Enzo Resta, a longtime resident and founder of the Bolinas Film Festival, compared the Bolinas post office to an Italian piazza — a place of serendipitous run-ins and “the poetry of community engagement.”
“It’s quite beautiful to see all walks of life, all demographics, all age groups, all personal interests, all cultural interests be unified in coming together to say: This part of our community matters,” Resta said.
As of Friday, there’s a new hand-painted sign in town.
Affixed to the exterior wall of the still-closed post office, it reads: “Coming Fall 2025 Bolinas Post Office 94924. Hooray!”
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