Trabuco Folks Do Battle With Postal Officials

Vases full of fresh-cut yellow roses decorated the stamp counter. And in the lobby, not far from the wanted posters, were collages from Trabuco Elementary School.

“This is a real small post office,” Trabuco Canyon Postmaster Clara Sears was saying Wednesday morning. “We really care about each other.”

Sears, 64, is responsible for the homey touches. She has been Trabuco Canyon’s postmaster for seven years--first in a cubbyhole at the Trabuco General Store, and for the last three years managing a 4,000-square-foot post office.

All the Carriers Transferred

But this gracious, white-haired lady is at the center of an unlikely controversy that has pitted canyon residents against top officials of the U.S. Postal Service in Santa Ana.

In March, while Sears was on vacation, postal officials transferred all four of the mail carriers out of the Trabuco post office and assigned them to sort and deliver backcountry mail from a larger post office in San Juan Capistrano, about 20 miles away.

The move was designed to “improve operational efficiencies and service to our customers,” said Santa Ana Division Postmaster Hector G. Godinez in a March 23 letter to Trabuco residents.

Many of the people in the five rural communities that Sears’ post office had served--Trabuco, Rancho Santa Margarita, Robinson Ranch, Portola Hills and Coto de Caza--expressed outrage over the loss of their carriers.

Overnight, the quality of their rural mail service deteriorated, they complained angrily in letters to Godinez and in a formal petition that is still being circulated. Local mail that used to take a day to arrive now takes from two to five days, they claim.

They also called the decision a blow to the identity of their fast-developing area because the post office under Clara Sears has been a central part of their close-knit, rural community.

Further, many residents said, they were deeply concerned that Godinez’s move was a thinly veiled effort to force Sears into retirement--or even to fire her.

Sears on Wednesday said that she could not comment on the changes. Later Wednesday, after a reporter’s inquiry, Godinez said his office may have made “a mistake,” and he would be moving two of the carriers back to Trabuco early next week.

Godinez denied that he wanted to get rid of Sears. “She was given a good merit raise,” he said. “She is free to stay. It’s a nice little job that many people would love, and we commend her for it.”

He also denied that any mail, other than some newspapers, had been delayed by moving the carriers to San Juan Capistrano. “It was not delayed. There was not more than a foot of mail delayed and some Wall Street Journals delayed,” Godinez declared.

For all its rustic charm, Sears’ post office, whether in the general store or in the new post office building, had always been efficient, Coto de Caza resident Betsy Jordan said recently. She and other residents said they had counted on next-day delivery for local mail--and personal service to boot, with Sears sometimes calling them at home to report that a package had arrived.

Longer Time Claimed

But since March, Jordan said, mail to her son in Santa Monica that used to arrive the next day is being routed through San Juan Capistrano and “is now taking five and six days.”

Jordan, who wrote to several congressmen to complain about the decision to move the carriers, called the situation “absurd. She (Sears) has a wonderful new building. She had good carriers who enjoyed working there. It’s absurd that the mail sorting would take place in San Juan and not here.”

M.J. Carey, administrator of the Coto de Caza Community Assn., noted that Sears’ 3-year-old building, leased for about $4,000 a month, is now virtually “empty with just two people (Sears and a clerk) down there.”

Carey recently organized the petition drive demanding the return of Trabuco’s four mail carriers. She said she expects to turn in several hundred signatures to Godinez, probably by the end of the week. Told that Godinez now plans to return two of the four carriers to Trabuco, Carey said: “That sounds great to me. But I’m still going to collect my petitions.”

She called the controversy over the Trabuco post office a matter of community pride. “We want our own identity. And that’s exactly what they’re doing, taking our identity away (by moving the carriers),” she said.

A Longtime Goal

Sears is a 20-year postal employee who said Wednesday that her longtime goal has been to manage a small post office. She commutes daily up the winding road to Trabuco from her home in Costa Mesa. During the years when the postal service required a postmaster to live in the community where he or she worked, Sears said she rented a small trailer in Trabuco.

Though her post office dispenses stamps, mails packages and maintains rented boxes like other post offices around the country, Sears has managed to place her own flavor on the facility. In addition to children’s art, the lobby sports a wall of historic Trabuco photographs; they include pictures of an old tin mine, the last grizzly bear killed in Trabuco, and a contemporary picture of Leo Jump, one of Trabuco’s first firefighters. Sears said she regularly leads tours of schoolchildren through the post office, showing off her “mini museum” and instructing them in how to buy and collect stamps.

Sears offered little comment about the management changes, saying she would not want to damage her career. Told that she would probably be getting two of her four carriers back, she said hesitantly: “I don’t know what the people want. There were a lot of unhappy people. But it’s what they want.”

Godinez said the four carriers were moved out of Sears’ office to San Juan Capistrano because the postmaster there had significantly more experience than Sears in managing high-volume mail delivery. And he said the Trabuco Canyon post office was initially planned as a mail box and retail facility and not for deliveries. Godinez did not explain exactly how and why Sears began delivering mail out of Trabuco Canyon, nor would he explain in detail the reasoning behind removing all four of her carriers.

Cites ‘Management Failure’

He did say, however, “They were taken out for management failure.” He also noted, that for reasons still unclear, delivery service to 200 homes in the Robinson Ranch area that was served by Sears’ post office began without necessary approvals from his district office in San Bruno.

In any event, Godinez said Wednesday, he has now decided to return to Sears two carriers to serve about 1,000 customers in an area that includes Trabuco Canyon, Portola Hills, Coto de Caza and Robinson Ranch.

However, the fast-growing Rancho Santa Margarita subdivision, with about 1,500 homes so far, will continue to be served by the San Juan Capistrano office until the area gets its own post office, Godinez said.

He added that moving the carriers “was not a vindictive or punitive move by any circumstances. This was a simple, day-to-day management decision. We move routes in various facilities, and all the customers don’t know all the facts.”

But Godinez said he appreciated the community support for Sears. “She’s a fine lady . . . we want our postmasters to be loved, and we want them to love the customers. Our business depends on one thing--as long as the taxpayer is satisfied.”