‘They don’t belong in our hands’ : Post Office Petitions Go Undelivered

Umbrellas couldn’t ward off the controversy that rained down Monday on a campaign for a new post office in Tarzana.

Homeowners gathered in a driving rainstorm outside the community’s tiny 25-year-old post office to submit a 5,000-signature petition demanding that a $3-million replacement facility be built quickly.

The problem was, nobody wanted to accept the stacks of signatures gathered by the Tarzana Property Owners Assn.

Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Tarzana) said the petitions should go to the U. S. Postal Service, which purchased 14 lots in a nearby neighborhood as the site for the new post office before canceling the project two months ago.

Postal officials said the petitions should go to Beilenson, who voted for the $1.2-billion Postal Service spending cutback, imposed two months ago, that caused the cancellation.

Tarzana residents anxious for the petitions to end up in the right hands were caught in the middle of the standoff. So were Tarzana postal patrons trying to get out of a rainstorm and into the post office during Monday’s petition ceremony.

The ceremony added to the congestion in the post office’s 10-car parking lot. And the entrance to the post office on Clark Street was partially blocked by people driven beneath an overhang by the pelting rain.

“We started the petition drive to keep the issue in the forefront,” said Joel Palmer, president of the homeowner group. “There were private developers literally hovering around the new site after they announced the post office project was canceled.”

Homeowner activist Louise Frankel said the delay is frustrating because residents took the unusual step of helping secure the commercial zoning needed for the post office at the 14-home site.

“A larger post office is not just an ego trip for Tarzana,” Frankel said. “The facility we have now is dangerous, unsafe.”

Beilenson and the others tried without success to persuade Ralph Tapia, Tarzana’s acting postmaster, to accept the petitions, which were mailed in February to 12,000 Tarzana homes.

Tapia examined one but quickly put it down. “We’ve already completed the delivery of these,” he said.

Beilenson vowed to track down Tapia’s bosses and give the petitions to them.

“I’ll go back to my office and call them and tell them I’m mailing the petitions to them from their inadequate facility,” the congressman said.

Said Los Angeles City Councilman Marvin Braude, who also attended the ceremony: “We’re going to take these and give them to the post office officials. We’ll find them.”

Late Monday, the soggy petitions remained in plastic bags in the trunk of a Beilenson staff car.

“They don’t belong in our hands,” said John Conti, a spokesman for the Postal Service’s regional office in Van Nuys.

San Fernando Valley Postmaster William Jackson said postal officials remain strongly committed to the eventual construction of a 21,357-square-foot building that will be four times the size of the existing Tarzana facility.

Postal officials have fenced off 14 vacant homes at the project site, but the Beilenson-supported legislation “prevents expenditure of funds” for new post office construction there, Jackson said.

Beilenson aide Joyce Emerson said the petitions probably would be sent to postal officials in Washington because “it wouldn’t do a lot of good to send them locally. . . .”

She said Beilenson voted for the post office cutbacks because of his concern for the federal budget deficit. “He knows his district has to share in some of the sacrifice. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t share in the community’s concern,” Emerson said.

Monday’s ceremony had started out as a way of thanking postal officials for keeping the Tarzana facility a top priority, she said.

“If the Postal Service wants to sit there and punish the congressman because he voted for it, that’s their prerogative. They’re hard people to be nice to,” Emerson said.