Calabasas Residents Stamp Out Woodland Hills ZIP : Mail: The post office has agreed to remove the Mulwood area from the neighboring zone to eliminate confusion.

If all goes as planned, some Calabasas residents who traditionally have put a Woodland Hills return address and ZIP code on their mail will receive their Christmas cards at a Calabasas address and ZIP.

U. S. Postal Service officials have laid the groundwork to rearrange ZIP code boundaries within the 5-month-old city to include a Calabasas neighborhood that the post office has called Woodland Hills for 25 years. If the residents vote approval, the change would affect roughly 1,000 addresses.

Mail to the neighborhood--known as Mulwood--now must be addressed to Woodland Hills 91364 instead of Calabasas 91302. Since Calabasas incorporated in March, Mulwood has been within the city limits and residents have complained that the discrepancy in community names caused confusion and left them feeling estranged from the community.

“We voted for a city, and we are a city, and we should be able to be called by the name of our city,” said Councilman Marvin Lopata, who lives in the area, which is south of the Los Angeles city limits roughly between Bon Homme Road and Summit to Summit Motorway.

Just weeks after voters overwhelmingly approved forming the new city, Lopata and other Mulwood residents--including two other City Council members--began lobbying the Postal Service to change the area’s postal designation.

After analyzing the costs involved, postal officials agreed to make the change.

In a letter to interim City Manager Ed Kreins, San Fernando Valley Postmaster William G. Jackson said the change will be made after residents in the area are surveyed.

If a majority support the change, it could be implemented by Christmas, said Rich Younce, director of postal operations for the Valley.

The survey will be mailed as soon as the post office and city officials agree on how many residences will be affected by the change, Younce said. Lopata said there are 920 residences in the area, but postal officials count 1,106.

Younce said the change was approved because it could be done relatively cheaply--at a onetime cost of $70,000 to $80,000--and would require no additional carriers.

He said that most mail in Calabasas already is delivered by carriers based in Woodland Hills, and that only a few routes would need to be reorganized.