EAST LYNNE, Mo. — Earlier this year, Jamie Hasenyager got into a car wreck while working as a mobile pet services provider. She was supposed to get a payout of $30,000, but her car title never showed up in the mail. Weeks passed. She waited.

Hasenyager finally went to her local DMV to figure out what was going on, and learned the title had been returned to sender. She eventually got the title after over two months, but she is still trying to replace her vehicle because the process was so delayed by the mailing mishap.

Hasenyager lives in East Lynne, a small Missouri town of almost 300 an hour south of Kansas City. She and many residents say they’ve been struggling to get their mail for years. Important mail like medication, checks and bills often take weeks to arrive or don’t arrive at all, they say.

The residents of East Lynne don’t have mailboxes. Instead, they have post office boxes. Roughly 1.3 million people have no-fee P.O. boxes across the country, according to a 2018 audit. No-fee P.O. boxes are offered to people who do not receive carrier delivery to their homes.

Even with free post office boxes, residents say getting their mail is still a struggle. Hasenyager’s title was returned because it had her address and not her P.O. box number on it, she said.

The East Lynne post office doesn’t have a regular staff member, and postal workers from a nearby town only come sporadically to sort mail into the P.O. boxes.

“We do not have a functional postal service out here,” Chad Vaughn, a resident, said. “It’s genuinely insane.”

Post office fire

Charlie Blalock, the mayor of East Lynne, said the city’s problems started after the house next door to the post office caught fire in 2023. The post office was damaged and had to be shut down for several months.

Blalock said the post office has been facing staffing issues since that, unable to keep a staff member for any extended period of time.

Hasenyager has lived in East Lynne for seven years, and she agreed that the fire started the problems.

“It wasn’t even, like, physical damage, it was just smoke damage. So we’re like, ‘What is the hold up for so long?’” Hasenyager said. “Then after that, that’s when it seemed like they could never really get a good staffing situation going on, and it’s been a problem ever since.”

Remote managed post office

Since 2012, East Lynne has had a remote managed post office. Its office has no postmaster, and the postmaster from Harrisonville, roughly 8 miles west of East Lynne, oversees the post office and is in charge of staffing it.

Sherry Grandberg, the postmaster from Harrisonville, declined to speak and told the Star to contact Tara Jarrett, a Missouri USPS media contact. In an email, Jarrett said the East Lynne post office hours are 12:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. on weekdays.

Residents, however, say a regular staff member is never there.

Jarrett did not respond to multiple further requests for comment.

Sharon Curtis, president of the Missouri Postal Workers Union, said the East Lynne office is supposed to be staffed by a postal support employee, who is a temporary non-career employee hired for roughly a year.

Curtis said the union has been having problems with the Harrisonville post office for years. She alleges the Harrisonville office is in violation of the union’s bargaining contract. Postal support employees cannot work in bigger offices, but Curtis said she believes a postal support employee from East Lynne is now working in the Harrisonville office.

The Harrisonville postmaster could open up a career position at the East Lynne office called a part-time flexible employee, but has not, according to Curtis.

She contends the Harrisonville office has had a lot of staffing issues, which have contributed to East Lynne’s problems.

“I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been there trying to staff it profitably,” Curtis told The Star.

Blalock told The Star he’s “not sure what’s going on with their employee retention, but it’s not, it’s not been good.”

‘They’re like ghosts’

Residents say staff from the Harrisonville post office do intermittently come to East Lynne to sort their mail, but they never know when they will be there.

Residents can always access their P.O. boxes because the post office’s front door is unlocked, but their mail is not regularly put in their boxes. The post office is marked as “temporarily closed” online.

Sally Rangel, a resident of East Lynne for a little over a year, said staff members spend as much time as they need to sort the mail that’s there and then they leave.

“No one’s over there ever,” Rangel said. “I mean, if you can catch somebody there, it’s like, they’re like ghosts.”

Residents said they use the city Facebook group to see when the post office is open.

“People literally just post every day,” Hasenyager said. “They’re like, ‘has anyone seen anyone around the post office? Or does anyone know if anyone’s going to be around the post office today?’”

Hasenyager said it is especially hard for her as a business owner who gets important mail delivered. Rangel, a real estate appraiser, said she ended up getting a post office box 35 minutes away in Lee’s Summit for checks from her clients because she couldn’t trust the East Lynne services.

Hasenyager said she’s had packages delivered and sitting in the post office for over a week before she actually sees them. Even when their mail is sorted, residents don’t always get the right mail. Both Hasenyager and Rangel said their mail has been misplaced and they’ve gotten the wrong mail.

“We constantly get stuff of other people’s in our mail,” Hasenyager said. “Even when someone is there, I think, because they’re not there often enough to, you know, recognize the numbers and the names and stuff, it just gets put in the wrong place and misplaced.”

Many residents have repeatedly gone to the Harrisonville post office to complain, but they said nothing has changed.

Earlier this week, a notice was posted on the East Lynne post office’s door. It said that starting Thursday, all mail must be addressed to a P.O. Box number and not a street address. It said that mail with only physical addresses would be sent back to the sender.

The notice said the office was making this change because not all staff members know whose address goes with which P.O. Box.

Vaughn said this new policy just makes it more difficult for residents to get their mail.

“I’m not sure what they want us to do,” Vaughn said. “Not every company will deliver to a post office box.”

Rangel said that when you’re having something delivered, “a lot of the programs won’t allow you to put a P.O. box in.”

Many residents of East Lynne said they just want regular mail service again.

“We would just like to get our mail, you know, and someone decent out here at the post office,” said Sue James, a lifelong resident of East Lynne.

Federal USPS changes

Rural communities have been at the center of discussions about USPS changes on the federal level.

One of these discussions is privatization. President Donald Trump has been discussing the privatization of USPS since his first term, stating in December that it is not the worst idea he’s ever heard. David Steiner, who became the postmaster general earlier this month, said in a video he does not believe the postal service should be privatized.

A 2018 report from the Task Force on the United States Postal System, created by Trump, found that the USPS’s delivery network to every address cannot be replicated by private actors.

The American Postal Workers Union and National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association have protested the privatization of USPS, with the NRLCA stating that privatization would harm rural communities because rural mail routes that don’t make a profit would be cut.

“I may drive 10 miles and serve three boxes, where, if you’re in the city, you drive 10 miles, you can serve 700 boxes,” Joan Carroll, president of the Missouri Rural Letter Carriers’ Association, told The Star. “So they will cherry pick what’s profitable and just leave the rest.”

USPS’s Delivering for America mail service plan, launched by former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy in 2021 to improve its finances and services, has also been criticized for harming rural communities.

The Postal Regulatory Commission, which provides oversight on USPS, concluded in a 2025 report that rural communities will experience disproportionate downgrading of service standards under the new plan.

The USPS responded and called the commission’s discussion of rural impacts “one-sided and misleading.”

One part of the Delivering for America plan is called “Regional Transportation Optimization.” This plan, which was implemented in April, eliminated end-of-day mail collection. Mail is now collected in the morning at the same time that it is delivered.

The Postal Regulatory Commission concluded in January that this change would have disproportionate affects on rural areas because they would experience more mail slowdowns and downgraded service.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) also criticized Regional Transportation Optimization, stating in a press release that it would have “significant negative impacts on rural communities throughout the United States.” He introduced the No Regional Transportation Optimization Act in May.

Vaughn, a resident of East Lynne, said he’s emailed Hawley about the problems his city has been facing.

Reps. Sam Graves (R-MO), Emanuel Cleaver, II (D-MO), and Mark Alford (R-MO) also introduced the bipartisan Pony Up Act in January, which criticizes the Delivering for America plan and requires USPS to pay fees from bills that are late due to delayed delivery service.

Mayor Blalock of East Lynne hopes his post office doesn’t shut down amid all the challenges it’s facing.

“Last thing we want to have happen is for the post office to close, because that usually is a death sentence for a community,” Blalock said. “Everything’s always a possibility when people are looking at trying to save money.”

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