Mail service complaints resurfacing

Lost mail, slow service cited Despite Residential Living's efforts to alleviate problems with campus mail delivery, complaints of lost and slow mail have surfaced once again. The most recent issue of ResNews, the Residential Living news bulletin, distributed to students living on campus Friday, contained a letter from Residential Living Director Gigi Simeone regarding recent mail problems. "Our department and the University Police are concerned about all reports of missing mail," Simeone's letter said. "We are working together to document and investigate problems." In March, a number of students living in the Quadrangle reported that they never received some mail that was sent to them. Residential Living received 350 complaints about Quad mail service that month. After investigating the complaints, the Department of Residential Living concluded there was no misconduct on the part of the Quad mailroom workers. Glass windows and cameras were installed in campus mailrooms to prevent future confusion. But, Simeone said yesterday, complaints continue to surface regarding the problem with "mail that never arrives on campus." "There have always been problems with University mail delivery," Simeone said last night. "I would say the most serious problems have been over the past few years." At the beginning of the month, representatives from University Police and Residential Living met to discuss the current mail delivery problems and to develop strategies for improving service, said Assistant Director for Residential Living Services Nancy McCue. "As of the meeting, we had 15 reports," McCue said. "And as of this Friday, we probably had another 20." While the current problem does not seem as extensive as last year's, Simeone said, it is possible that many people have just not reported mail loss to 573-DORM, the department's hotline. To more thoroughly assess the problem, representatives of University Police and Residential Living will hold three open meetings in the next week to collect student grievances and answer questions. The meetings will be held in McClelland Hall in the Quad, Stouffer Dining Commons and High Rise North. "We have heard that there are students [with complaints] who have not called," Simeone said. "It is our hope that they will be responsive if we come to them." McCue said complaints from last year as well as this year have come from all over campus, and procedural adjustments have been made campus-wide. "We have done everything on our end both administratively and from a security point of view," Simeone said. "Very few complaints could be linked to the mail rooms." Ware College House resident Jason Straus said he and other Ware residents are having problems with lost and slow mail. "I called [University] Police and [Director of Residential Services] Rodney Robinson and they both said to blame it on the [United States] postal services," the College junior said. But Straus said he is "happy" about the current effort to rectify the problem, even though it came over two weeks after his initial complaint. Neither Simeone nor McCue are sure what is causing the current problems, but Simeone said one clue is the amount of misdirected mail the University receives each day. "We have gotten as many as 50 letters in one day in the Quad alone intended for other parts of campus," Simeone said. "There is a suspicion that if we're getting that much misdirected mail, there are other people who are getting mail that is intended for us." And McCue said a post office at 9th and Market streets, used for mail with "any sort of errors" on the address, has been discovered as a possible resting place for missing student mail. "We found quite a bit of mail sitting there," she said. "Mostly magazines, but also some first class mail, and we didn't even know about the place for a while."

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