PALMDALE, Fla — Back in December, the Palmdale post office shut down over safety issues. Now, nine months later, the building is up for sale and people still can’t get mail there.
Fox 4’s Hendry County Community Correspondent Austin Schargorodski works in these rural communities daily - that’s why a business owner called him saying the problem still isn’t fixed. Instead, people are still making a 40-minute round trip to LaBelle for mail.
Watch to hear what problems people have been facing with the closure, and the solutions they're still asking for:
Right off Highway 27, Gatorama has been in Palmdale since 1957. It’s one of Florida’s oldest roadside attractions and is home to alligators and crocodiles. But owner Patty Register says running the zoo means relying on shipments through the post office.
“If I want to use someone other than Amazon, like Etsy – like for animal enrichment items we use that a lot – they use the post office,” Register said.
Register says that’s meant daily trips to LaBelle for packages, and the system has been a mess. She says packages are sometimes marked as delivered but never show up. And even when the mail is ready, she says the pickup window is so limited that many people can’t get there in time.
“It’s, frankly, a crapshoot,” Register said.
Getting to LaBelle means taking State Road 29 - a two-lane highway packed with dump trucks.
Brooke Livingood says it forces her to relive a trauma every time she drives it.
“My family was in an accident July of 2018 where I lost two children in that car accident on 29. So I don’t like that road, I don’t like to drive down it,” Livingood said.
Locals are still pushing for solutions, like a rural delivery route or even a cluster of P.O. boxes in town. So, Schargorodski reached out to the LaBelle postmaster for updates.
USPS said, “At this time, there is no firm timeline for resumption of services at Palmdale, but the goal is to do so as quickly as possible. We appreciate the patience of our valued customers and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”
“It is shockingly poor planning and poor management,” Register said. “There’s rural routes across America. What makes Palmdale so different that we can’t have a rural route?"
