After more than two years of mail delays, makeshift service, and community outcry, the isolated community of Bolinas in West Marin is getting its post office back — a major step toward restoring normalcy to the tiny coastal town.
On Thursday, the U.S. Postal Service signed a 10-year lease with landlord Gregg Welsh to return to its original location, according to Welsh’s lawyer Patrick Morris.
The post office could move in as soon as August, pending the construction timeline, according to John Borg, a Bolinas resident who has led the initiative to restore USPS service. The lease marks what many hope will be the end of a contentious dispute that had thrown the town into chaos.
“It’s been such an epic timeline, so many slings and arrows and bureaucratic delays and mistakes — the USPS is a beleaguered agency,” Borg said. “I feel like we’ve climbed Mount Everest to get here, and along the way, we hit snowstorms and dangerous crevasses and all these things that could sabotage everything, but we somehow made it.”
The saga began in 1998, when Welsh allegedly discovered shoddy construction work by the USPS. The Bolinas Post Office had been a fixture on Brighton Avenue for 62 years before a dispute with Welsh sparked a contentious lease termination in February 2023. After a grassroots campaign to revitalize the property’s second building, which was partially destroyed in a 2020 fire, Welsh announced that the USPS had lost its lease after failing to address asbestos-laden tiles in the building’s floor, which it had installed 40 years earlier.
The tiles have since been removed by the USPS, and two environmental firms have cleared the space of asbestos.
Since its exile, the Bolinas Post Office has operated out of trailers and post offices around rural West Marin, creating complications for the largely elderly population it serves, as well as people without vehicles. Bolinas residents have had to travel up to 30 minutes by car on routes with no public transit in order to get their mail.
The post offices in neighboring towns like Olema, Stinson Beach, and Point Reyes Station have been dealing with their own troubles, including flooding, power outages, and even a car barreling through a window, and weren’t able to handle taking over Bolinas’ mail.
In a 2023 Bolinas community survey, 88% of respondents said they visited the post office at least three times a week, and 60% said they relied on the post office to receive prescription medications.
The community of Bolinas — an unincorporated town with no mayor or city council — has rallied in numerous meetings and town halls with local and state politicians to find a solution. Local architects worked with communications experts and designers to create proposals that the USPS repeatedly rejected, leaving locals feeling alienated.
“Our former postmaster and district-level postal service officials have been ineffective to work with during this ‘temporary closure,’ even with our extensive good-faith public engagement,” said Borg.