Mayor Says US Postal Service Continues To Fail Lake Elsinore

The following opinion piece was written by Lake Elsinore Mayor Robert "Bob Magee.

LAKE ELSINORE, CA — For more than 40 years, the United States Postal Service has leased a small building on Graham Avenue in downtown Lake Elsinore. This site handles three Zip codes, Post Office boxes, and allows customers to visit the retail counter daily. Never designed for high volume, vehicular or pedestrian traffic, this facility reached its limit before the turn of the century.

In response to the increased demand, USPS repeatedly renewed and extended its existing lease and moved in an unpermitted, mobile office trailer to handle overflow mail — completely ignoring the service needs of the second-fastest growing city in Riverside County and in the State of California.

In 2003 when I first ran for office, the postal workers gave me a tour of the facility and urged me to support their efforts to build a new Post Office befitting of our community’s needs. Since then, I have consistently lobbied our congressional representatives as I watched Temecula, Murrieta, Wildomar and Canyon Lake all receive new and/or updated Post Office facilities while Lake Elsinore and its burgeoning population were passed by over and over again.

Finally, in 2018, the USPS reached out to Lake Elsinore and informed the City Council that we were in line for the next new Post Office. In fact, we were told it might be the only one built in California in the foreseeable future. Our Economic Development Team swung into action, and over several months many meetings were held, sites were visited, and an offer was ultimately made. The properties (one owned by the city and the other held by a private party) went into escrow in 2019 and the due diligence and design process began in earnest.

In October of 2019, representatives from USPS told us during a design meeting to “hurry up and pick out your name because we will be finished in 12 months!”

Then, suddenly, without warning in January 2020 (pre-pandemic) USPS canceled escrow without explanation. The next month our congressional representative was informed that plans had changed and a “new retail building” was being considered. It wasn’t until May of 2020 that our congressional representative received a formal response that the construction of a new building had been ruled “cost-prohibitive.”

Yet again, this month without warning a paper notice was taped to the front of the Lake Elsinore Post Office announcing they will be moving to a new location on Casino Drive. The “new” facility is a 35-year-old abandoned Sizzler building. The USPS will occupy half of this structure leaving the other half vacant. All this, of course, while using federal privilege to ignore our local codes and design standards while they do as they please to yet another leased facility.

This complete lack of respect for the people of our valley is reminiscent of what was done to us by a telephone provider back in the day. In the early 1990s, then-Mayor Gary Washburn famously tossed the new Yellow Pages from the City Council dais because it neglected to list Lake Elsinore on the front cover. His act of outrage worked and within weeks a new phone book was distributed throughout our valley.

While phone books are no longer in style, it’s time to send a message to the United States Postal Service. They cannot keep stepping over us. President Biden just received approval from the House for his Build Back Better Program and if approved by the Senate will send trillions of federal dollars out into the universe to improve infrastructure. Shouldn’t the second fastest-growing city in the 10th largest county in the biggest state in the union with an ethnically diverse, growing population warrant a new Post Office? Surely it can’t still be “cost-prohibitive.”

Rehabbing an old restaurant into a small retail service is not building back better. We deserve more!

Robert “Bob” Magee
Mayor, City of Lake Elsinore