Cheshire Neighborhood Approaches Two Years Without Home Mail Delivery

By Amanda Callahan, WFSB 3

CHESHIRE, CT — Residents of the Whispering Oaks development in Cheshire have gone nearly two years without mail delivered to their homes. They have to drive to the post office daily to pick up their mail while a dispute with the U.S. Postal Service continues.

The 20-home neighborhood was built by Lovely Development. Residents said they were initially told delivery would begin once the development reached 50% capacity, then 80%, and later that a cluster box unit at the end of the street would be required before any delivery could begin.

“This is like playing a football game where someone keeps moving the goal post further away and many months have passed it’s frustrating going to the post office every day,” said Jeffrey Smrek, a resident.

He and his wife moved to Whispering Oaks in 2024 and ordered a custom mailbox for their home. He added that some residents have been without home delivery for close to two years.

He said the daily post office trips are a burden on the neighborhood’s working families.

“All the families around here you can see from all the kids. They are young families, both the husband and the wife work,” he remarked. “They have to. They’re hard-working people that don’t have time to make trips to the post office.”

He said mail availability at the Cheshire post office is also limited by pickup windows.

“If they are having a good day it gets to the Cheshire post office by 11 o’clock, but that means you can’t pick the mail up before 11 o’clock, so that further crimps the time window that people have to go pick up the mail,” he added.

The same issue affected a Southington neighborhood also built by Lovely Development. Resident Pamela Daly said the community organized against the cluster box requirement.

“Every single person in this development was very upset about it. We had every single person at the time sign a petition in support of the curbside mail deliveries,” she said.

She added that the cluster box posed particular challenges for some residents.

“We have some elderly folks that live here. They get their medicine delivered to their mailboxes, so when inclement weather, it’s going to be difficult for them to access the CBU. We also have many young mothers with children and strollers,” she said.

After three failed appeals, Southington residents installed a cluster box unit at the top of their street.

The U.S. Postal Service said new delivery areas require centralized mailboxes to allow for more efficient and cost-effective mail delivery, as more than 1.5 million addresses are added to its delivery network each year.

However, residents said other new developments similar to theirs receive curbside delivery.

Developer Mark Lovely said he has not encountered this situation in more than 40 years in the industry. He also said that he was not notified of the cluster box requirement before designing the neighborhoods and he would’ve done it if he was.

“I reached out to all of the town planners that I do business with, all the town engineers that do business with, and other developers, and nobody was ever given notice that they were going to change to this type of system so that we could design for it,” Lovely said.

USPS says installing a cluster box at the end of Whispering Oaks Drive would allow mail delivery to begin.

Smrek said the proposed location is in a high-traffic area that serves as a school bus stop, with no safe place for residents to pull over to retrieve their mail. Residents intend to continue fighting the requirement.

This story is posted with permission from WFSB 3 TV. For video and more, visit WFSB 3 here.