Customers lined up inside the small, wood-paneled Terrebonne Post Office on Jan. 4 as three postal workers rushed to help customers in an understaffed workspace.

Laurence Robbins, a resident of Crooked River Ranch, waited — his phone with a tracking number glowing in his hand — as they searched for a missing package. The post office said they’d delivered it, but Robbins said the package never made it to him.

This scene has played out on repeat over the last couple of weeks at both the Terrebonne and Redmond post offices as the organization scrambles to find solutions for a workforce shortage that has left residents without mail and packages, sometimes for more more than a week.

“I have had three packages disappear in three weeks,” Robbins said after his trip to the post office. “I have never had that happen there before.”

Dawn Emerson, a Terrebonne resident, said the problems at the post office caused her to not receive a check she was expecting in time for Christmas.

“It required us to move other money to compensate for that,” she said.

Emerson said she recognized that the holiday season can easily mess up post office schedules, but noted she didn’t receive any mail for more than a week. On Jan. 3, Emerson said she received a week’s worth of mail.

“It’s rare that mail stops being delivered,” Emerson said. “We think of that as something part of our life.”

Currently, there are four full-time and one part-time employees working in the Terrebonne post office. Spokesman reporting showed the site has roughly eight carrier jobs currently vacant.

Those vacancies, however, are at odds with the message from USPS.

“(The) Terrebonne Post Office is nearly fully staffed with carriers,” wrote Kim Frum, senior public relations representative of corporate communications for USPS, in an email. “There is one position in the process of being filled and we have the ability to hire one more carrier.”

On the ground, there are two carriers delivering five routes. Each route includes anywhere from 1,200 to 2,000 mailboxes. That means two carriers are responsible for delivering mail and packages for between 6,000 and 10,000 people six days a week.

Employees have clocked in substantial overtime trying to meet demand, but have been unable to keep up.

“They’re just so overwhelmed,” said Emerson. “I’m not complaining because everybody is in the same boat.”

Similar issues in Redmond

Glenda McCarn, a Redmond resident who lives near the Dry Canyon, said she had a package sent via U.S. Postal Service from Eugene and didn’t receive it for three weeks. The drive from Eugene to Redmond takes less than three hours.

David Fenech, another Redmond resident, said there are always problems with deliveries. His mom, he said, received at least a week’s worth of mail rubber-banded together and delivered one day by her carrier.

Debbie Christiansen, a Redmond resident who lives past Ridgeview High School, said she has only received mail once or twice a week since the beginning of December. Christiansen said the Redmond Spokesman — which currently uses USPS for delivery on Tuesdays — sometimes comes as late as Saturday.

“It’s very frustrating because I like to see the ads (in the paper),” Christiansen said. “I sometimes go into the back of the lot (of the post office) and there’s like four or five trucks sitting there right now because they don’t have enough workers.”

Multiple calls to the Redmond Post Office went unanswered during the course of this story.

According to Frum, the Redmond Post Office has 14 carrier openings. She added that they are using “every available resource at our disposal, including borrowing employees from facilities across the state to match the workload.”

Frum wrote that the average time to deliver mail and packages has remained at 2.5 days.

“It’s just a tough … job,” Christiansen said. “They can work 12-15 hours a day and they just get too frustrated and they quit.”

A wider issue

The situation only seems to be getting worse. According to the State of Oregon’s Employment Department, there was an average of 246 post office employees in Deschutes County in 2002. Although data is not available for every month in 2022, that number appeared to dip to roughly 180.

This means that the number of post office employees in Deschutes County decreased nearly 27 percent between 2002-2022 while the number of residents grew nearly 72 percent between 2000–2020.

According to the USPS career website, the stated hourly wage for new hire city carriers and rural carriers at the Redmond and Terrebonne post office is $19.33 and $19.94 an hour — about $40,000 per year.

“A postal job isn’t a career anymore,” Fenech said.

Frum said that their workforce, like others, is not immune to nationwide staffing challenges. The USPS posts openings on its website every other Tuesday until they are fully staffed, she said.

Tell us what you think of postal delivery in the area. Email reporter Nick Rosenberger at nrosenberger@redmondspokesman.com