For three years, the town of Crested Butte has labored to find a new place for its overwhelmed U.S. post office. The town bought a parcel and began negotiating with builders, offering plans that involved the town either leasing the land to the Postal Service so it could build its own facility, the town building a new $12 million post office and leasing that to the service or even selling the land outright to the Postal Service.
“We drafted a cost-sharing agreement with the Postal Service and they told us a year ago, ‘We can’t do this,’ and then we have heard nothing from them since. Every plan we offer, we do not hear anything back. They are silent and nonresponsive,” said Dara MacDonald, the town manager of Crested Butte. “So we are stuck. We can’t really plan anything.”
The long-term lease for Crested Butte’s 3,300-square-foot post office on Elk Avenue expires in February 2026 and it’s unclear what will happen when the facility closes. It’s too late to build a new post office and have it ready in less than a year. It’s hard to fathom the estimated 4,000 residents in the north end of the Gunnison Valley traveling 30 to 40 miles to Gunnison for their mail.
“The Gunnison facility cannot handle this. They do not have the space or staff to add this volume,” MacDonald said.
Last month, Colorado’s U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper joined U.S. Rep. Jeff Hurd in sending a letter to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy pleading for the Postal Service to make a decision and speak with the communities of Crested Butte and Mount Crested Butte.
“Closing this post office would be catastrophic since this area does not receive any home delivery,” reads the letter from members of the state’s D.C. delegation to the postmaster who quit the Postal Service last month.
That letter — one of several over the years from Bennet urging the Postal Service to better rural protect mail delivery in Colorado — followed increasingly desperate missives from Gunnison County’s commissioners and councils in Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte, asking the Postal Service to reveal its intentions for the Crested Butte post office.
“With the USPS publicly signaling its intent to move out of the existing facilities three years ago, but demonstrating no meaningful progress in a replacement plan, we are seeing growing anxiety about how the USPS will maintain critical services,” reads a January letter from the mayor of Crested Butte to regional Postal Service managers.
The Postal Service in 2022 announced the lease was expiring in downtown Crested Butte and the agency was launching a search for a parcel that could accommodate a new 11,300-square-foot post office with parking. The service said it would begin looking to acquire a new parcel near the Crested Butte post office.
The Sun reached out to the Durango family that owns the post office building but was unable to reach them. MacDonald said she spoke with the property owner several years ago and he recognized that the property was underutilized as a post office but the agency was a good tenant. Still, the owner declined to renew the lease beyond February 2026.
A USPS spokesperson said it “has been working diligently to evaluate every option for establishing an alternate post office in Crested Butte.” That effort includes repurposing existing commercial buildings and buying undeveloped land in the valley.
“Despite this extensive exploration, each candidate site has presented significant challenges that prevent it from meeting the rigorous space, design, and operational requirements necessary to serve the community effectively,” Postal Service spokesman James Boxrud said in an emailed statement.
The scramble in Crested Butte reflects a growing frustration around mountain town post offices. Since the pandemic meltdown piled packages on understaffed and overrun rural post offices, mountain town residents have been enduring mail delays and long lines for packages in communities where the Postal Service does not deliver mail to homes. The tsunami of Amazon ordering has overwhelmed rural post offices across the state.
The post office in Colorado City closed for more than a month in 2023, Buena Vista residents in 2022 forced the Postal Service to stop charging for P.O. Boxes and Postal Service managers in Colorado called on employees in other states to help with mail delivery in the state.
Crested Butte in 2023 recruited the support of a half-dozen other mountain communities in a possible lawsuit to force the Postal Service to improve rural service.
Mail delivery in Crested Butte “has absolutely improved” since the town threatened to sue, MacDonald said, with the USPS now delivering packages to residences in town, eliminating the dreaded yellow-slip wait for parcels at the post office.
“They were responsive when we were pondering litigation and that got all sorts of media attention,” she said.
The 2022 Postal Service Reform Act promised an overhaul of the services finances and performance as part of a 10-year “Delivering for America” plan to reduce costs and streamline operations. Last month the Postal Service — which is self-financed and relies on the sale of postage and other services to fund delivery to 169 million U.S. addresses — unveiled new measures that could save $36 billion in transportation, mail processing “and real estate costs” over the next 10 years.
Crested Butte Mayor Ian Billick went to Washington, D.C., this year and raised his hometown’s postal issues with elected leaders. The visit resulted in the latest letter from the D.C. delegation to the now-gone postmaster.
“They are supportive but there’s a limit to what they are capable of influencing with an independent federal agency,” Billick said. “I mean we are not at a point today where we are seeing the federal government expand services for citizens, right?”
Crested Butte paid $2.3 million for a parcel on the northern end of town in 2022 and the Postal Service in 2023 asked the town to consider a partnership that would develop a new post office on the parcel. The parcel could accommodate an 8,000-square-foot facility at a construction cost of $6.6 million or $12.2 million if the building included three deed-restricted residential units.
As the town negotiated with developers and the Postal Service, the agency in October 2023 told the town it could not enter into a pre-construction partnership that would guarantee funding for the project. The town sent nearly monthly emails to the Postal Service last year and the service’s representatives said the agency was adjusting its planning requirements for a new facility to fit the smaller site.
Boxrud said the parcel offered by the town of Crested Butte “initially appeared promising” but was ultimately deemed too small to handle the growing demands for a new facility.
“This setback underscored the complexity of finding a location that not only meets immediate needs but is also adaptable to future service requirements,” Boxrud said. “USPS representatives continue to navigate issues such as zoning restrictions, infrastructure limitations, land availability, and long-term sustainability.”