PALM BEACH COUNTY, Fla. — People who live in a community west of Boynton Beach contacted WPTV after months of not receiving their mail due to a United States Postal Service key issue.
"When we bought in here, we knew there would be a delay in mail postage because there wasn't enough homes," Valencia Grand resident Missy Maio told WPTV. "But we were told [when there were] around 60 or 70 homes ... the mail would start being delivered."
Valencia Grand is a new development that currently has 200 households and will eventually consist of 600 homes.
Maio's neighbor, Lori Weintraub, contacted WPTV because six months after moving in, their mail service is still on hold due to an issue with the postal service keys that open their cluster mailboxes.
"They told me that they received new locks for the mailboxes, but the keys that they have don't fit the locks," Weintraub said. "That's the only information that I've gotten."
Weintraub gave WPTV a copy of that email that was sent Dec. 1. It was sent after she filed a complaint with the Boynton Beach postmaster.
"I wanted to get this situation resolved, not only for my husband and me, but for all of our neighbors who have been living with this for months on end," Weintraub said.
In the meantime, all of Valencia Grand's residents are having to go pick up their mail and some of their packages at the post office at Jog Road and Boynton Beach Boulevard.
"Sometimes we're there for up to a half hour or longer only to get to the counter, and if there's no mail, we've already waited," Weintraub said.
"I was told in two weeks that the mailboxes will be activated, then I was told another two weeks," Esther Bloom, another Valencia Grand homeowner, told WPTV. "From Christmas to New Year's, it was virtually impossible to get mail. They would tell us they don't have the mail. It got lost in transfer. There are any number of stories given."
WPTV contacted the USPS communications team on Tuesday to see if they could provide an update on the situation. In a statement, a spokesperson said "postal management has acquired new keys for installation to the cluster boxes by the end of this week."
"We traveled to Los Angeles this season and went without gifts to our grandson," Maio said. "We shipped them after, but they were all ordered in time, and it's just the sorting process because there's not that many people that work at the Boynton Beach location."
