Improving Community Zip Codes

Floor Speech

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Mr. COURTNEY. Mr. Speaker, this week we are going to be taking up legislation on H.R. 672, an act to establish new ZIP Codes for certain communities.

This measure is aimed at fixing problems in about eight communities all across the country where the post office's ZIP Code allocation system has just completely fragmented these towns and cities because of the proliferation of ZIP Codes that have occurred and been implemented in some of these towns.

It is a bipartisan bill. I am one of the bipartisan cosponsors. I represent one of those towns, which is Scotland, Connecticut, in eastern Connecticut.

Scotland, Connecticut, is a community that was established back in the 1700s. It was incorporated in the 1800s. It is a small town. The last census was 1,576 people. There are 625 residents in the town.

Mr. Speaker, it is almost hard for people to believe me when I tell them this, but it has six ZIP Codes in a community with 1,500 people. It creates havoc in terms of people doing their ordinary business through the post office.

First Selectman Dana Barrow of the town of Scotland described in a letter to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform:

``Due to the town's ZIP Code configuration, Scotland residents face daily frustration with packages being misdelivered, service providers being unable to find their properties, and digital ordering or registration systems refusing to accept their address information. But the issue goes beyond inconvenience. People have paid taxes to the wrong town and sent their children to the wrong schools. Town party committees and voluntary associations cannot effectively reach residents by mail. Public health statistics seriously understate the burden of disease in our town, and other survey data also misrepresent us. A high percentage of absentee ballot applications that we were required by law to send out . . . were returned--not because the people weren't in town, but because the USPS computer scanning system rejected their addresses. The situation is clearly damaging to us individually and as a community.''

What this bill does is it just simply says for Scotland and a number of other communities that have been identified by the community that basically we are going to unify a ZIP Code for those communities so they don't have to, again, experience what Scotland First Selectman Dana Barrow described.

Last night, the post office actually sent out a letter of opposition to the bill to all Members of the House Chamber. They actually had the nerve to say that passage of this bill would significantly degrade mail service in the affected communities.

Mr. Speaker, it is hard to imagine how the mail service for the people of the town of Scotland could be any worse than the situation that exists today where they have six ZIP Codes for a population of 1,500 people.

Luckily, we have Members of Congress like the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Diaz-Balart) who chairs the committee and who is bringing the bill out later this week. He has the common sense to understand that the post office needs to get their act together and go into a very finite and manageable number of communities and aggregate the ZIP Codes so that people, again, can get the services they rely on.

I am a strong supporter of the post office. It is in the Constitution. It is mandated we have a Postal Service in this country. People depend on it to get their medications, to get important documents, and to receive their monthly Social Security payments.

To have a dysfunctional system that is completely self-inflicted and man-made because of the organization of the post office is just unacceptable.

Mr. Speaker, again, despite the post office's somewhat hysterical, out-of-touch opposition that they announced last night, I am here on the floor to publicly call on all my colleagues to join Mr. Diaz-Balart from the Republican side, myself from the Democratic side, and a host of other cosponsors to get this modest and obviously commonsense bill passed and sent to the Senate and then to the President's desk.

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