“I’ll take a look at it,” Sumpter Township attorney Rob Young said to resident Mary Ban, who once more asked the township board to have the attorney prepare a resolution for them to pass on the 48111 problem. At Tuesday’s regular Sumpter meeting, she said her son’s new title to his truck says he lives in Van Buren Township, but he lives in Sumpter. This is the family’s latest problem in a string of address problems. And, they are not alone.
Ban said she has talked to VBT Clerk Wright who unilaterally effected the VBT address change in the 48111 zip code that has gone out of control. He said he would fix her problem, but it has gotten worse and he no longer returns her calls. Ban said she believes VBT Supervisor McNamara must have approve Wright’s 48111 decision to go ahead.
“He wanted to make VBT a premier community,” Ban told the Sumpter board, referring to Wright. “Well, I think Sumpter Township is a premier community with ‘Country Living at its Finest’.”
She asked the board to help resolve the problem of Sumpter residents being identified with VBT addresses. Attorney Young said also has had complaints about shipments that don’t get sent and other problems. Young said he would “try to pull something together” to present to the board. The 48111 snafu has affected many people negatively. Is it too late to fix it?
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The problem is with the post office and the secretary of state not Van Buren Township. The post office needs to correct their address index and secretary of state needs to do same. When the Belleville post office relocated to Van Buren Township that’s when the the mailing should have been changed. The population in Van Buren Township is far greater than that of the City of Belleville so having the Belleville mailing has caused Van Buren to miss out on some nice restaurants and stores. Check out face book for the tri-community with some great ideas of how City of Belleville can improve their downtown area which is in need of a coffee shop, bakery, grocery store, etc… The new library will be wonderful!
The fact is, that Wright made this change without asking anybody, and it’s effecting everybody. I live in VBT, but when people ask where I live, I say Belleville. I understand that he wants to market VBT and doesn’t want Belleville to get credit for everything in his city, but now all those things within the city have a Van Buren Zip. He’s trying to break the small town feel by giving everyone a VBT zip (including those in Sumpter).
If this is how he wants to play the cards, I think we need to all front the expense to move the Post Office back to Belleville. It’s bad enough that VBT is driving our businesses away (I heard the Menard’s opening delay is due to township problems), not now they want to make everybody VBT, even if they don’t live here.
I didn’t realize that the post office had made the error of placing Van Buren Township 48111 on City of Belleville addresses. The post office needs to correct their records, this really shouldn’t be this difficult if all entities had put in the correct addresses. This change wouldn’t have affected Sumpter Twp. or City of Belleville had it just been done correctly.
Clerk Wright most likely did not anticipate that the post office would not be able to change the address index in such a way as to not affect other communities.
How would this be a Post Office issue? The Post Office delivers post, it doesn’t type in somebody’s address into any form or sheet. How many websites have you gone to, in which it asks you to enter your Zip Code, and it pre-populates the City/State? The only fix for this would be to use the extended Zip Code (which most people don’t know), or have separate Zip Codes for city/township (which would mean separate Post Offices and expenses that goes with that). For years, Sumpter and Van Buren residents received mail/etc stating they lived in Belleville. This was just accepted and became the norm. Then when the Post Office moved to Van Buren, the Zip wasn’t updated because we all relate ourselves to Belleville. This change that Wright did without consultation or approval from others, forces everybody to change the norm, and expect that many automated systems will assume they live in Van Buren now. Post Office delivers, it’s not their problem. Thank you Clerk Wright for taking it upon yourself to force this change on everybody without their say. You will be missed when we can finally elect to throw you out of office.