Dana Barrow has lived in Scotland, Conn., for three decades. Barrow wears many hats, literally. The baseball caps line the top of his desk in Scotland’s town hall.
Barrow is Scotland’s first selectman and fire marshall. He is also the town’s burning official, in charge of controlled burns to keep farmland healthy.
Scotland, which has a population of less than 1,600 people, is nestled by the Rhode Island border.
“There’s probably more cows in the town than there are people,” Barrow said.
Across the street from Scotland Spirits, the only store in Scotland, is the town hall.
Barrow’s office is a straight shot to the back of the building from the front door. Town hall was originally a schoolhouse, constructed in the 1840s, a couple years before the town was formally established.
Barrow’s desk is beneath chips of white paint flaking off the ceiling, revealing spots of tin paneling, illuminated by the snow outside the tall windows in mid-January. He sat behind his desk and explained the size of the town.
“We have no gas station, no grocery stores. One blinking stoplight, and we have our biggest employers, probably the saw mill. I think they had like 10 people,” Barrow said.
The town’s size is not the challenge, it’s the number of ZIP codes. Scotland has half a dozen ZIP codes.
“The mail gets screwed up. Sometimes it's missed packages. Sometimes they go on a computer and put in their address. The computer says there is no such address. A lot of times they get the bills from motor vehicles sent to the wrong town,” Barrow said.
Problems beyond missing mail
It’s uncommon for a town with only 600 street addresses to have six ZIP codes and it has caused issues for nearly every resident, according to Scotland Town Clerk Sharon George.
“I have a petition in the vault that's 14 years old of residents signing saying, ‘Oh, can we please fix this?’ And it's just been sitting like that,” George said.
It’s led to parents not realizing their child’s birth certificate is missing until it’s time for vaccinations, or kids spending months attending the wrong school.
“If you live in Scotland and your address is Hampton, and you're a woman in labor, the last thing you're thinking about is, ‘Wait, that's my mailing address,’” George said. “So a lot of times we have our birth certificates, and until mom and dad come in looking for it, I don't even realize it's missing.”
And that’s not all, according to George.
“The ZIP code issue led to one of our residents, his wife passed away, and it took over a month to get her death certificate corrected,” George said.
A Change to USPS
The United States Postal Service established ZIP codes in 1963, with the goal of making it easier for mail carriers to sort and deliver mail.
But, technology has only made the problem worse, according to Democratic Congressman Joe Courtney of Connecticut.
“When the post office wasn't so automated, the postmaster in the community, who pretty much knew every postal address in town, was able to sort of manually direct the mail to where it was supposed to go,” Courtney said. “The system now has been, you know, totally automated, and that actually has worsened the problem.”
Courtney is co-sponsoring a federal bill that would consolidate Scotland's ZIP codes, and ZIP codes in other communities across the country facing similar issues.
USPS has been unresponsive to residents’ requests to change the ZIP code system, Courtney said.
“A huge bureaucratic mess has just been met with a total cold shoulder,” Courtney said. “They have just elevated their own sort of ZIP code formula and systems above what is actually happening to the people who are actually getting served by the post office.”
In previous iterations of the federal bill, more than 30 municipalities nationwide were listed, including parts of Colorado, Florida and Wisconsin.
USPS declined an interview but said in a statement that ZIP codes are “closely linked to factors such as mail volume, delivery area size, geographic location and topography, but not necessarily linked to municipalities or perceived community boundaries.”
USPS said changing the ZIP codes would negatively impact mail service.
The future of Scotland ZIPs
For Scotland tax assessor Mary Hawley, it’s hard to see how the system could get worse.
Hawley holds in-person office hours every Wednesday night at town hall. She says people trickle in for help, often relating to the ZIP codes.
“It's bad. I mean, all year long, I'm getting people going to the town that they're in and saying, ‘You know, I don't live in this town. I got this bill, but I should be over there.’”
Courtney said it may take about a year before Congress votes on the ZIP code bill. Hawley hopes it happens, for sake of future and fellow Scotland residents, cows included.
“I know government works slowly,” Hawley said. “I know, but I still would hope. I hope it does it before I leave here. Let's put it that way, that way the next person doesn't have to worry about it.”
