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‘Please take your trash home’: A month after removing its bins, the Steamboat Springs Post Office is still being trashed

Piles of trash like this one seen on Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2022, continue to appear around the entrance and P.O. boxes at the Steamboat Springs Post Office after staff removed trash bins a month ago.
Dylan Anderson/Steamboat Pilot & Today

Having been without a janitor for about a year, the Steamboat Springs Post Office recently decided to remove some trash bins with the expectation that people would throw out their empty shipping boxes and junk mail at home.

Instead, people are leaving bundles of trash on the floor all over the post office.

“What the heck?” Interim Postmaster Fernando Castro asked as he cleaned up junk mail left along a windowsill, on the floor and even atop the stamp machine. 



Castro said the post office is short three staff members, and anyone who has been there knows the front desk almost always has a line. The janitor position is still open, but the lack of applicants has put the post office in a bind.

“Depending on how busy it is, sometimes we get to it, sometimes we can’t,” Castro said. 



The trash bins have been gone for a little over a month, and despite asking customers to take their trash home with them, the piles keep popping up.

Staff at the post office posted a pink sign saying, “Please take your trash home! We are a mail service not a garbage service! We are very short staffed and we can’t keep up.”


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But the areas around the P.O. boxes, which are kept open 24 hours a day, continue to accumulate trash heaps. The desk area still has trash receptacles and has been kept clean.

This isn’t the first time Steamboat’s post office has been mired in trash. Back in 2016, a contracted cleaner for the post office was a no-show just a couple of days before Christmas. Over the ensuing weeks, trash quickly accumulated near the P.O. boxes.

Election season isn’t helping either, as an abundance of political mailers can be seen mixed in with the pockets of trash strewn about the office.

The good news is that Nov. 8 is less than a month away, but after that comes the holidays — the busiest and messiest time of the year for post offices. 

Castro said the community’s feedback has been positive, saying most customers are upset with the people leaving trash, not the post office staff. 


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