Cheshire Neighborhood Nears Two Years Without Home Mail Delivery in USPS Cluster Box Dispute
Residents of the Whispering Oaks development in Cheshire have gone nearly two years without home mail delivery, forced to drive to the Cheshire post office each day to pick up their correspondence while a dispute between the developer and the U.S. Postal Service remains unresolved.
The problem has its roots in a shifting set of requirements from USPS. When residents first moved in, the postal service told them delivery would begin once the 20-home neighborhood reached 50 percent occupancy. That threshold was later moved to 80 percent, and eventually, USPS said no delivery would occur at all until a centralized cluster box unit was installed at the end of Whispering Oaks Drive.
"This is like playing a football game where someone keeps moving the goal post further away," said Jeffrey Smrek, a resident who moved to Whispering Oaks with his wife in 2024. He described the burden on working families who don't have time for daily post office trips — particularly because the Cheshire post office limits mail pickup to before 11 a.m. on regular delivery days.
The Cluster Box Problem: A School Bus Stop
The proposed location for the cluster box is at the end of Whispering Oaks Drive in a high-traffic area that also serves as a school bus stop. Residents say there is no safe area to pull over and retrieve mail at that location, creating a safety concern that has added to the dispute.
Mark Lovely, the developer behind the Whispering Oaks project, said the cluster box requirement was never communicated to him during the planning and development process. Lovely, who has more than 40 years of experience in residential development, said he received no advance notice that USPS would require centralized delivery for the street, leaving no opportunity to design the neighborhood with a suitable cluster box location.
"In 40-plus years in development, I never encountered this requirement," Lovely said, according to WFSB.
USPS has not issued a specific public statement about the Whispering Oaks dispute, but the postal service has said centralized delivery is increasingly necessary as it adds more than 1.5 million new addresses to its delivery network each year. The agency considers cluster boxes a more cost-effective option for new residential developments.