Address change upsets residents

LACLEDE — A big white sign, clumps of knee-high grass, railroad tracks and a church lie prone as blacktop under a gray, June sky.

Down the Highway 2 from the sawmill is the gas station that doubles as store and cafe where a fence keeps out neighboring goats that serve as weed wackers.

The spotted animals laconically eye passers-by.

This small town is home to Bob Hopkins, a retired Sandpoint automotive repair shop owner, and his wife, Ellen.

They get their mail at the Laclede post office on Riley Creek Park Road, which is across the highway from where their road, called North Riley Creek, ambles through open fields toward the mountains.

Despite what seems an idyllic North Idaho setting, Hopkins is unhappy.

As are his neighbors.

He no longer lives in Laclede, he said.

Somewhere in the past few years his physical address was absorbed by Priest River and that, he says, is not OK.

“Laclede has totally lost its identity,” Hopkins said.

 The U.S. Postal Service still ships mail to his Laclede post office box at the 83841 ZIP code, but ground shipments, including the shipments of medicine he gets for his diabetes, is shipped to a Priest River address with an 83856 ZIP code.

The stuff still gets to his front door, which means Hopkins and his neighbors are a tribe living in two ZIP zones simultaneously:

One for their post office box, and another for everything else.

The Hopkins’ and their neighbors said the change occurred relatively recently, but when they tried to find the responsible agents, they hit pot holes. Lots of them.

Bonner County officials say the change most likely occurred with the postal service.

“The post office kind of sets where they put post office boxes and where physical deliveries go,” Dan Spinoza of the Bonner County planning department said.

A U.S. Postal Service spokesperson says her agency does not use physical addresses in places serviced solely by post office boxes such as Laclede. Therefore the post office has no reason to change physical addresses.

Bonner County Road and Bridge personnel said they were not authorized to comment on the changes that seem to have dropped Laclede from their maps.

Other county officials say updating the 911 system may have prompted the address change.

Bonner County Commissioner Joe Young said the Laclede address likely melded with Priest River when the 911 system was adopted a decade ago.

“The closest incorporated city is Priest River,” he said. “This is something that did not change lately.”

A new, enhanced 911 system is almost ready to be adopted countywide, he said, and that may have triggered further address changes in an effort to make rural homes easier for emergency personnel to find.

Bottom line: County officials had no definitive answers.

“I don’t know the reason why,” Spinoza said.

Patsy Moore, who has lived her entire 70 years in Laclede, feels the county is not responsible for the ZIP code change, or the loss of Laclede’s physical location on locator maps.

“They don’t know what’s really going on either, is the feeling I got,” Moore said. “I think someone above our county did this. I’m not sure.”

What bothers Laclede residents is that no one informed them that the ZIP code change and the adoption of their community by Priest River was in the works.

“I’ve lived here all my life,” Moore said. “I don’t like my physical address to be in Priest River.”

Hopkins wonders about the ramifications and the inconveniences the change — which he says happened over the past two years — will have .

“It’s really screwy,” Hopkins said. “The whole thing is just messed up.”

Moore hopes that someone will take the time to tell her how and why the changes were made.

“What really bothers me, is that they did it with none of us knowing,” she said.

As logging trucks trundle to and from the mill at Riley Creek at the edge of town, Hopkins stands along the road and mulls the changes.

“We’ve been in Laclede forever, but we’re not in Laclede anymore,” he said. “We’re in Priest River now.”