Ahead of House Vote, Courtney Urges Support for Bill to Give Scotland a Single ZIP Code

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Ahead of a vote by the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Joe Courtney (CT-02) spoke on the House floor to urge his colleagues to support H.R. 672, which includes Rep. Courtney’s provision to assign a single zip code to the town of Scotland, Connecticut. During the speech, Rep. Courtney also set the record straight after hysterical opposition to the bill from the U.S. Postal Service in a letter sent to Congress last week.  The House is scheduled to consider H.R. 672 today.

Scotland has a population of just under 1,600 and only 625 residencies, but six zip codes. In a letter to Congress, Scotland First Selectman Dana Barrows described the difficulties Town residents face due to the high number of zip codes, including misplaced packages, difficulty requesting mail-in ballots, paying taxes to the wrong town, and sending students to the wrong schools. 

Click here to view and download Rep. Courtney’s remarks.

“[The Post Office] actually had the nerve to say that the passage of this bill would ‘significantly degrade mail service in the affected communities.’ Mr. Speaker, it is hard to imagine how, for the people of the town of Scotland, their mail service could be any worse than the situation that exists today where they have six zip codes for a population of 1500 people,” Courtney said.

“People depend on [the Post Office] to get their medications, to get important documents, to get paid their Social Security monthly payments, and to have a dysfunctional system that is completely self-inflicted and manmade because of the organization of the Post Office is just unacceptable,” Courtney continued. “Despite the Post Office's somewhat hysterical, out of touch opposition… I am here on the floor to publicly call on all my colleagues to join Mr. Diaz-Balart from the Republican side, myself from the Democratic side, and a host of other co-sponsors to get this really modest, obvious commonsense bill passed, sent to the Senate, and to the President's desk.”

Full Transcript

 “Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, during this week, we are going to be taking up legislation, H.R. 672, an act to establish new zip codes for certain communities. This measure is aimed at fixing problems in, as I said, about eight communities all across the country where the Post Office's zip code allocation system just completely has fragmented these towns and cities because of the just proliferation of zip codes that have occurred and been implemented in some of these towns.  

“It is a bipartisan bill. I'm one of the bipartisan co-sponsors, and I represent one of those towns, Scotland, Connecticut in eastern Connecticut. Scotland Connecticut is a community that was established back in the 1700s. It was incorporated in the 1800s. It's a small town. The last census was 1576 people. There's 625 residences in the town. And, Mr. Speaker, it's almost hard to get people to believe me when I tell them this. It has six zip codes in a community with 1500 people. It creates just havoc in terms of people just doing their ordinary business through the Post Office. 

“As the First Selectman of the Town of Scotland described in a letter to the Oversight Committee, ‘Due to the town's zip code configuration, Scotland residents face daily frustration with packages being missed delivered, service providers being unable to find their properties in digital ordering or registration systems refusing to accept their address information. But the issue goes beyond inconvenience. People have paid taxes to the wrong town, sent their children to wrong schools. Town party committees and voluntary associations cannot effectively reach residents by mail. Public health statistics seriously understate the burden of disease in our town, and other survey data also misrepresent us. A high percentage of absentee ballot applications that were required by law to be sent out were returned not because the people weren't in town, but because the USPS computer scanning system rejected their addresses. This situation is clearly damaging to us individually and as a community.’

“So what this bill does is just simply say for Scotland and a number of other communities, that have been identified by the committee, that basically we're going to unify a zip code for those communities so that they don't have to experience what Mr. Dana Barrow, who's the First Selectman of the Town of Scotland described last night.

“The Post Office actually sent out a letter of opposition to the bill to all the members of the House chamber, and they actually had the nerve to say that the passage of this bill would ‘significantly degrade mail service in the affected communities.’

“Mr. Speaker, it is hard to imagine how for the people of the town of Scotland, their mail service could be any worse than the situation that exists today where they have six zip codes for a population of 1500 people.

“Luckily, we have members of Congress like Mario Diaz-Balart from Florida who [is a Member of] the Committee, who's bringing the bill out later this week, who has the commonsense to understand that getting the Post Office to get their act together and to go into a really a very finite manageable number of communities and aggregate the zip codes so that people can get the service which they rely on.

“I am a strong supporter of the Post Office. It's in the Constitution. It's mandated that we have a postal service in this country. People depend on it to get their medications, to get important documents, to get paid their Social Security monthly payments, and to have a dysfunctional system that is completely self-inflicted and manmade because of the organization of the Post Office is just unacceptable.

“So, again, despite the Post Office's somewhat hysterical, out of touch opposition that they announced last night, I am here on the floor to publicly call on all my colleagues to join Mr. Diaz-Balart from the Republican side, myself from the Democratic side, and a host of other co-sponsors to get this really modest, obvious commonsense bill passed, sent to the Senate, and to the President's desk.”

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