WEST PARIS — Seven months after signing a lease, the U.S. Postal Service has yet to begin construction on the town’s new post office.

Residents are frustrated, Town Manager Joy Downing said. The town has not had its own post office since the former facility closed in 2021 because of lease issues at the former building.

U.S. Rep. Jared Golden sent a letter this week to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy demanding answers concerning the lack of progress in reopening the West Paris Post Office. The Postal Service signed a lease in August 2024 to open a facility in the former Ledgeview Living Center, a former nursing home on Route 26.

“I continue to hear almost daily from constituents whose lives are made harder by the lack of a post office in West Paris,” Golden said in his letter to DeJoy. “At bare minimum, residents deserve to know how much longer they have to wait for the return of basic mail services in their own community. With the Postal Service having already signed a new lease — the originally stated reason for the closure — it’s beyond time for the agency to show some real progress.”

Downing said Tuesday that she has not heard from the Postal Service since last year. Work was originally scheduled to begin in November, and then early this year, “but no one is really responding,” she said.

“What I have heard is that there is a lot of work that needs to get done in that section of the building,” Downing said. “They have to make an outside entrance for the mail trucks to pull up to drop the mail off. They also have to build a wall as well because the front section of the Ledgeview building will only be for the post office. It can’t be open to the apartments and the water district that’s there. It has to be separate since it is federal.”

Like Golden, Downing thought work on the new facility would have already started.

West Paris residents must travel to neighboring Paris, nearly a 15-minute drive away, to buy stamps or mail packages.,

“We have a lot of elderly citizens,” Downing said. “It may not look like a long drive, but it is if you don’t have a vehicle and depend on other people to drive you.”

“Residents of West Paris must travel 30 minutes or more, round trip, in the wintertime to access their P.O. Box mail, parcels and medications, purchase money orders and pay their bills,” American Postal Workers Union of Maine President Selena Garside and Executive Vice President Jennifer Garland said in a statement. “Rural small businesses, senior citizens, veterans and the entire community are suffering an extended and undue hardship, with increased cost of fuel and potential health risks of not receiving medication in a timely manner.”

The town does have a blue mailbox outside the Town Office for mail pickups. Some people will step into the Town Office looking to buy stamps and other postal needs.

Golden is seeking some transparency from the Postal Service as to when the facility will open. He sent a similar letter to DeJoy last year, which prompted the Postal Service to sign the lease.

“Since those inquiries, my team and I continue to experience the same lack of transparency and an unwillingness to share minor details that my constituents have become accustomed to when attempting to gather information from the USPS,” Golden wrote. “That is why I am once again reaching out to you in the hopes of providing communities I represent with much-needed clarity as to when they can expect postal services to be accessible to them at the West Paris facility.”

“I sincerely hope that the town of West Paris can celebrate the reopening of its post office before we recognize the fourth anniversary of its closure,” he added.