Zion Canyon Post Offices
About
This is a page documenting recent articles and concerns about the postal services in the three Zion Canyon towns of Virgin, Rockville and Springdale.
Background
Recent years have seen the decline in the use of the US Postal Service (USPS) for all manner of communications and services. Using as a rough guide, here is a chart (source: St. Louis Fed) showing the number of people employed by the service:
As can be seen, the growth in the postal service continued up to just before the year 2000, and afterward saw a dramatic decline. It can be guessed that this decline was due at least in part to the rise of the internet, email and so on. Since 2000, a Pew Research report indicated that the number of Post Offices has declined from 40,000 in 2000 to just over 30,000 today. For this reason alone, there has been reasonable concern about the loss of post office services in the three Zion Canyon towns of Virgin, Rockville, and Springdale.
These concerns increased in 2018 with the closure in Virgin of the Virgin Post Office.
The Springdale Sun Issue 3
A controversy has arisen with the publication of a local news publication, The Springdale Sun, whose Issue Number 3 has a section titled “Going Postal”. In that article, the publisher (Elizabeth Cutler) makes the statement that the Virgin Town post office became inoperative because “the owner chose to close“. The article then quotes a USPS representative who assured Ms. Cutler that there are no plans to close or relocate the (Springdale) facility, and concludes the little section with the bottom line assurance that “our (Springdale) office was never in danger of closure. The sky was never falling after all. Whew.”.
Fact Checking
Reports of this news item in The Springdale Sun reached the other two mayors in Zion Canyon, who issued a set of corrections and clarifications to the above claims and assessment (see links below). In particular, the exact sequence of events which led to the closure of the Virgin Post Office, as described by the article in the Sun, are challenged and corrections provided, based on the events as related first-hand by the Virgin Town postmistress: