Union Township Trustee George Topoll is trying to help the U.S. Postal Service establish a post office in Wheeler after a two-year hiatus.
“It’s going to be small, but at least it will be there,” he said.
“My goal was to get it up before two years hit,” Topoll said. The old post office was closed in July 2023 with the Postal Service saying the closure would be temporary because the building needed repairs.
W. Dawn Moore, a real estate specialist with the U.S. Postal Service in Denver, shared a letter with Topoll that indicated plans to place a 600-square-foot prefab building in Wheeler and asked for his assistance in getting it through the local approval process.
Topoll is working with Jeff Salino, of JLL Realty in Washington, D.C., to make it happen.
Site approval will be up to Porter County officials, not Union Township, but Topoll said he’s involved on behalf of the township’s residents.
“It sounds like they’re ready to move,” Topoll said about the Postal Service plan. Now it’s just a matter of making sure the site rights are cleared up.
Postal Service Strategic Communications Specialist Susan Wheeler said Tuesday the Postal Service didn’t have any public comment yet.
Finding a suitable location in Wheeler hasn’t been easy. The tiny settlement has few commercial properties available.
At U.S. Rep. Frank Mrvan’s town hall meeting last month at the Memorial Opera House in Valparaiso, one of the questions he fielded was the status of the Wheeler post office. When the Postal Service announced its closure in July 2023, it referred customers to the Hobart post office to conduct transactions there.
Last week, the Postal Service let the owners of the building where the Winfield postal substation is housed know that the agreement to operate there will end Sept. 30. That substation opened in April 2021. That substation is near western Porter and Union townships in Porter County.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.