Carmel-By-The-Sea creates ad-hoc committee to explore adding street addresses

CARMEL-BY-THE-SEA, Calif. (KION) - Addressing, street addresses. It was a hot topic during Tuesday night’s Carmel-By-The-Sea City Council meeting. While people living in the city have gone over a century without addresses, the mayor says changing technology has created added challenges.

“People that have been troubled, getting credit cards, getting their streets identified," Mayor Dave Potter said. “I think we're concerned, does that mean that we're gonna get mail delivery? We don't want to lose our post office.”

The city’s downtown post office is viewed as a social hub for people who live in Carmel-By-The-Sea, given it’s where all mail is delivered. Findings were presented about how that would impact the mail situations.

“The City of Carmel could very well keep our post office system as is already in place. It's efficient and it's already established," City Administrative Analyst Emily Garay said.

However, city staff said they also couldn’t definitively say the post office will never close or change locations. During public comment, many people were in support of adding addresses.

"It affects their security, their insurance and financial affairs. Besides receiving deliveries of important and necessary items. I support addresses," said one person during public comment.

At the same time, some say they don’t want to see the system change, especially with the post office as a gathering spot.

“I do not want to see street addresses because that is the last standing place where this community comes together and gets welded together as we as we are today," said another person public comment.

With this new ad-hoc committee the city says the public will be able to continue to engage and provide input on the matter.

This item was previously brought up to city council during an Oct. 2022 meeting.