Kankakee Valley Post, Volume 2, Number 24, DeMotte, Jasper County, 5 January 1933 — Town Spurns Costly Post Office [ARTICLE]

Town Spurns Costly Post Office

Fights Expense and Town’s Loss of Rent. Southampton, L. I. —This^ village does not want a new post office, and, if it can help it. will not have one under any conditions. Southampton, center of one of Long Island’s exclusive summer resort colonies* thinks its present post office is good enough, and Mayor .1. Foster Terry ahd the town’s four trustees, Elmer Van Brunt. Robert E. Hubbard, Lewis E. Downs and Latham R. Reed, told Secretary of the Treasury Ogden L. Mills so in no uncertain terms. Instead of relieving unemployment Southampton feels that the expenditure of SIIO,OOO, which was appropriated at the last session of congress for the-erection of a new post office, would not only increase the financial burdens of the federal government, but would result in increased local taxation. The present building, “erected by the village primarily tor the post office,’’ Mayor Terry told Mr. Mills; brings in a rental of $3,000 a year from the government. The proposed new post office, the mayor estimated. would cost the government XO.OOO a year to operate, and “render it necessary to increase the village

taxes to make up this loss of revenue.” Mr. Terry said that the village had been opposed to the construction ever since it first had been proposed, about four year ago. Besides writing a letter of protest to Mr. Mills. Mr. Terry sent a letter to Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia university, who lias a summer residence near the village, requesting his help iff “stopping this project.” The mayor declared that the village did not believe the construction of a new post office building would help the town’s unemployed, since the “contractor would come from outside and bring his own labor.”