Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.
The fate of longtime Wacissa postal worker Frank Kolb took a turn for the worst last week, with the postal service giving him an ultimatum: either transfer to the post office in Wakulla County or face the consequences.
Kolb said on Monday, May 17, that he had received an official email on the previous Thursday informing him that his training session in preparation for assumption of his new position in the Woodville Post Office had been rescheduled for June 7.
Kolb said that the message came with a caveat that if he didn’t report for the training this time, he couldn’t perform any more duties.
“If I don’t go this time, action will be taken,” Kolb said. “I am not going. I will be handing my resignation letter to my boss today or tomorrow, effective June 6.
For Kolb, his dilemma began in December, when the postal service informed him that he was being transferred to the Woodville Post Office and should report for training in Tallahassee, preparatory to his transfer on March 3.
Currently, classified a non-career postal worker, Kolb has worked part time at the Wacissa Post Office for many years. The training was to prepare him for his new position and allow him to gain career status.
The problem is that Kolb enjoys the flexibility of his part-time, non-career status and wants to retain it. He also doesn’t want to move to Woodville or into a career status, despite the benefits that it provides.
At it was, Kolb never reported to the first training session or his new post in Woodville and had received no official word one way or the other until last week.
“I’m taking it day to day,” Kolb had said a couple of weeks earlier, when his status still remained in limbo.
How it all developed is that a contract agreement between the postal workers union and the postal service called for the creation of a new position at the Woodville Post Office, which oversees the Wacissa Post Office.
The rules also set a hierarchy for how the new position must be filled, with the job supposed to go to the senior non-career worker. Because the Woodville postmaster has oversight over the St. Marks, Wacissa and Woodville post offices and Kolb is the senior non-career worker among the three, he was naturally the choice. The rules also reportedly don’t allow for a refusal.
The Monticello News was earlier unable to verify Kolb’s official status, as calls and texts to the Woodville Post Office went unanswered. The best that the Monticello News could do was to get it secondhand from Sylvia Hendrix, the postmaster at the Monticello Post Office, that Kolb “wasn’t being reassigned and wasn’t going anywhere.”
That at least was the information that Hendrix said Kolb’s supervisor in Woodville had conveyed to her via text when she had inquired about Kolb’s status.
When this information was related to Kolb a couple of weeks ago, however, the latter said it was news to him. He had heard nothing from anyone as to his status at that point, he said.
The Monticello News tried to learn of Kolb’s job status when a Wacissa resident emailed about the “craziness” of Kolb being told that, “he had to move or be fired.”
“Frank Kolb is an important part of our small community,” Connie Boland emailed. “He knows each of the people in the surrounding area and helps them in various ways. Frank helped start a lending library in Wacissa to help the ones that didn’t have access to Tallahassee.”
Kolb also, she emailed, helped with many countywide charitable fundraising events, from helping veterans to raising funds for animals to making Christmas come true for children.
“Frank is an important part of our small community,” Boland said. “He doesn’t want to move to another location and is very happy working here.”
As for the union rule that set the process in motion, she called it “another ridiculous rule that may make sense in another situation, but not in this one.”
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