In recent months, the removal of two post office collection boxes in the Village of East Hills has sparked protests by local residents. In one incident, a group of residents formed a human chain in a failed attempt to keep their collection box.

Last week, postal officials in Nassau County decided to return one of the collection boxes to its former station at Colony and Parkside Avenues in East Hills. The purpose of the move, said Tom Gaynor, a customer affairs executive, was to conduct more tests at the site. By "more tests," this means that post office officials will be checking the volume of mail that this particular collection box takes in on a daily basis. And so the relocation may be temporary.

The reason the post office removed the two collection boxes in the first place was because neither site received enough mail to make their existence viable. A collection box must receive at least 100 letters a day, Gaynor said. Otherwise, he added, it is not cost-effective for the post office to have a letter carrier go out on runs if the mail volume is so low.

Earlier tests by the post office on the East Hills collection boxes found that daily mail volume did in fact fail to reach the 100-letter limit. And so, they were removed. In a survey done from June 9 to June 15 of this year, the East Hills boxes averaged 20-25 letters a day.

Still, the decision to move the boxes was, as noted, not popular with East Hills residents, especially those in the East Park neighborhood. Numerous residents wrote letters to the Roslyn Heights post office to express their opposition. Some letter writers observed that senior citizens need such a box, since a walk to the nearest available collection box can be dangerous. Others claimed the two collection boxes were gathering places in their own right, a "place to meet neighbors." In addition, some criticized the post office for not giving East Hills residents any notification of the collection box closings.

"East Park is a small, isolated community," one letter writer claimed. "It is bordering on the Long Island Expressway on its north side and the Northern State Parkway on the south side. There are no easily accessible sidewalks or paths leading out of the neighborhood. In order to mail letters, our neighbors must drive to the post office or to another neighborhood and search for a mailbox. Up until recently, people were frequently seen walking to our mailbox and depositing their mail. Now we are forced to drive cars to other areas or else leave mail in our personal mailboxes to be picked up by our mail carrier. Leaving mail outside to be picked up is not safe and certainly unfair to the mail carrier."

A reassessment of the situation took place only after representatives of the East Park Civic Association met with Pat Murphy, director of customer service for the Roslyn Heights post office.

At that meeting, which took place on Aug. 28, Murphy did confirm that "low usage" of the East Hills boxes was the reason for their removal.

Still, members of the civic association claimed that there should be other factors when assessing the worth of a collection box. They told Murphy that boxes should be measured in how they serve the public, not just on their mail volume alone.

More specifically, civic association members told Murphy that the East Park neighborhood has numerous elderly residents who rely on the collection box as their primary means of accessing postal services.

According to civic association members, the Roslyn Heights post office people "seemed to agree that mere numbers" may not be the best way to decide the matter. And so, when post office personnel from both Nassau and Suffolk counties held a regional meeting on Sept. 10, the concerns of East Hills residents was placed on the agenda.