Keith Browning isn’t the Big Bad Wolf, and Debora Stewart certainly can’t pass for the Three Little Pigs.

But with Douglas County officials huffing and puffing for new regulations that would blow down her red-brick mailbox — all in the name of traffic safety — Stewart knows one thing: Her situation’s no fairy tale.

“I will not want to take my mailbox down, no matter what they say,” said Stewart, whose husband built what has become a landmark mailbox 15 years ago on Stull Road west of Lawrence. “I wouldn’t be happy at all. We have a right to have our mailbox look the way we want it to.”

County officials are bracing for a battle over the design, construction methods and materials used for mailboxes on rural roads.

The county’s Traffic Safety Advisory Committee has been working for several months on two sets of regulations that would address safety concerns raised by mailboxes considered dangerous because of their size, weight, rigidity or location.

Such boxes typically feature materials such as concrete, brick, stone or steel that can pose a heightened safety risk for drivers who run into the roadside structures.

Delivering safety

Under both of the committee’s working proposals, future installation of such boxes would be prohibited, said Keith Browning, the county’s engineer and director of public works. But the fate of boxes already in place, along county rights of way, would be left for county commissioners to settle.

Proposed regulations from the county's Traffic Safety Advisory Committee would ban future construction of mailboxes like this one along East 652 Road. County officials say the boxes pose a heightened safety risk for drivers who run into the roadside structures

• One plan would require that all mailboxes be made either of “light sheet metal or plastic,” meaning that anything else would need to be removed and replaced within a year of the owner being notified of the problem.
• The other plan would deem specific materials unsafe for use in supports: concrete, masonry and/or solid stone; steel stronger than a standard steel pipe measuring 2 inches in diameter; or any material measuring more than 6 inches in diameter. Any other problems would need to be identified by Browning, who then would notify the owners.

Browning said he already had found 150 mailboxes that would need to be removed from the county’s busiest roads. He anticipates that far more are located on roads now maintained by townships.

Any order to remove a mailbox could be appealed to the County Commission, according to the proposals. And commissioners say they’re committed to making a strong stand for safety.

6News video: Brick mailboxes pose driver dangers, county officials say

“The ones that have the mass to stop a car flat probably ought to be taken down,” Commissioner Charles Jones said. “It’s tough, but it’s probably too great a risk to be allowed to go unabated.”

Bob Johnson, commission chairman and a former insurance executive, said the county should do all it could to prevent serious injuries from accidents.

“What we’re talking about is safety,” he said. “We’re talking about people’s lives. We’re talking about doing the things we can do to make it safer on our roads.

“You never get to start over, but if we could start today — saying, ‘What is the safest way to have mailboxes?’ — I’m sure we wouldn’t allow so-called monument mailboxes. It just doesn’t make sense to build a concrete-and-brick pillar within 2 feet or 3 feet of a highway.”

Vandalism shields

But Stewart and others counter that their steadfast mailboxes make plenty of sense. After moving into their house 18 years ago, Stewart and her husband watched as vandals destroyed their regular mailbox not once, but twice.

That’s when her husband, one-time masonry contractor Lowell Stewart, installed a third mailbox — this one encased in a stack of red bricks.

“You would hurt your car if you ran into our mailbox,” Debora Stewart said. “But there’s so much space out on the roads, how can they say that 3 (square) feet becomes a danger to somebody? If you were going to drive off the road where our mailbox is, it would stop your car from flipping over on the steep embankment. I don’t think that’s a safety hazard.”

Commissioner Jere McElhaney, who has a vinyl support and cover for his rural mailbox, said he wasn’t ready to decide on an ending for the mailbox saga.

Yes, he said, the county needs to prohibit anything dangerous from being installed in the future. But whether the Stewarts and others should be forced to take down their mailboxes remains an open question.

“It’s going to be hard for us to do this completely, and 100 percent, because it’s not a perfect science,” McElhaney said. “We’ll just have to do the best we can.”