A Boise post office will relocate, but residents worry where it may end up
A Boise neighborhood may soon lose its post office, a decision the neighborhood association president says could hurt local residents.
The U.S. Postal Service will relocate its office at 4650 W. State St. “as close as reasonably possible to the existing location,” Erica Moss, a spokeswoman for the service, told the Statesman.
Relocation was considered for months before a final decision was announced in a letter two weeks ago to Boise Mayor Lauren McLean. A copy of the letter was taped to post office door. The letter says the office must relocate because the lease on the building will end.
The lease will end in December 2022, Moss said. She said the owner of the shopping center that includes the post office building, the Larkspur, California-based Argonaut Investments, is considering redeveloping the site.
Stephen Jaeger, founder and managing partner of Argonaut Investments, said that wasn’t quite true. Jaeger told the Statesman that he proposed moving the post office to a suite in the shopping center to improve visibility for the office and traffic flow for the whole center.
“We absolutely want to maintain the post office in the Collister Shopping Center,” he said in a phone interview Thursday.
It’s not necessarily simple for the Postal Service to relocate an office. The Postal Service must follow certain legal requirements, which include a public hearing like one that was held in November.
Suzanne Stone, president of the Collister Neighborhood Association, attended that meeting. She said opponents of relocation, including herself, filled a room at the Collister branch of the Boise Public Library — in the same shopping center.
Stone said relocating the post office could hurt residents and the small businesses some people run from their homes. The current location won’t close until the new one is open and operating, according the Postal Service’s letter. But it isn’t clear where or when that move may occur — and won’t be for some time, Moss said, as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
The post office is one of residents’ biggest concerns, Stone said. While options for specific postal services are sprinkled around Boise and surrounding cities, the next-closest post office for Collister residents would likely be at 3485 N. Cole Road in Boise’s West Bench neighborhood or at 770 S. 13th St. in Boise’s downtown. Those are both about 10 minutes farther away, which Stone said could be a problem for the area’s older residents.
“Demographically, our residents are older than many other neighborhoods,” she said. “It’s not as easy for them to travel or make connections on buses or to travel downtown to get there and wherever else they need to go.”
The Postal Service hasn’t kept the neighborhood in the loop, Stone said. It hasn’t kept Argonaut Investments up to date either, said Dayna Desmond, the company’s asset manager. Desmond said the company hadn’t heard that the Postal Service had made a final decision.
Stone said that she hoped that a location “as close as reasonably possible” meant it stayed in the neighborhood — and perhaps even in that shopping center.
“Even if it can’t stay quite in the same place, we need one close by,” she said. “Anything else would hurt the people who live here.”
.jpg)