News

Postal official to talk about relocation Thursday

By Bill Moss, Published: July 6, 2016

The public can hear on Thursday night more about plans for a new post office location to serve Hendersonville.
But there's no reason to get too excited yet. The post office has recently negotiated a lease extension to stay at its 427 Fifth Avenue West location until October 2017, the building’s owner said.

On Thursday night, Richard Hancock, a real estate specialist with the U.S. Postal Service from Greensboro, will tell the Hendersonville City Council and the public about plans to relocate the post office 15 months from now.
“This relocation project would provide full continuity of service and would consist of procuring a suitable alternate location, preparing the new location for use as a Post Office and then transitioning services to the new facility,” he said in a news release on June 22. “The Postal Service would continue retail services in the current Post Office until the new Post Office is up and running. If the move is approved, there would be no impact on letter carrier delivery to Hendersonville residents and businesses. There would be no change to Post Office Box numbers or ZIP codes.”
Although Hancock said that “public input on this relocation is welcome,” City Manager John Connet said the mayor and city council don’t want to turn the council meeting into an official hearing on the post office because it’s not the council’s decision.
““The mayor’s not going to open up a public hearing on the post office,” he said. “If it’s a big crowd that has a bunch of questions we may ask them to step out and talk to Richard one on one. We really we don’t have a dog in this fight other than he’s required to notify council.” (Federal regulations require the postal service to notify local elected officials and the local community of a post office relocation and to solicit public input.)
“All he told me is they’re looking for a more retail type facility on the eastern side of downtown,” Connet said. “As it relates to sorting mail, they’re not doing that anymore. He keeps using the term retail center.”

Larry Hinkle, the owner of the 50-year-old building on Fifth Avenue, said the post office only recently contacted him about staying one more year in the building.
“The post office had a 20-year lease and then they had six 5-year options,” he said. “So the lease ran for 50 years. Oct. 1 was their 50th year.”
Hinkle expected the lease to run out.
“Then we got a call from them two months ago saying, ‘Would you please extend this lease for us. We’re in a difficult situation. We don’t have facility (to move to) at this time.’ We gave them a year extension for them to continue to rent that post office,” he said.
The post office has been consolidating mail processing into regional hubs serving larger areas. A year ago, the USPS closed its Asheville distribution center and moved the sorting to its Greenville, S.C., facility. More of the work that had been done on Fifth Avenue is not done at the annex on Frances Road.
“They basically were using this facility just for the mailboxes and to serve the downtown area with the counter space,” Hinkle said. “They’re saying we don’t need such a large facility anymore. We want to go to a smaller one.”
Hinkle said the lease agreement never has been that lucrative because it started low and was constrained by the contract terms.
“I’ll just say this lease was negotiated 50 years ago,” he said. “Fifty years ago they were getting a bargain. They were paying pennies a square foot. There was an escalator in the contract that said every five years the rent would go up $1,000 per year, which isn’t much.”
As the last lease extension was running out, Hinkle and his wife, Elizabeth, approached their church, First Baptist, about a sale.
“They were very interested in it because they had received notice that the city was interested in building a hotel in that Dogwood parking lot,” Hinkle said. “So they were very interested in the building. Basically we went and got an appraisal” and negotiated a sale at what he described as “a very reasonable price.”
First Baptist will then hold the lease and collect the rent. Hinkle said the post office also agreed to a condition of the lease extension making the post office responsible for maintenance and repairs of the building, which is known to have problems. “They agreed to that,” he said.
Church members voted to approve the sale, which is scheduled to close next week, said church administrator Steve Briggs.
First Baptist needs 700-800 parking spaces for its 11 o’clock service on Sunday mornings, he said. It already uses the post office for parking, under an agreement with the postal service. The church has similar agreements with the county school system’s central office and about four businesses.
If the city does recruit a developer to build a hotel on the Dogwood lot, that will further reduce parking for the church.
When the post office moves out in the fall of 2017, the church plans to bulldoze the 50-year-old building and make a parking lot, he said.