Leaner, cheaper, post office opens in Westfield Mission Valley

This eventually led the postal service to reverse its decision and instead seek a more affordable space in the mall.

The new post office opened Monday, Jan. 27, in a 3,906-squarefoot storefront between Lenscrafters and Onami, near Macy’s Home Furnishings, said Eva Jackson, a postal service spokesperson.

The new space will cost a total $215,184 a year in rent, a reduction of 34 percent. The space is also about 36 percent smaller than the previous space, which cost $327,328 a year. That number appears higher than the previously reported figure of $216,000 because it did not include the annual common area maintenance fee, Jackson said.

Still, in deciding to maintain a presence at the mall, the postal service gave up a much larger potential savings. It had planned to consolidate the entire Mission Valley operation into the Linda Vista post office, which the postal service owns outright, Jackson said.

Jackson acknowledged that the financial difficulties that prompted the postal service to initially announce it was closing the Mission Valley office had not gone away. But she said that the problems were more global in nature and not specific to Mission Valley.

Two significant problems she mentioned included Congress’ requirement that the postal service prefund retire health costs at $5 billion per year, and the fact that First Class Mail is going the way of the dinosaur.

“The financial issues were not at that location,” Jackson said. “It brings in good revenue.”

The Mission Valley office was targeted because of its relative proximity to the Linda Vista office, just over two miles away by car, Jackson said.

Resident Marc Skora wrote a letter to the Mission Valley News saying he believed it was a bad decision to keep the Mission Valley office open.

“In my opinion there was little logic, common sense or even more importantly fiscal sense shown by” interests who argued to maintain the location, Skora wrote.

“Wiser, more rational minds should have pointed out that the Linda Vista post office is easily reached by a short drive up Ulric Street,” Skora wrote.

 The proposed closing caught the eye of Steve Hutkins, who blogs about the state of the U.S. Postal Service at the website . Hutkins noted that while the closure would have resulted in financial savings, those savings would have come at a cost.

“Of course, closing post offices also means driving away customers and losing revenue.  The Postal Service hasn’t released information about the annual revenues at (the Mission Valley office), but they are likely to be significant, and the potential losses, just as significant,” Hutkins wrote.

Meanwhile, a longtime anti-tax activist is criticizing the decision to keep the Mission Valley post office open.

“It’s like reverse NIMBYism,” said Richard Rider, chairman of San Diego Tax Fighters. “It’s like, ‘Please put it in my backyard.’”

Rider was referring to the wave of community leaders who had begged the postal service to spare the Mission Valley office.

“This happens over and over,” Rider said. “There’s always that pressure. Everybody always wants to go two blocks to the post office. But it’s not appropriate for us to subsidize those operations.”

Rider suggested the postal service consider contracting with a private company such as Postal Annex to use their space at reduced prices.

As a result of the decision to maintain a post office in Mission Valley, the postal service is now looking at other potential locations to close or merge, Jackson said.

“We’re looking at what offices are within one, two or three miles of each other that we could consolidate,” she said.

Some possibilities include downtown San Diego, which has two post offices within a few blocks of each other, and Escondido, which has three within the city limits.