Landlords Picking Up New Postal Charge
By CHRIS CZIBORR
Mail service has gotten more costly at Irvine office buildings.
In early December, the U.S. Postal Service cut its afternoon pickup for businesses in the city, leaving buildings and companies stuck with piles of mail.
The rub: property mangers or tenants have to pay $12.50 per pickup day to resume the service.
Most Irvine office buildings depend on two pickups per day. The Irvine post office had offered both pickups for free.
So far, a number of Irvine property managers are picking up the tab for the second pickup. The cost: $62.50 a week, or $3,250 a year. Throw in Saturday and the tab rises to $3,800.
“Tenants are used to that service, so we don’t want to take it away,” said Thomas Young, vice president of management services at the Irvine office of Dallas-based property manager Transwestern Commercial Services.
Transwestern manages five Irvine high-rises, including Irvine Center Towers and the Atrium.
Chaos ensued the week the post office stopped the afternoon service until Transwestern restarted it, Young said.
“There was a lot of mail piling up,” he said. “A lot of companies and law firms especially were complaining. Some companies had to use their own drivers to deliver afternoon mail to the post office.”
Other local property managers, including the Irvine office of Chicago’s Equity Office Property Trust, also are paying for second pickups at their buildings.
For Transwestern, the added costs could be as much as $19,000 a year.
“It’s an additional cost for a service that we were getting for free,” Young said.
The new postal fees come on top of other rising costs.
“With insurance rates on our buildings going up and utility rates higher than in past years, we have a lot of new costs coming down the pike,” Young said. “And when you look at the number of office buildings in Irvine, it’s a big influx of money for the post office.”
Postal Service officials said the change brings Irvine in line with the service the post office already offers everywhere.
“These free afternoon collections should’ve been removed two years ago and hadn’t been,” said Richard Maher, a Postal Service spokesman in Santa Ana. “So the Irvine post office,unlike every other post office in the country,was providing these second daily collection runs for free.”
In short, businesses were getting a free ride, Maher said.
“In Irvine we were covering part of a cost to do business for businesses,” he said. “The cost of doing what we were doing in Irvine isn’t built into the cost of postage. Our competitors charge for a service we were providing for free.”
It is “too early” to tell what the new fees would yield for the post office, Maher said.
Bruce MacRae, a spokesman for United Parcel Service Inc., said the mail change might spur new business for UPS.
“It’ll be interesting for me to check over the next few weeks to see whether our volume is going to go up as a result of this,” MacRae said. “Right now, the postal service has a lot of cost advantages over us. They don’t have to pay vehicle license fees, state or federal taxes like we do. They can’t get ticketed for staying too long in a loading zone.”
December’s shift created other headache for businesses: no more mail picked up from postal tubs left outside a drop box.
Security was behind the change, the post office’s Maher said.
“Identity theft has doubled within this past year, and nine times out of 10 that involves mail theft,” he said.
But John Wayne Airport area tenants have complained that the post office leaves behind tubs of overfull mail on mailroom floors for anyone to go through.
“Postal workers in those cases likely had a limited amount of space in their trucks if they were making one pickup a day,” Maher said.
The post office has no immediate plans to raise postal rates for office towers, Maher said.
“We plan to hold rates steady until 2006,” he said.
