$33.4-Million Mail Plant Approved for Oxnard Site

The U.S. Postal Service has approved funding for a $33.4-million mail processing plant to be built in a massive new business park in north Oxnard.

The Postal Board of Governors approved construction of the plant at an Aug. 2 meeting in Seattle, said Mark Bodycombe, a postal service spokesman. The plant would replace a smaller, outmoded facility on North C Street in Oxnard.

The new plant, which will handle mail from all ZIP codes beginning with the digits 930, will be the centerpiece of the McInnis Ranch Business Park, a 295-acre development that will include 50 to 100 tenants when it is completed in seven to 10 years, said Martin Menne, director of marketing for developer Sammis Co. of Irvine.

City officials and developers connected with the 1,600-acre Northeast Industrial Assessment District had feared that postal service budget cuts would delay or kill the plant.

‘Huge Project’

“This is a huge project,” Oxnard Mayor Nao Takasugi said. “We’re very happy about it.”

Completion of the 188,792-square-foot plant, one of 215 such facilities nationwide, is expected by 1990.

At 120,000 square feet, the current facility is already strained by the 507 million pieces of mail it is expected to handle this year, Bodycombe said. By 2001, the number is expected to jump to 815 million.

No new jobs will be created because the new plant will use more automated equipment to sort mail from Summerland on the north to Simi Valley on the south, Bodycombe said.

Postal officials were attracted to the McInnis Ranch site, one of six under consideration, because of its proximity to the Ventura Freeway, to which it will be connected by a new four-lane boulevard, and the site’s access to downtown Oxnard through a planned extension of Colonia Road, he said.