DANA POINT : City Hall Fighting Plans for Post Office

If fighting City Hall is difficult for residents, taking on Uncle Sam may prove even tougher for Dana Point officials who are battling construction of a new post office.

The city has nothing against mail delivery. Rather, city officials argue that the new post office will take up 72,000 square feet of a planned downtown commercial area without producing any added city tax revenues.

City officials feel a sense of urgency because surveyors are already at work at the Coast Highway construction site. The contractor is about to break ground.

“That’s a pretty substantial chunk of property,” Councilwoman Eileen Krause said of the site. “It could nuke our chances for a commercial center there.”

Local architect Lynn Muir, who has lived and worked in Dana Point for 43 years, is leading the fight against the project.

“This belongs in an industrial area somewhere, not in the middle of our city,” Muir said. “It’s totally incompatible with the area, what will be the commercial center of Dana Point.”

The postal center is scheduled to be built in what is called the “couplet,” a 58-acre section of land wedged between Coast Highway and Del Prado on a bluff above Dana Point Harbor. The couplet is one of the areas targeted for redevelopment with hopes of luring businesses that could add to the city tax base.

While it would certainly serve the city and its residents, a post office would add nothing to city sales tax revenues, said Ed Knight, the city’s community development director.

“Through our economic development committee, we’ve identified sales tax revenues as an area where we’d like to see an improvement,” Knight said. “At the moment, we rely on our transient occupancy (hotel bed) tax for 31% of our revenues.”

Knight said the city staff had met with postal officials earlier on the matter, but a new meeting is being sought in a bid to postpone the start of construction.

Hector Godinez, the U.S. Post Office’s district general manager, said the government had spent 10 years looking for its Dana Point property. It would be very difficult to replace it somewhere else in the community, he said.

“Because the future of the area is so lucrative, nobody wants to divest themselves of any land on which so much more money could be made later,” Godinez said. “We had only one choice in Dana Point, so it was either that or nothing.”

Godinez said the government paid $3.7 million for the property in 1988 before the city was incorporated, and “we felt we were fortunate to get that.” The post office is looking for more land for a regional center in South County in San Juan Capistrano, Mission Viejo or the Santa Margarita area, Godinez said.

Dana Point already has a small post office on Coast Highway at Street of the Golden Lantern. Krause believes that office is more appropriate for a downtown location in the city.

“What they have planned is not a neighborhood post office, which I think is all we need,” Krause said.

Krause would like the government to suspend construction of the center temporarily until the city could further study redevelopment plans.

“I’d like to see them back off for a while, maybe just for a month, so we could zero in on the matter,” she said. “I just don’t want our hands to be tied by this.”

But Godinez said a construction contract for the post office has already been awarded to R.J. Lanthier Corp. of Poway.