ORANGE COUNTY BUSINESS : Post Office Buys Room to Grow

The Postal Service has made a New Year’s resolution: By the end of 1992, it will deliver county-postmarked mail more efficiently.

To fulfill that promise, the service has bought a 230,000-square-foot industrial building on more than 17 acres in Anaheim, where it plans a new regional distribution facility.

The facility, scheduled to begin operating by the end of this year, will lighten the load at the Santa Ana Field Division--now the county’s only mail-processing plant.

After advertising in local newspapers for bidders, the federal government Monday bought the one-story building on East La Palma Avenue for $13 million.

“It is one of the biggest industrial transactions in Orange County in over a year,” said Brian Corrigan, a broker with the Anaheim office of Scher-Voit Commercial Brokerage Co. The brokerage represented both the Postal Service and the seller--Warner-Lambert Co., a New Jersey-based manufacturer of health-care products.

Eventually, the service plans a third distribution facility in unincorporated Aliso Viejo between Laguna Hills and Laguna Niguel. Construction on this South County clearinghouse is expected to begin this summer and conclude by the fall of 1993.

The 5,000 employees at the Santa Ana division will be divided among the three facilities, said Hector G. Godinez, general manager and postmaster of the Santa Ana plant.

“New automation and computerized equipment make it possible for us not to increase the staff,” he said.

Godinez said more processing plants are needed to handle the burgeoning volume of county mail. In 1991, the Santa Ana division processed 2.85 billion pieces of mail--almost double 1985’s 1.5-billion total.

Also, the county’s traffic increase underscores the need for more than one distribution center, through which the county’s 26 local post offices funnel their mail, he said.

“The traffic is disastrous in the evening,” Godinez said. “Sometimes we get the mail too late (from post offices) to get it on evening flights to the East Coast.”

But within two years, all of the county’s post offices should have distribution facilities nearby. “We strategically placed (the plants) equal distances from each other to cover the three areas in which we have the greatest volume of mail,” Godinez said.