Winter Park wrangles U.S. Post Office property

Winter Park will buy the Post Office property when the post office is done with it, or at least that’s what the city is negotiating.

On Monday the City Commission voted 5-0 for staff to move forward with a request that the United States Postal Service property at the northwest corner of Central Park not be put up for public bid. The Commission wants to be able to buy it before anyone else does, giving the city a plot of land half the size of a football field to expand the city’s downtown park.

“I think you’ve got pretty much universal support for that,” Commissioner Sarah Sprinkel said. When the mayor asked for a show of hands of residents in support of the decision, nearly all hands in the room went up.

But exactly when and how the city would go about acquiring the property was anybody’s guess. Though the struggling USPS has been undergoing structural changes, nobody knows whether the New York Avenue post office will close any time soon, Mayor Ken Bradley said.

Commissioner Steven Leary suggested it could take as long as 15 years before the city ever had a chance to buy the property and turn it into expanded parkland.

Commissioner Carolyn Cooper suggested that the city try to get an accurate appraisal of the post office as soon as possible for negotiation purposes.

“It’d be nice if we had an idea of what the property value is,” Cooper said.

But Bradley was quick to suggest that he didn’t want the city to have to pay much, if any money for the property, implying that if the post office were to close or vacate the space, it could be transferred to the city for a nominal fee.

“I certainly hope the property value for them is valued at a dollar,” Bradley said.

The property will already be stuck with a zoning change to parkland that the city enacted two years ago, Bradley said, making converting it into a park the obvious choice.

“It's either going to be a post office or it's going to be a park,” Bradley said, adding that he’d already been negotiating at the federal level with postal officials to try to engineer the city’s first right of refusal on the sale of the property.

“We've been in favor of this for years,” Bradley said. “I've worked infinitely with federal authorities on this. At the appropriate time and place the city of Winter Park will acquire that property.”