The Postal Service is opening a new Sorting & Delivery Center (S&DC) in the Miami metro area sometime this summer. It will be located in a new 140,000 square-feet logistics warehouse at 11150 NW 122nd Street (Building 7) in Medley, Florida 33178 (Miami-Dade County). The site has 12 acres and parking for 234 vehicles.

The new S&DC facility is part of the Prologis Miami International Tradeport Park, a state-of-the-art manufacturing and logistics hub that spans 126 acres with ten buildings totaling 1.7 million square feet. (Video here.)

According to the property flyer, Building 7 was completed in 2023. Major improvements took place during the summer of 2024. Leasing the facility was “spearheaded” by JLL, the real estate company that also manages USPS properties. When the lease was signed in October 2025, it was one of the largest industrial leases in Miami-Dade last year.

On the USPS Facilities Report, the facility at this address is called the Milam Dairy Carrier Annex; on the USPS website, it’s called the Milam Annex Medley Post Office (it has no services at this time). These, however, may be temporary names until the S&DC opens.

The name Milam Dairy comes from Marcus Alexander Milam. (1876-1940), a Miami pioneer and tycoon who established a successful Florida dairy farm. There’s also a school and state road named after him. And there’s already a post office branch with the name Milam Dairy, at 5600 NW 72nd Avenue.

In its 207 Report to Congress, issued in December, the Postal Service noted that “Almost all of these [S&DC] facilities are converted from existing, underutilized facilities.” That goes for nearly every one of the 150 or so S&DCs that have been created thus far. One notable exception is the new, leased S&DC in Pompano Beach, Florida, just 40 miles away from the new Medley facility, as discussed in this post.

According to a local union publication, the Medley S&DC will consolidate carriers from nine post offices: Hialeah Main, Hialeah Lakes, Hialeah Promenade, Miami Blue Lagoon, Miami Doral, Opa-locka Main, Miami Martin Luther King, West Carrier Annex, and Milam Dairy Annex.

There are seven other post offices with delivery units that are within a 30-minute drive from the S&DC — that’s the maximum, beyond which too much time gets added to the route. It’s possible they would be included in.the consolidation at some future date.

Here’s a list and map of the 16 post offices, with the nine on the union’s list is bold. (Note that the drive times are under optimal conditions. During the morning and afternoon rush hours, when carriers are going out to their routes and back, the times can be much longer, and in many cases, more than 30 minutes.)

Here’s a map of the S&DC and 16 post offices, with the nine on the union list in red, the other seven in blue. Note that both the West Carrier Annex and Milam Dairy Annex are located at 2200 NW 72nd Avenue, so only one marker shows on the map.

Source: Prologis flyer

The nine delivery units have a total of 230 routes, probably about 350 to 400 carriers.

That’s comparable to the new S&DC in Pompano Beach, which has 136,000 square feet and consolidated 250 routes — about 400 carriers — from five post offices .

The Medley S&DC is a big facility, but if it has only 234 parking spaces, consolidating 230 routes may be stretching its capacity. Perhaps the Postal Service has arranged for more parking. According to a Prologis flyer, there’s a 3-acre site adjacent to Building 7, originally intended for 56 trailers, that’s marked as “future expansion.” Maybe it will be used to provide additional parking.

There’s no indication how much this new S&DC will cost the Postal Service. The lease has to be expensive, and there are also the costs for outfitting it with sorting machines, carrier cases and perhaps charging stations for EVs. The longer distances between the S&DC and routes compared to between post offices and routes may end up necessitating adding more routes and more costs.

Some of these new costs will be offset by eliminating some clerk positions. Clerks at the post office do double-duty in retail and assisting carriers, which isn’t necessary once the carriers are gone.

After the delivery units are moved out, the post offices will have a lot of excess space, so it’s possible, perhaps likely, that the Postal Service will eventually reduce costs by downsizing, either by relocating to smaller, retail-only outlets or by closing some post offices. In those cases where the Postal Service owns the building, there may also be the revenue from selling the property.

Those changes, however, will not take place for some time. In the meantime, the Postal Service will be incurring a large new expense. Somehow, though, the Postal Service envisions saving money. As the lease announcement on the new S&DC says, “The deal was marked by USPS’s signing of a lease for the entire warehouse, aligning with their ongoing cost-cutting initiatives.”

= Steve Hutkins