The Phoenix Business Journal is reporting that the Postal Service will open a new Regional Processing and Distribution Center in Phoenix later this year.
The Phoenix RPDC is located in a 450,260-square-feet building in the the Fairway Commerce Center at 12250 W. Corporative Drive in Avondale, a suburb west of Phoenix.
The Postal Service has signed a 10-year lease, April 1, 2024, with four renewal options and a right of first refusal to purchase the facility, according to Maricopa County land documents.
According to Phoenix Business Journal, the Denver-based Westfield Co. Inc. developed the Fairway Commerce Center after acquiring about 30 acres for $17.5 million in 2022.
This will be the fourth RPDC installed in a newly leased building, the others being in Atlanta, Charlotte, and Indianapolis. Most of the other 60 RPDCs are being located in currently operating P&DCs owned by the Postal Service.
Like other RPDCs, the new Phoenix facility will handle outgoing mail including letters, flats and packages, as well as incoming package operations for the region.
According to a USPS response to an information request on July 1, 2024, initial operations for package sortation begin September 2024. In a USPS notification to unions and management last week, the Postal Service says the target date for opening the Phoenix RPDC is October 2024.
The notification indicates that the facility will initially have five Single Induction Process Sorters (SIPS), a High Speed Tray Sorter (HSTS), and a Flex Rover Sorter (FRS). Some in the future, it will also have a smaller version of the Matrix Regional Sorter (MaRS).
The Postal Service says no existing facilities in the area are closing, so the RPDC will presumably consolidate some operations (outgoing mail and packages) from the area’s P&DCs and convert them to Local Processing Centers, which handle incoming local mail and packages for local ZIP codes. These P&DCs may eventually also house Sorting & Delivery Centers.
The impacted facilities could include the Phoenix P&DC (4949 East Van Buren St.), the West Valley P&DC (620 North 47th Ave. in Phoenix), and the Tucson P&DC (1501 South Cherrybell Stra).
The Postal Service has not conducted Mail Processing Facility Reviews (MPRFs) for any of these facilities, and it may not do so. In other cases where a MPFR was not done, the Postal Service has told the PRC that it’s not necessary to do such a study if a consolidation does not involve moving “all originating and/or destinating distribution operations from one or more Post Offices/facilities into other automated processing facilities in different service areas” (italics added). That may prove to be the case with the Arizona P&DCs as well.
This may also help explain why the creation and launch of Phoenix RPDC has not been put on pause, while most of the 59 consolidations for which a MPFR has been done are currently on hold.
— Steve Hutkins
(Featured image: Fairway Commerce Center. Source: Whiting-Turner)