Postal hub flies past Palmdale

Meanwhile, a fight against the hub may be just getting under way elsewhere.

The domestic-delivery hub, located in Oakland, will be relocated within two months to Reno, Nev., Postal Service representatives confirmed Wednesday.

Only a week earlier, Antelope Valley Congressman Howard P. "Buck" McKeon sent a letter to Postmaster General William Henderson recommending Palmdale Regional as the site for the hub.

McKeon's June 16 letter was sent the day after Larry Grooms, president of the Antelope Valley Greater Economic Alliance, discussed the Postal Service's search for a new hub with the congressman in Washington, D.C.

Grooms said he learned of the search "about three weeks ago. The day I heard it, Postal Service officials were at other airports in California looking at them" as possible hub sites.

Upon returning to Lancaster, he mailed information about Palmdale Regional and its neighboring cities to officials in the real estate division of the Postal Service, Grooms said.

The goal was to "make a strong case that the Antelope Valley will be a great place for this installation," he said Monday morning. "Our data will prove it has great north, south, east and west access to all over the state.

"Based on what we understand about their criteria, Palmdale would be hard to beat," Grooms said.

McKeon agreed, saying Palmdale Regional "has the capacity to land any craft, including the space shuttle. Landing conventional U.S. Postal Service flights would present no difficulty.

"Furthermore, Palmdale (Regional) Airport currently has no major airline traffic and, as such, congestion will be minimum for this project," the congressman wrote.

McKeon spokesman David Foy said it was his understanding the Postal Service's hub had been temporarily relocated to Reno but mail officials had yet to make a permanent selection.

The congressman "will continue to lobby on behalf of Plant 42," which is the home of Palmdale Regional Airport, Foy said Tuesday afternoon.

Less than four hours later, Los Angeles mail district spokeswoman Terri Bouffiou left a voice-mail message confirming that a permanent selection had been made.

"We have signed a contract already to locate that air hub in Reno," Bouffiou said. "It is an air hub to provide service to all areas west of the Rocky Mountains."

Because the service routes extended into Oregon and Washington, postal officials "were looking for a more central location than Southern California," she said.

Mark Saunders, with the Postal Service media relations group in Washington, D.C., said the agreement would become effective at the end of August.

"The Reno facility is all they're looking at. There is nothing in California they have an interest in at this point," Saunders said.

Earlier Tuesday, officials at the Postal Service's real estate division in Memphis, Tenn., declined to provide details about the search, other than to say it was never intended to be public.

"We don't know how the word is getting out," said one man, who declined to identify himself.

However, it would be his department's responsibility to oversee the signing of any contract for such an air hub, he said. It was his understanding that the Postal Service was still assembling the criteria upon which such a contract would be based.

Grooms said that was his understanding as well.

"This might be a case where one arm of the federal government didn't know what the other one was doing," he said Thursday. "But in terms of our interest, it doesn't sound good."

In fact, doing such business in private "sounds like politics at its worst," he added.

His conversations with postal officials indicated they also may be looking to identify a site for an international mail hub, which could be separate from the domestic one at Reno, Grooms said.

Given that, he would continue pursuing any opportunity to bring an international facility to Palmdale, he said.

On Thursday, the Associated Press reported that about 1,000 Reno residents turned out in opposition to their new mail-sorting hub at a Wednesday night meeting of the Washoe County Airport Authority.

The residents said the hub, at Reno-Tahoe International Airport, would bring loud, late-night planes and air pollution.

The planes, seven Boeing 727s, are the same type of planes the airport authority has lobbied air carriers to replace with quieter jets over the past 10 years. They would land and take off between midnight and 2 a.m.

Despite the opposition, airport authority trustees affirmed the relocation plan but agreed to ask the Postal Service to use quieter planes.

According to a report in the Reno Gazette-Journal newspaper, trustees were congratulated for winning the hub on June 7 by Brian Campbell, the president of a consulting firm hired in December to lobby airlines to increase service to Reno-Tahoe International.

Although the airport authority has signed a letter of intent with the Postal Service to open the hub on Aug. 28, a final contract will not be signed until sometime in July, the newspaper reported.