Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves offers city's assistance to find new downtown post office

As the Downtown Pensacola Post Office is set to close to make way for a nine story hotel, Pensacola Mayor D.C. Reeves is offering the city's assistance in finding the U.S. Postal Service a new downtown location.

Reeves said this week that he had a call with local Postmaster Christina Walker about help the city may be able to provide to keep a post office in the downtown core.

Reeves said Walker is going to put the city in touch with the Post Service's real estate office, which will be making the decision about any potential new location.

Earlier this month, the Postal Service sent letters to customers who had mailboxes in the downtown post office notifying them their mailboxes would be relocated to the East Hill Post Office on Davis Highway.

Post office closing: Downtown Pensacola Post Office is closing. Where your mail will go instead

Reeves said that may only be a temporary situation.

"I would not presume that means that (only operated the East Hill Post Office) is their plan in concrete moving forward and that they would just move there in perpetuity," Reeves said. "That has not been decided."

Reeves said he felt the city has a duty to offer whatever assistance it can provide in finding a downtown post office location.

"We aren't the landlord," Reeves said. "We aren't the Postal Service. There's no clear, direct line between the city's responsibility in this, but kind of like our issues with parking, some things are out of our control that I feel like I would regret just saying that's not our problem."

What’s next for the Downtown Post Office property?

Former NFL player and co-founder of Bear General Contractors Josh Sitton and his wife Kristen Sitton bought the property in 2019 with plans to renovate it, but those plans have now changed to selling the property.

In July, Pensacola architects Brian Spencer and William Brantley presented conceptual plans for a new nine-story, 159-room hotel on the property at the corner of Palafox and Romana streets.

The new tower would be built over the historic corner building that dates to the 1880s and is where most of the post office boxes are located. The historic building would be incorporated into the new nine-story building that would be 136 feet tall and feature a 161-space, seven-level parking garage in the rear of building.

The proposed plan calls for tearing down the annexed part of the building, built in the 1990s, that houses the customer service side of the post office.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Pensacola mayor offers help find new location for downtown post office