The new office opened Wednesday in the Stonegate Village Center
shopping center southwest of Lincoln Avenue and Jordan Road. The
Stonegate branch is expected to lighten the load on Parker’s only
post office at Dransfeldt Road and Pony Express Drive. The office
is one of the busiest in the nation, said Skip Bent, delivery
supervisor.
“We’d like to have one up there in Stonegate and another one
down in the Stroh Ranch area. That would relieve a little of the
burden here at the post office,” Bent said.
The new branch, which moved into the former location of Ranch
Bikes, will act strictly as a satellite office and focus on mail
and package delivery. A Hallmark store in Cottonwood operated a
contract post office a few years ago before it closed, and all of
those customers now have to travel to the Dransfeldt and Pony
Express location
“We want to get the customers used to driving two blocks from
their home instead of driving out of their way,” said Bent, a
longtime post office employee and Parker resident for 27 years.
“The contract station is definitely for people in the Stonegate
area. It will help us a ton.”
The United States Postal Service moved the post office from East
Parker Square Drive to the northwest corner of Dransfeldt Road and
Pony Express Drive eight years ago. While the building is much
larger than the previous facility, it is struggling to keep up with
the increase in population.
The office serves every resident with a Parker mailing address
and processes an average of 750,000 pieces of mail on Monday alone.
There are roughly 80,000 people living in Parker’s service
area.
The lobby’s Automated Postal Centers, which allow customers to
mail a package without waiting in line, bring in more revenue than
any others in the entire country including New York, Bent
said.
Although the Dransfeldt and Pony Express facility is not yet at
full capacity, the postal service is taking a proactive approach to
manage rapid growth in the Parker area.
“We had 23 routes at the beginning and now we have 54 routes. We
could add another 20 routes without any (physical) expansion,” Bent
said. “The growth has been steady. We add four to five new routes
each year.”
There are typically 600 deliveries for each route, which
translates to an average of 3,000 new deliveries per year. At that
rate, Parker will need another branch in the next few years. The
postal service is now researching the Stroh Ranch area and its
viability for an additional branch, Bent said.
Contact Chris Michlewicz at
cmichlewicz@ccnewspapers.net