Rehoboth post office annex moving

Years in the making, the U.S. Post Office’s Rehoboth Annex will soon be moving from its Forgotten Mile home to the Rehoboth Mall at the intersection of Routes 1 and 24.

Postmaster Tami Davidson said Dec. 26 she expects the move to happen in the next six weeks. The plan is move when there’s a holiday, she said, pointing to Martin Luther King Day, Monday, Jan. 15 or Presidents Day, Monday, Feb. 19.

Davidson said the post office has been using the 7,000-square-foot space in Rehoboth Beach Plaza for the last 19 years. She said the new 10,000-square-foot annex will be located in what used to be the mall’s food court, accessed through double doors near the property’s Route 24 entrance.

With the owners of the Forgotten Mile property seeking to redevelop the property, Davidson said the ultimate reason for the move is space.

A number of years ago, the Rehoboth annex absorbed the post office’s Lewes annex, once located at East Savannah Road and Massachusetts Avenue before it was torn down and replaced with Denniston Place.

Davidson said that consolidation brought more people to the Rehoboth annex with no expansion in size.

Davidson said the population for the area the annex serves encompasses Indian River Inlet, Dewey, Rehoboth, Lewes, Milton and Millsboro. She said with 70 employees, the annex is a three-shift operation that sorts mail for 40 routes, with more routes expected in the coming years.

Davidson said the post office has also contracted with delivery and online retail companies, such as Amazon, FedEx and UPS, because those companies don’t have the infrastructure to deliver to all the individual houses.

“We’re committed to delivering to every single house,” she said. “It’s cheaper for those companies to drop off packages and have us deliver them.”

The Rehoboth Mall is owned by Baltimore-based Cordish Companies, which could not be reached for comment.

According a company website with mall leasing information, the mall area, which includes the contiguous space from Walmart to Rite Aid, Chevy Chase Bank and the restaurants along Route 1, is a total of 259,000 square feet and has an average daily traffic of 73,000 vehicles. The website says there are nearly 60,000 people within a 10-mile radius of the mall.