After months of negotiations, the deal is apparently done.
“We are under contract,” Kenmore City Manager Frederick Stouder said.
Under contract, that is, to lease the former Kenmore City Hall to the U.S. Post Office. Stouder said he received notice last week that the appropriate federal officials had given their final approval to moving the Kenmore branch from its current location at 6513 N.E. 181st St.
The office essentially will move across the street to the temporarily abandoned city hall next to the Kenmore Village shopping plaza at 6700 N.E. 181st St.
The deal has been in the works for months and local officials optimistically had hoped the post office would be in its new home by November. From the city’s point of view, the idea behind the move was to keep a post-office branch within the city, as well as help out the King County Library system.
As has been previously reported, library officials long ago targeted the current post-office location as the home of a new Kenmore branch.
Stouder said he did not know when exactly the post office will move into the city hall space, but he is assuming the change will happen in January. Postal officials already have plans drawn up to renovate the former city space to their uses and those plans have been approved by the city, with the necessary permits issued.
When library officials first tabbed the Northeast 181st spot for their new location, the rub became that the post office had a long-term lease on its space. Had officials decided to stay put, they effectively would have put the library’s plans on hold until at least 2011.
Hoping to help out the library, city officials became involved. What followed was a long string of events that at one point included postal officials announcing they simply were going to close their Kenmore office.
Eventually, after several exchanges between city and postal officials, the plan emerged to move the post office into the former Kenmore City Hall.
Officials already had plans to vacate that facility, as a new city hall is rising up on 68th Avenue Northeast and should be open for business by the spring of next year.
In the meantime, anticipating the postal move to Kenmore Village, city operations temporarily were transferred to the second floor of the Schnitzelbank building on Northeast Bothell Way. The city formally opened for business there in October.
Regarding plans for the new library, system Director Bill Ptacek has said his organization is ready to make its moves as soon as the post office makes its move.
“As soon as they are out, we will begin demolition,” Ptacek said.
In a worst-case scenario, Ptacek was anticipating a ground breaking for the new library in January at the latest.
The library system awarded a roughly $4 million contract for construction of the new Kenmore branch in October. Ptacek said he expects construction will take about a year.
