MOYIE SPRINGS — A lease for a new Moyie Springs post office is expected to be signed in the coming days for a parcel directly west of City Hall.  

Since March, USPS has not had an official home after a lease renewal at its previous location did not occur, though the current site continues to operate temporarily. 

The lease is a fixed 10-year term beginning Jan. 1, 2026, with renewal options favorable to the city, according to Moyie Springs officials. USPS will pay the city an annual rental rate of $5,000. 

The post office will sit on a 1.894-acre lot. The U.S. Postal Service plans to install a prefabricated building on the 15,000-square-foot parcel, which was donated to the city by Idaho Forest Group.

Moyie Springs Mayor Geoff Hollenbeck said that the signing of the lease is imminent and estimated when the building could open.  

“Once we get approval from our attorney and their attorney, then we should be able to go ahead and sign,” Hollenbeck said. “I'm thinking it'll probably be early summer. It should go fairly quickly.” 

He added that the new location will improve safety for residents. 

“It’s only moving 200 yards, so it won’t be a big impact for the citizens,” Hollenbeck said. “Down on the corner here, it’s a terrible intersection. It eliminates our worst traffic hazard that we have in the city.” 

Hollenbeck said it was not guaranteed the town would keep its post office if a new site hadn’t been secured. 

“The biggest fear we had was that they would just say, ‘Oh, we don’t have any place in Moyie, just close it,’” he said. “It’s not just the city of Moyie that gets their mail here. It’s everybody out to the Montana line. If they don’t have a mailbox, then they come here to get mail.” 

Lease negotiations focused heavily on maintenance responsibilities. 

“A lot of it was terminology, because they put on there that, since we’re the landlord, we were responsible for the premises and had to deal with the property,” Hollenbeck said. 

“We didn’t want to be responsible for plowing and doing all this stuff for their parking lot, so we had to get that language hammered out to where it says the only thing we have to deal with is, if, say, a tree falls down in their parking lot, we have to go remove the tree. They’re in charge of doing all their other maintenance and we wanted in there to make sure that if they did any changes, they’d let us know ahead of time.” 

USPS uses a broker, Jones Lang LaSalle Brokerage Inc, who will receive a 4% commission on the lease value, totaling $2,000. 

“They go through a broker and that was a surprise to us because we got this bill for $2,000 saying you have to pay this broker and we hadn’t even dealt with the broker,” Hollenbeck said. “We were told, ‘The post office never deals directly. This is what they do for everybody.’ Well, not everybody has a government entity that has to answer to other people.” 

Hollenbeck said months have been spent finalizing the contract. 

“At the last meeting, I said, I’ve seen this so many times I’m kind of going cross-eyed,” he said. “I think everybody will be glad once the contract is signed.” 

“I think it worked out better than anybody would have anticipated. I was pretty naive when it first started, thinking this ought to go fairly quickly. I forgot we’re dealing with the federal government. Nothing moves quickly.”