It has the potential to be one of the most spectacular development projects Boston has ever seen.

Real estate consultants working for the U.S. Postal Service have long talked up the possibilities of moving the giant South Station mail sorting plant to make way for a mega-project. The congested commuter rail hub would be able to add several badly needed tracks while making way for a multibillion-dollar air-rights development above.

Armed with a $32 million federal grant, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation is hard at work drafting a proposal to expand South Station and bid out the development rights for the air-rights above. With yet another year gone and no deal done, it’s fair to ask what in the world is holding things up here.

For its part, the postal service offered up a rather dismissive statement through a spokesman, noting that there no plans to move its South Station plant “at this time.”

Certainly the postal service has been glacially slow in acting on a proposal that might actually make it a little money, of all strange things, and give it a modern, far more efficient plant. Then again, maybe that is not all that surprising for what is still effectively a government operation that can’t ever seem to get out of the red.

But you also have to wonder whether old-time Boston politics may be once again making hash of what should-be a win-win-win situation for commuters, taxpayers and developers.

Scott Van Voorhis

Seventeen Years, Still No Deal 

Beyond organizational inertia, the biggest obstacle holding the post office back from moving to a new mail plant – and freeing up that valuable land next to South Station – has been the inability to nail down a relocation site.

It’s not for lack of trying. The real estate consultants hired by the postal service have spent years looking at different sites and running different scenarios behind various elected officials. It all sounds pretty normal – until you get to the fact that this highly unproductive search goes back to the final days of the 20th century and has focused on a relatively narrow stretch of city turf.

The post office first floated the idea of moving to a new location and selling its valuable South Station site way back in 1999, in a story broken by a long-since deceased commercial real estate reporter at the Globe.

Moreover, the effort appears to have almost exclusively focused on finding a 25-acre site in just one city neighborhood – South Boston.

Instead of expanding the search to other Boston neighborhoods, or for that matter, suburban locations, the brokers working for the postal service have doubled down on Southie.

Now brokers working for the postal service say they are moving closer to a deal for a site on D Street near the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, where traditional South Boston meets the Seaport.

We’ll see, for we’ve heard that one before.

I hit up James Travers with some of my questions the other day. The veteran CBRE/New England executive has worked for years on the postal service’s search for a new mail plant site. Given the postal service needs a 25-acre site with highway access, South Boston is a natural fit, Travers argued. Asked whether there would not be more options if the suburbs – or for that matter other parts of the city – were looked at, Travers was skeptical, citing the requirements.

OK, I don’t broker real estate deals for a living, but common sense would indicate that expanding the search range would only increase the options available. Especially when you are talking about a deal first publicly floated back during the Clinton Administration.

Sure, it’s not easy to find large development sites on 128 and 495, but they are hardly all taken up, either.

In fact, the postal service could take a page from one of its competitors, UPS, which manages to churn out big profits year after year without a big mail plant in Boston. Far from it – UPS’s central mail hub is all the way out past 495 in Shrewsbury, closer to Worcester than to Boston. And you can be sure that it is a lot cheaper to build out there than it is on the edges of downtown Boston.

Parochial Thinking

So why are the postal service and its real estate consultants so fixated on South Boston?

A good hunch is that City Hall and Southie pols wouldn’t take too kindly to the postal service jumping town and taking all those hundreds of relatively well-paid jobs with it.

Make no mistake, the postal service’s South Station plant is a major employer with a payroll of 1,600. It is on 24/7, three shifts a day.

The late, great Thomas M. Menino wouldn’t have stood for it. Nor can I imagine Mayor Marty Walsh – or for that matter, son of Southie U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch, whose mother was a postal clerk – letting the postal service skip town either.

But while such parochial thinking is to be expected, there is a real world price to be paid for it.

By now the postal service may very well have found a new site in the suburbs, if it hadn’t been so narrowly focused on Southie sites. In this alternative universe, the USPS would be gearing up to open a streamlined and efficient new mail plant in Norwood or Marlborough to replace its clunky, four-story operation at South Station.

Plans to expand the number of tracks at South Station would be finally ready to break ground, providing a badly needed boost to our state’s sad sack commuter rail service. Meanwhile, developers would be lining up to bid for the chance to build millions of square feet of new condos, hotel rooms, shops and corporate suites in a half a dozen towers.

And city officials would be drawing up estimates of the tens of millions in new taxes – and thousands of new jobs – that the air-rights development over the South Station tracks would generate.

Those development details aren’t imaginary, but rather part of a proposal being pushed by state transportation officials for expanding South Station and building over the new tracks.

But if the postal service doesn’t open its eyes to alternative beyond the same old Southie sites, the chances of any of this coming will remain just pure fancy.