Iona College plans to relocate the college mailroom to a building on North Avenue by spring of 2019, according to Director of Facilities Management Richard Murray.

Iona has been discussing the possibility of moving the mailroom out of Doorley Hall for a long time, according to Anne Marie Schettini-Lynch, senior vice president for Finance and Administration. The administration and the Board of Trustees are planning the move.

The college’s main concern regarding the mailroom’s current location is the amount of traffic around Doorley Hall due to trucks pulling in and out to deliver mail, according to Schettini-Lynch.

“We’ve really been focused on having the campus be more pedestrian-friendly,” Schettini-Lynch said. “When you look at the location of the mailroom and where the truck’s coming in, and if you’re walking past it, you’ll see all the time there’s a lot of traffic.”

Iona purchased property on North Avenue for the new mailroom. The building it bought used to be a restaurant, Iron Pizza Kitchen. It is located next to Loftus, Hales and Conese Residence Halls.

“I think it’s going to be more convenient for the students, [a] closer location,” Murray said.

The college had also considered moving the mailroom into a college-owned house, like the ones on President Street, according to Schettini-Lynch. The college decided against this because moving the mailroom into that area would have affected the college’s neighbors.

Mail services currently transports letters and packages from the mailroom in Doorley Hall to the smaller mailrooms in the residence halls. The letters are then inserted into individual mailboxes for the students, and the packages are left in the mailrooms. Students can access their personal mailboxes whenever they want, but they can only retrieve a package when someone is working a shift in his or her respective residence hall mailroom.

A new mail-delivery system will be put into place once the new mailroom opens. Mail services will continue to deliver letters to the residence halls, but it will not deliver the packages, according to Nancy Morano, director of Business Services. The new mailroom will hold onto the packages and students will have to visit the new mailroom to pick them up. Morano is now trying to set hours for the new mailroom.

“I think relocating mail services gives the staff and mail services the opportunity to make the system and the process more efficient,” Morano said. “The process that we have now, delivering it to the dorms and then the dorms having to staff the mailroom…it’ll just make it easier.”

Schettini-Lynch said the administration is trying to decide what to do with the current mailroom once the new location opens.

“We’re assessing various options. It’s kind of an awkward space,” Schettini-Lynch said. “We’re trying to figure out what could we put there, because it’s not conducive to a lot of thi