For the second time this year, the owner of the big Spokane Business & Industrial Park has announced plans for more development, this time to the north of the developed part of the park.


The owner, Spokane-based Crown West Realty LLC, says it plans to develop 82 acres of vacant property on the north end of its sprawling, 600-acre industrial and business park, which is located near Sullivan Road and Euclid Avenue in the Spokane Valley. Crown West already has sold a chunk of the proposed development site to a Spokane concern that plans eventually to expand there.


Brent Long, the industrial parks marketing manager, says Crown West plans to submit a site plan for the proposed expansion to Spokane County early next year. He says the expanded area, which would be called Spokane Industrial Park North, would be bounded by Trent Avenue on the north, Sullivan on the west, Flora Road on the east, and the industrial parks current northern border on the south. Long expects the county to act on the application within 60 days.


Plans call for Industrial Park North to have 28 lots varying in size from two to four acres each. Ten of those lots already have been sold to Inland Empire Distribution Systems Inc., a Spokane company that provides warehousing and other distribution help to manufacturers and distributors. Inland Empire Distribution, which already leases three buildings in the industrial park totaling 220,000 square feet of floor space, bought the 10 lots, totaling nearly 29 acres, for about $1.1 million. That land is located on the southwest corner of Trent and Flora.


Jim Ewers, director of marketing and sales at Inland Empire Distribution, says the company plans to build a large warehouse facility on that property, but wont do so for a couple more years. He declines, for now, to elaborate on those plans.


The planned expansion would be the second major development unveiled this year at Spokane Business & Industrial Park, which Crown West refers generally to as The Park. Last summer, the company began development of Crown Centre, a 21-acre, mixed-use commerce center located just south of the parks main entrance at Sullivan and Kiernan Avenue. That $20 million development is to include a large warehouse building, a retail building, a hotel, and several restaurants.


The proposed Spokane Industrial Park North, meanwhile, is expected eventually to include up to 16 industrial buildings and to be fully developed in about five years, says Long.


Its kind of a sleeper for us, he says, adding that Crown West began planning the development about nine months ago and expects to begin marketing it aggressively early next year.


The expansion will provide space for more modern, more specialized buildings than exist in the rest of the industrial portion of the park, much of which was built decades ago, says Long. Tenants or buyers might need buildings that are taller or have more loading-dock area than those in the older portion of the park, he says.


This gives us an opportunity to do a whole range of things, Long says.


Long says Crown West anticipates that the remaining 18 lots in the new development likely will be occupied by a combination of industrial, distribution, manufacturing, or warehouse users. He says Crown West is willing either to sell portions of the remaining 54 acres there, as it did with Inland Empire Distribution, or to develop parcels for tenants that would lease buildings there.


Altogether, the 600-acre Spokane Business and Industrial Park site has about 4.5 million square feet of business and industrial space, and companies there employ more than 5,000 people.


The park currently is comprised of three main areas. The largest one, known as Spokane Industrial Park, includes 59 buildings and is zoned for heavy-industrial use. A second, known as the Spokane Business Park and located just south of the industrial area, includes 22 buildings. It is zoned for office, light-manufacturing, and research-and-development uses, and offers tenants a campus-like setting with landscaping and walkways.


The third is the Crown Centre development that began in July. That two-phased commerce center, which is carved out of the industrial portion of the park along Sullivan, eventually will include more than 400,000 square feet of hotel, retail, commercial, industrial, and office space. A 105,000-square-foot warehouse building, one-third of which has been leased to McKillican American Inc., a wholesale building-materials distributor, nearly is complete. Construction of a 59-room Radisson Country Inn and a Maid OClover convenience store and gas station are expected to get under way soon, and construction of a McDonalds restaurant will begin next spring, Long says.


The planned Spokane Industrial Park North likely will resemble the Spokane Industrial Park area. Unlike in the rest of the park, the new development will allow metal buildings, which Long says would give users a more economical alternative to the typical concrete buildings required elsewhere in the complex.


Don Williams and Dale Bright, both of Tomlinson Black Commercial Inc., of Spokane, represented Inland Empire Distribution Systems in its land purchase, and Long represented Crown West. Taylor Engineering Inc., of Spokane, is completing the engineering work for Crown West for the expansion of the park.