Crown West Realty LLC, which operates the huge Spokane Business & Industrial Park in the Spokane Valley, is refining plans for a $15 million commercial and light-industrial center on vacant land just south of the parks main entrance.


The center is to include a 59-room hotel with space for a 30-room future expansion, according to a preliminary site plan submitted to the Spokane County hearing examiner. Plans also call for an office building, a restaurant, a couple of multitenant retail buildings, and four large, multitenant warehouse buildings ranging in size from about 22,500 square feet to 110,000 square feet.


Richard Rollnick, president of Crown West, says the company hopes to begin work by this summer on the $5.5 million first phase of the project, assuming a pending zone change is granted, and to have the center completely developed within about three years.


He says the first phase is to include the hotel, which would be built along the main entrance to the park; a 12,000-square-foot, multitenant retail building, which would be built just east of the hotel; and the 110,000-square-foot warehouse building, which would be located at the southeast corner of the site.


Crown West plans to develop the hotel jointly with Hospitality Associates Inc., of Spokane, and it probably will be affiliated with the Country Inns & Suites By Carlson chain, Rollnick says. The chain is part of Carlson Hospitality Worldwide, which also operates the Radisson hotel chain, and a number of restaurant chains and other businesses.


Crown West has filed a zone-change request with the Spokane County hearing examiner that seeks to clear the way for the revised project. The zone change would convert the entire 21.5-acre site to the light-industrial (I-2) zone from the current, more restrictive community-business (B-2) and industrial-park (I-1) zones. A hearing on the zone change is set for April 16.


Everything weve got planned is currently permitted under the existing zoning, but it doesnt lay out right, partly because the property is split between two zones, Rollnick says. The zone change simply will allow the project to move forward under the proposed updated layout, which has the hotel being developed farther east of Sullivan than was planned before, he says.


Pentzer Development Corp., a subsidiary of Washington Water Power Co., sold the business and industrial park to Crown West about a year ago. Pentzer had disclosed in late 1994 that it was working on tentative plans to develop a commercial center on the vacant property along Sullivan. As part of that effort, it obtained a zone change for the site, to its current zoning from the heavy-industrial (I-3) zone.


Pentzer said it envisioned the community business-zoned portion of the site being used for professional offices, retail shops, a restaurant, and possibly a bank branch, partly to serve the more than 4,000 people who work in the business and industrial park. However, the divided zoning of the site ended up creating obstacles to the development.


Since then, the county commissioners have adjusted the countys industrial-zoning matrix to allow certain commercial uses in the light-industrial zone, which Crown West is seeking to have applied to its site.