Construction is about to begin on a long-planned Wal-Mart Supercenter in Orchards, on the south side of Northeast Fourth Plain Boulevard, east of 147th Avenue.
The 155,000-square-foot store is the first development in the Birtcher Business Center, which encompasses about 200 acres generally south of the Wal-Mart site. The overall Birtcher Business Center site includes three commercial properties that are under separate ownership from the larger project, including the 20-acre Wal-Mart property the retailer purchased a decade ago.
The project had been stalled for years due to the economic downturn and a bankruptcy of the larger property. A sign placed on the property in 2006 said a Wal-Mart is “coming soon.” The company this week confirmed construction is underway, and a spokesman said the store should be completed by next fall.
The new store is a further expansion for the world’s largest retail chain in Clark County, where it has made steady inroads in recent years. Wal-Mart this year opened a Supercenter in Battle Ground and two of its smaller neighborhood market stores in Vancouver.
Mark Childs, senior vice president of Portland-based Capacity Commercial Group, which is managing the site’s development, confirmed the Wal-Mart construction. He said the store will be a good kickoff for the larger site development that is about to get underway.
Roads next summer
“We’ve got over 20 acres available now and over 100 acres for which roads are going to be punched in this next summer,” he said. He hopes that construction on industrial buildings could start in late summer.
The Birtcher Business Center, one of the county’s largest industrial developments, will be configured into about a dozen parcels of five to 15 acres to accommodate manufacturing and distribution businesses, he said.
He sees demand for such parcels in the Vancouver area, where the vacancy rate for industrial property has dropped to 4 percent. “Across the marketplace, we’re seeing manufacturing companies can’t find what they are looking for,” Childs said.
The site’s property owners are California-based Birtcher Development Group, Wal-Mart, Portland-based Weston Investment Co. LLC, Vancouver-based Frances Keller Trust and 438 LLC of Vancouver. Approximately 18 acres of the original 218-acre site were sold to the U.S. Army in 2009 for a reserve training center.
The business center has a long and frustrating history, having been caught in the recession that wiped out demand for new industrial sites. It had been owned by the Keller family, which brought it into the city limits through annexation in 2003 and then sold it to developer Eastgate LLC. That company wound up in bankruptcy, and the bulk of the property, excluding the Wal-Mart site, ended up in foreclosure.
In July, the Vancouver City Council approved Wal-Mart’s plan to build the supercenter as part of the larger development. Under that agreement, the city scrapped an earlier requirement that Northeast 59th Street be extended 15 blocks, from 147th to 162nd avenues. Instead, developers will have to pay to extend the street as abutting properties are developed.
