Spokane Teachers Credit Union, of Liberty Lake, announced this morning plans to open a new branch on the ground level of the Hutton Building, a downtown structure located at 9 S. Washington that STCU obtained through foreclosure last year.

STCU spokeswoman Traci McGlathery says the organization also plans later this year to move the bulk of its commercial lending operations to an upper floor in the seven-story building, from their current location in Schade Towers, at 528 E. Spokane Falls Blvd. The Schade Towers retail branch, however, will remain open.

STCU had held the loan on the Hutton Building and foreclosed on it last summer. Its board of directors decided last month to keep the building rather than put it on the open market.

The credit union plans a historic renovation of the structure, which was built in 1910, but McGlathery says the credit union doesn't have a cost estimate for those improvements yet.

The Hutton Building currently is 40 percent occupied, McGlathery says. That occupancy rate, however, will drop this spring when the Pacific Northwest Inlander newspaper moves from its 10,000-square-foot fourth floor space to a new building in Kendall Yards, just northwest of the city's core.

STCU will offer office space for purchase on some floors.

The ground-floor branch will be STCU's 17th overall. The organization also plans to develop a new Spokane Valley branch, which would be its 18th overall, on a 2.5-acre site it owns at the northeast corner of Mission Avenue and Mullan Road. That branch is expected to open in the first half of 2014, McGlathery says.