Two-year-old plans for a new office tower in downtown Spokane appear to be dead in the water following a decision by property owner K. Wendell Reugh to step back from the project, which at one time had an estimated cost of $50 million.


I think there is no project right today, until we find someone who can take the risk. Were still working to resurrect it, says Larry Soehren, vice president of Spokanes Kiemle & Hagood Co., which has been a development consultant to Reugh and was the designated leasing agent and property manager for the proposed building.


Soehren says, Wendell has decided at this point in his life that he really shouldnt be taking this risk alone. Instead, he says, Reugh is interested in exploring any of a number of other options involving his downtown property where he had hoped to develop the tower, including using the property as equity in a partnership venture to build a tower or leasing it or selling it to some other developer.


Were trying to work through that with him, Soehren says.


Reugh couldnt be reached for comment. He owns most of the block bounded by Howard and Stevens streets and Riverside and Sprague avenues, where the office tower was expected to be constructed.


Plans originally had called for the tower to have 19 stories, include 232,000 square feet of office space atop a five-story parking garage and a main floor of retail shops and restaurants. As envisioned, a spire extending up from the towers Riverside roof line was expected to make the building the highest structure in downtown Spokane. Soehren says, though, the project was scaled back this past summer to an eight- or nine-story structure with around 120,000 square feet of office space, due to cost and market concerns.


Reugh and Kiemle & Hagood formally unveiled plans for the building in July 2001, saying they hoped to begin erecting it early this year and to complete it in the summer of 2004. That timetable later was pushed back, though, due to a lack of tenant commitments, with construction not projected to begin until 2003 at the earliest. Despite that reprieve, lingering uncertainties about when or if the current buildings on that block would be demolished have prompted some businesses that leased space there to move elsewhere.


Thompson Vaivoda Associates, of Portland, designed the proposed office tower. Hoffman Construction, of Spokane, was named to be the general contractor on the project.