A Spokane company headed by prominent developer Dick Vandervert has cleared a 7.5-acre site just north of Wandermere Mall for a retail development project.


The company, Wandermere Investments LLC, is considering several options for the site, which likely will house retail tenants, says Dick Vandervert, part owner of Wandermere Investments. Vandervert declines to disclose what those options are, or the potential tenants that would occupy space there, until plans have been firmed up.


Wandermere Investments began clearing and leveling the site earlier this year, and essentially has completed that work. Vandervert says negotiations are under way with several potential tenants, and a site plan currently is being drawn up.


Wandermere Mall, which is located at the northeast corner of Hastings Road and U.S. 395, covers 15 acres and has more than 100,000 square feet of floor space. Its anchor tenants include an Albertsons supermarket, which occupies about 43,000 square feet of space, and a Rite Aide drug store, which occupies nearly 29,000 square feet of space. It opened in the late 1980s.


Rite Aid Corp., the Camp Hill, Pa.-based drug-store chain, has said that it likes to move older outlets into newly constructed, free-standing stores. Its store at Wandermere Mall is part of the malls strip center that faces U.S. 395. Vandervert says Wandermere Investments has been talking to Rite Aid about moving the drug store to the 7.5-acre property, but no agreements have been reached.


Vandervert also is part owner of Wandermere Mall through a separate partnership called Douglass-Vandervert Development. In 1990, that Spokane partnership announced that it had an option to buy the same 7.5-acre site that Wandermere Investments now owns, and filed plans with Spokane County to expand the mall onto that property, by adding 65,000 square feet of new retail space. Those plans never materialized.


Fred Meyer Inc., the big Portland-based chain, recently opened a 170,000-square-foot retail store at the southeast corner of Hastings and U.S. 395.