Construction of a new Home Depot store at the former Shopko site on Spokane’s South Hill could begin as early as this spring, with a possible grand opening by summer 2025, a recently filed State Environmental Policy Act checklist on file with the city of Spokane shows.

The checklist, submitted by Fresno, California-based engineering company Lars Andersen & Associates Inc., follows a pre-development application filed with the city in August that shows an estimated construction value of $20 million.

Preliminary planning documents, which don't list a contractor or architect for the  project, call for the demolition of the roughly 102,000-square-foot former Shopko building, which has been vacant since 2019, followed by the construction of the new 134,000-square-foot Home Depot store.

About 200 people will be employed at the new store, the SEPA checklist shows.

Located on a 13-acre site at 4515 S. Regal, near the southeast corner of 44th Avenue and Regal Street, the new home improvement store will include 108,000 square feet of retail space and a 26,000-square-foot garden center, according to the SEPA checklist.

The new store also will include a loading dock and vehicle and equipment rental areas. Much of the existing parking lot will be reused following upgrades, the SEPA checklist shows, with site plans calling for over 500 parking stalls.

Landscaping improvements include two stormwater basins and the removal of about 70 trees, which will be replaced with new vegetation and ground cover, the SEPA checklist shows. A 10-foot-high wall along the southern boundary of the property will help reduce noise for some residential and commercial properties south of the building.

SHS Building LLC, a Phoenix-based real estate investment company, purchased the land for $10.5 million nine years ago, tax records show.

As previously reported by the Journal, Home Depot scrapped similar plans in 2008 for a new store and garden center just southeast of the Shopko building due to objections by some neighborhood residents and building restrictions that limited the footprint of a big-box store to 100,000 square feet at that site.