The owners of Spokane Valley-based Spalding Auto Parts Inc. have formed Pull & Save Auto Parts Inc. and are developing a $3 million, 20-acre self-service vehicle salvage yard in Mead.

The new Pull & Save business, which will allow customers to come in with their own tools to remove vehicle parts for personal use or re-sale, could open as early as this fall, says Russ Spalding, who owns Spalding Auto Parts along with his father Max Spalding and Dave Kokot.

The salvage yard will be located near the northwest corner of Parksmith Drive and Market Street, Russ Spalding says. The company paid $2.3 million last fall to buy about 48 acres for the Mead facility from the estate of Jack Hessel, Spalding says, but it plans to operate on just under half of that land.

"The building of the north-south freeway took out three salvage yards in its process of being developed, so we felt there's a need up there," Spalding says.

Spalding Auto Parts started here in 1934 and operates on 50 acres at 2210 N. University, just north of Interstate 90 between Argonne and Pines roads. Its headquarters has both a Pull & Save yard with about 10,000 vehicles, as well as a full-service auto yard, where employees dismantle about 3,500 vehicles annually and salvage about 80 percent of the materials for sale to the public or other businesses. The company then crushes the rest and trucks it to Seattle for recycling.

"What's happening up north is it's a self-service yard only, and there will be no full service," Spalding adds.

The Mead site will be able to accommodate between 1,300 to 1,400 vehicles, Spalding says, and while the company will buy about 700 vehicles a month, it plans to maintain the overall level at up to 1,400. Because of the loss of North Side salvage yards, old vehicles needing to be sold for salvage "are, in our mind, still sitting in people's backyards not being processed," Spalding says.

Spalding Auto Parts employs about 190 people. The Mead Pull & Save business expects to start with about 12 staff hired when it opens and grow to 25 at that site after several months of operation.

Garco Construction Inc., of Spokane, is the contractor for the Mead development, which will include an about 10,500-square-foot retail and storage facility and a 6,500-square-foot processing facility for removing fluids, batteries, and antifreeze when vehicles are received.

Garco also designed the Mead site's two buildings, Spalding says, and the processing building will have a rack system to tilt vehicles for working on them and draining fluids. It also will have an electric-powered crusher inside that will be used to bundle cars into small blocks after they've been stripped essentially to the frames.