MURRIETA ---- The developer of The Orchard-Stone Creek shopping center announced this week that a SuperTarget plans to open there next year, bringing with it more than 900 jobs and about $1.5 million in annual sales tax revenues to the city.

The foundation already has been laid for the 179,862-square-foot SuperTarget building within the center, which sits just north of Clinton Keith Road and west of Interstate 215. The SuperTarget will offer everything the discount retailer typically sells as well as groceries and pharmaceuticals.

Allan Davis, president of the development company Retail Development Advisors, says that a 28,000-square-foot Marshall's clothing store and a 14,469-square-foot Walgreens also will be added to the year-old shopping center.

Currently, a juice joint, coffee house, nail salon, sandwich shop, bank and a lumber/home improvement store call the largely desolate 460,000-square-foot shopping center home. The center is located at ground zero of a drastic reconstruction effort that will revamp the Interstate 215 on- and offramps at Clinton Keith Road.

Davis said earlier this week that he is working to bring in more shops, but declined to say who he has been in communication with. Retail Development Advisors has invested as much as $140 million in the center, which included widening Clinton Keith Road and the construction of the Linnel Lane Bridge. The bridge is part of the effort to redesign the freeway access routes and is expected to be complete around the time the SuperTarget opens.

"We think with what (Target) is offering there will be a tremendous draw for our shopping center," Davis said. "Mostly smaller tenants want to know there's going to be an anchor store like a Target to draw people so that they can successfully do business."

When the center is complete, Murrieta could pull in as much as $1.5 million in sales tax annually, and another $250,000 in property tax, said city Economic Development Director Bruce Coleman.

Additionally, Coleman said the project could keep some 1,500 construction workers busy and, once the stores open, an anticipated 900 to 1,000 jobs will open to residents.

"This is just the beginning of some major other activities that are going to take place in that area," Coleman said. "This is a substantial project and it's a substantial investment and it starts to show what the I-215 corridor is going to evolve into."

The Murrieta store will open a handful of months after the opening of another SuperTarget this fall a little more than five miles up the freeway off Newport Road in Menifee, said Target spokeswoman Anna Goeppinger. Currently, there are only three SuperTargets in California, the closest of which is in Moreno Valley.

Target Corp. already has a store in Murrieta on California Oaks Road, and the corporation is considering opening another standard store at the site of the The Regency, a shopping center planned along Winchester Road where the extension of Clinton Keith Road will eventually intersect.

"It's not uncommon for two stores to be within five miles of each other," Goeppinger said. "That's kind of (Target Corps.) spacing in suburban areas."

Business people at The Orchard said a SuperTarget would be a "super" addition to the center.

"Everybody is looking for more tenants to come in," said Paul Tran, owner of Stone Creek Nail Salon. "I say, Yeah, OK. SuperTarget come.'"

Chrissy Erickson, who'd just come out of the nail salon, said she hopes that one day a Nordstrom would open in the city. Then she'd have it all, she said.

"A Nordstrom, SuperTarget and Starbucks," she said. "What else do you need?"

Contact staff writer Nelsy Rodriguez at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2626, or nrodriguez@californian.com .

Concerned One wrote on Jul 3, 2008 5:34 PM:On one hand it's good to see a business coming to town. But, retail? Murrieta does not need another retail boondoggle. And 900 jobs? Again, good news but what kind of jobs? Sorry to be so negative, but somebody at City needs to look ahead a little. They've been stumbling over their own feet for too long. Regards, C-1.

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