Target Faces Committee, Plans Fayetteville Store

CEI Engineering Associates of Bentonville filed a large-scale development plan with the Fayetteville Planning Commission on April 6 to build a 124,767-SF Target store on 12.9 acres in the city’s CMN Business Park II.

The plan will go before a subcommittee on today and, if approved, from there to the full planning commission on May 14 for final approval.

The building will be located at the northeast corner of Steele Boulevard and Shiloh Drive, northeast of a Kohl’s department store that opened April 16.

Target said it will preserve 16.2 percent of the tree canopy on 1.7 acres of greenspace at the site. That includes 3.4 percent of existing canopy and 12.7 percent replacement canopy.

The city’s tree ordinance requires that 15 percent of the tree canopy be preserved. Kohl’s was allowed to bend that rule, which contributed to Fred Hanna losing his reelection bid as mayor and protesters opposing the Kohl’s construction and opening.

The current plans call for two 5,600-SF stores attached to the Target building that can be leased to other retailers. The site includes two out lots — 1.3 acres and 1.5 acres in size.

Kristin Jahnke, a spokeswoman for Target Corp., said Target has already announced all its store openings for 2001, but a Fayetteville store could be opened next year. She said it takes about 10 months to build a store.

Target is based in Minneapolis and refers to itself as a “upscale discount retail” chain. The company has 992 stores in 46 states. For the fiscal year ended Feb. 3, Target had sales of $1.26 billion.

The Fayetteville location will be one of Target’s smaller stores. Target has three store sizes: the traditional store, 125,000 SF; Target Greatland, 135,000 SF; and SuperTarget (which also sells groceries), 177,000 SF. Target also operates 266 Mervyn’s stores and 64 Marshall Field’s stores.