Huntwood preps for huge move

One of the Spokane area’s largest manufacturers, Huntwood Industries, expects to complete construction of Liberty Lake’s biggest industrial building within a year, the company said Friday.

Huntwood owner Tim Hunt said the new building will employ 800 workers, up from 700 now, after the wood-cabinet manufacturing company moves operations from the Spokane Industrial Park to Liberty Lake.

“It’s going to be a huge move,” Hunt said Friday, the same day that more than a dozen concrete trucks started pouring the first slabs of the plant’s main floor. “But we’ve got a great group of employees who will make it happen.”

Huntwood also has several dozen employees across the country in sales offices.

Haskins Construction, of Spokane Valley, is in charge of the massive project, which will create a 490,000-square-foot facility, plus more than 900 parking spaces on property south of the freeway at the corner of Molter and Appleway roads.

Work on the factory started in the spring. Over the next three months, the project will use about 18,000 yards of concrete, one of the largest projects of its kind in the area, said a spokesman for Spokane Rock Products, which is hauling the concrete.

“It’s one of the largest concrete projects ever in Spokane County,” said Jim Clarizio, a supervisor at Spokane Rock Products.

The Hunt family, which started Huntwood Industries in the late 1980s, paid close to $2.7 million for 84 acres of undeveloped land formerly owned by Agilent Technologies, also in Liberty Lake.

The building, once finished, will easily be the largest commercial or industrial property in Liberty Lake, officials for that city said Friday.

The property tax benefit to Liberty Lake won’t be known until after Spokane County assessors value the site, sometime after the company moves in next year.

Adding to that assessment will be millions spent by the company on new assembly equipment, Hunt added.

“It’s going to be a very modern facility,” he said.

He declined to detail the cost involved in the Liberty Lake project. Even after the move, the company expects to keep a group of workers at the industrial park for operations best done there, he said.

Hunt said the company decided to expand to Liberty Lake in part because the Agilent land was affordable and ideally located. “The people at the City of Liberty Lake have also been very helpful and supportive,” he said.

“Plus, we wanted to keep our plant close to our employee base,” he added.

Driving the expansion has been the company’s phenomenal sales growth, said James Hunt, Tim Hunt’s cousin and project manager for the Liberty Lake site. The bulk of the company’s cabinet sales are in the Western United States, and especially in California, Arizona and Colorado, he said.

Driving the perimeter of the construction site in a Jeep, James Hunt needed about 20 minutes to travel the distance back to his starting point. From the east wall to the west wall, the building could hold nearly two football fields, with the same distance from north wall to south wall.

“We’ll need a lot of space to make 1,000 cabinets a day,” he said. The property will also serve as shipping dock, central office and warehouse for materials, finished goods and equipment.