Advanced Input Devices To Construct New Building In Coeur D’Alene

Advanced Input Devices, an 18-year-old keyboard manufacturing company that employs 340 people in Coeur d’Alene, will construct a large facility in the next year.

The new AID plant will be located on 20.5 acres at the southwest corner of Highway 95 and Wilbur Avenue.

This ends some of the speculation regarding several properties owned by Hecla Mining Co. in the development formally called Silver Lake Center. This 145-acre parcel is on both sides of Highway 95 between Hanley and Wilbur avenues and includes Silver Lake Mall, Silver Lake Plaza (with Target, the empty Ernst building and smaller businesses along Canfield Avenue), the Hecla headquarters and other neighboring businesses on the west side of Highway 95.

With construction to start in the next few months and occupancy about a year afterward, the AID plant’s Phase I project will be an 85,000-square-foot building accessible by Wilbur Avenue and Mineral Drive.

All AID employees, now in 72,000 square feet in four buildings in Prairie Commerce Park (at the southeast corner of Highway 95 and Prairie Ave.), will be consolidated into the new facility. This will include those in the former Keystone Lighting building, which is being incorporated into the Prairie Shopping Center.

All of the involved properties are owned by Glacier Partners, comprised of Steve and Judy Meyer and Charlie and Susan Nipp of the Coeur d’Alene area. Steve Meyer was a founder of AID. The new building will not affect AID’s 30 employees at the circuit board plant in Priest River.

“All of the leases will expire when we move into the new building,” said Mike Wilson, AID vice-president of finance. “It’s pretty handy to have the same owners for everything. The new building will accommodate us very well. It’s specifically designed for our purposes.”

AID plans calls for two 20,000-square-foot additions to the southwest of the new facility when expansion is needed.

Now owned by a group of private investors, AID manufactures custom-made, peripheral computer components for “blue-chip” customers, Wilson said.

The current AID buildings, adjacent to booming new retail and service facilities, probably will attract new occupants to compliment the high-traffic use of the area.

A rumored new business in Silver Lake Plaza is OfficeMax, which would occupy 16,500 square feet in a new 40,000-square-foot building planned between Target and the empty Ernst Building. The office supply and computer chain has been in a construction frenzy, with about 700 stores in 48 states, Puerto Rico and Mexico and 200 stores planned for Japan.

Nearest OfficeMax stores are in Pasco and Yakima, although Spokane and Lewiston have been in the plan. Typical stores usually have 20 to 50 employees, depending upon whether they include the company’s FurnitureMax and CopyMax outlets.

The Coeur d’Alene facility evidently would contain other businesses in the new spaces. Stores that often accompany OfficeMax are The Sports Authority, Toys ‘R’ Us and MaxValu, a box-it-yourself supermarket.

Other former Hecla properties have been attracting interest in the real estate market.

South of the new AID property, an out-of-the-area bank is planning a new building for an acre site at the northwest corner of Highway 95 and Canfield Avenue. And California developers are planning a retail complex for 3.5 acres in a complimentary L-shape around the bank.

Just to the west, on the northwest corner of Canfield Avenue and Mineral Drive, a quartet of Hayden Lake investors has purchased two acres connecting to the AID property.

The new owners, who include Tomlinson-Black real estate agents Monte Risvold and Ron Branson, plan to construct an 8,000-square-foot professional office building in the next year. About 2.7 neighboring acres to the west remain available, Risvold said.

In the parcel south of Canfield and west of Mineral Drive, Coldwater Creek Co. has purchased about six acres for future development. About three acres south of the Environment Control building, directly across from the Hecla Building, remains available through Risvold and Branson. The only other available parcels are a six-acre piece between the Ernst building and Government Way and a neighboring 0.6-acre pad on Canfield Avenue near Eyemasters.

The June 12 closure of the Wells Fargo Bank on Sherman Avenue will be a blow to downtown Coeur d’Alene. Company officials hope the employees will be transferred to other area branches.

The 5,500-square-foot facility, built in 1964, will be for sale. It was built as a Bank of Idaho, became a First Interstate Bank in 1980 and was bought by Wells Fargo in 1996. Wells Fargo will install a merchant and consumer ATM in downtown Coeur d’Alene.

Although the bank also will close Spokane’s Shadle branch, those in Post Falls, Hayden, Sandpoint and on Appleway in Coeur d’Alene will remain open.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Nils Rosdahl The Spokesman-Review