Warrenton – With its large tracts of flat land along U.S. Highway 101, Warrenton has become a magnet for businesses looking for highway access and room to spread out.

The latest is Home Depot. The national home improvement chain, whose closest outpost is 50 miles away in Longview, Wash., has plans in the works for a 26-acre site on the west side of Highway 101 at Dolphin Lane. But first, the property must be rezoned from residential to commercial.

The Warrenton Planning Commission will consider the corporation’s rezoning application April 19, according to Planning Director Carol Parker. If it’s approved by the planning commission, the request must still be approved by the city commission. After that, Home Depot will have to submit a site design application, which needs to be approved before construction could start.

Home Depot’s plans call for a 102,500-square-foot retail store and adjacent 28,000-square-foot garden center at the northwest corner of Highway 101 and Dolphin Lane, with a parking lot located to the west of the two buildings. The buildings will face the parking lot, with access from Dolphin.

Parker said Home Depot has submitted a subdivision plan to create lots on the acreage not occupied by its store. The lots could be sold to a commercial developer or developed by Home Depot, she said.

As part of the project, Home Depot will have to move the existing Dolphin Lane northward, realign it and pay to have a traffic light installed at its intersection with Highway 101. Two left-turn lanes will be created on 101, one for northbound traffic and one for southbound, and the existing Dolphin access to Highway 101 will be closed.

Parker said the traffic reconfiguration and signal installation stem from a traffic impact analysis that was part of an agreement reached between a corporation owned by Martin Nygaard and others (which sold the property to Home Depot) and the Oregon Department of Transportation, the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development and the city of Warrenton.

Thanks to a December 2005 amendment to Warrenton’s development code that imposes standards on retail developers, Home Depot will be required to construct an attractive building using varied materials and architectural details, and must include landscaping, shielded lighting and community amenities. Mechanical equipment must be concealed and pedestrian safety and access issues must be addressed.

If Home Depot’s applications are approved, construction could start this summer, Parker said.

Meanwhile, Ocean Crest Chevrolet has moved its car dealership from downtown Astoria to U.S. Highway 101 in Warrenton, and Lum’s Auto Center has announced plans to do the same.

A new 14,500 square foot Walgreens drugstore with a drive-through pharmacy window is nearing completion in Warrenton’s Premarq Center at the end of the Youngs Bay Bridge. It’s set to open in mid-May at 1625 E. Harbor Drive, according to Carol Hively, a corporate spokeswoman at Walgreens’ Deerfield, Ill., headquarters. She said the company plans to hire about 25 people locally, and invites anyone interested to go online to www.walgreens.com to apply for a job at the store. It is the 39th Walgreens to be built in Oregon. The chain operates 5,122 drugstores in 45 states and Puerto Rico.

Across Harbor Drive in Youngs Bay Plaza, Starbucks has leased space for a coffee shop with indoor seating and a drive-through window. The shop will be the anchor tenant in a 7,000-square foot building planned for the shopping center that will house five new retail stores. It will be built on the south end of the plaza on the Highway 101 side by Atlas Investments LLC of Portland, which owns Youngs Bay Plaza and other shopping centers in Oregon.

And across Neptune Avenue from Youngs Bay Plaza, the North Coast Fred Meyer is getting ready to start selling gas. Parker said a company representative came in Monday for a permit for the project, which was approved in 2000. Construction can’t start until the permit is granted. In the meantime, the site at the northeast corner of the parking lot is being prepared.

No word yet, however, on when or whether the nearby Costco Wholesale will move from south to a larger site in Clatsop County’s North Coast Business Park, on the east side of Highway 101, from its present location west of Fred Meyer.