Home Depot is coming to Maricopa.

The Atlanta-based, big-box, home-improvement chain has confirmed with the city its intention to open a store on Stonegate Road between Maricopa-Casa Grande Highway and Alan Stephens Parkway on the city’s southeastern side.

The world’s largest home-improvement retailer, with more than 2,300 stores across North America, anticipates opening its Maricopa store in spring 2024.

“This is a really exciting day for Maricopa,” Mayor Nancy Smith said. “It’s absolutely amazing that this is coming. People who have any type of projects at home now can go to this store and receive any of the products that they need that come from a big store like this.”

Home Depot will submit building plans to the city over the next three months. The average construction time for a Home Depot from ground-breaking to opening is typically 10 months, a company spokesperson said.

Smith said it has been a long time coming. Discussions with Home Depot began when her husband, Tony Smith, was Maricopa mayor 15 years ago.

“I was just talking with Tony this morning after reading the city manager’s confirmation email and they had a place picked out,” Nancy Smith said. “They were very serious. It had taken a lot of work to get them interested way back in 2008 when we were that much smaller and that much newer.”

And then, the Great Recession hit.

“They were serious about coming and then they had to pull out here and really out of all of their new developments across the country,” she said. “That was disappointing.

“So, you can see starting from there to now it’s been a 15-year endeavor to get them back, so I consider that a huge success.”

City Manager Rick Horst and city staff “really worked it hard,” Smtih said, as did the mayor and City Council.

In 2009, Brad Hinton, then a permit official with the city, confirmed the home-improvement retailer got site approval from City Council in mid-2008, but did not submit construction drawings.

Construction plans must be renewed with the city every six months if the project has not started or been completed, so the project died at the time due to the recession.

Home Depot filed pre-application paperwork with the city early this year and the process began anew. A pre-application is the first step in the formal permitting process, submitted prior to submitting formal planning and zoning application, and includes a meeting with the project’s representatives and various city staff from Planning and Zoning, Building Safety and Fire, Engineering and other divisions or departments.

“I got the impression from my discussions that it’s not going to be any type of slow process,” the mayor said. “They’re going to want to open as soon as possible. I don’t anticipate any significant delays unless, of course, product is not available for the build.”

Smith, when listing her hopes for Maricopa in 2023 for an InMaricopa story in January, had landing Home Depot or Lowe’s high on her top 10 list for the coming year.

She acknowledged the store will have much more than lumber and tools and won’t be just for the guys.

“My husband tries to keep me out of Home Depots because they have a lot of things I can use for crafts,” she said with a laugh. “Right now, I’m looking forward to having the location where I can go find a significant selection of plants. That’s something I’ve been working on, and we don’t have a place to go buy plants. So, I’m excited about that.”

Home Depot corporate officials in Atlanta were not immediately available to respond to InMaricopa’s request for comment.

 

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