Wal-Mart has filed plans to expand its existing Lawrence store into a Supercenter that would include a full-service grocery department.

The world’s largest retailer filed a rezoning request with the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Department that would allow the company to expand its store, 3300 Iowa, to 208,492 square feet from the current 121,856 square feet.

Keith Morris, a spokesman for the company, said about 40,000 square feet would house a grocery department. The rest of the addition would allow existing departments to be enlarged and aisles widened.

“We have gotten to the point that we can’t operate the way we need to in that small store,” Morris said. “We have a problem out there because we’re overcrowded.”

The company is aiming to have the approximately $5 million expansion completed by spring 2006. Morris said the addition of the grocery department would roughly double the store’s current employment of about 200 people.

The expansion is part of a project that would include Crown Automotive moving its Crown Chevrolet-Oldsmobile and Crown Toyota dealerships into the vacant Payless Cashways building, which is south of the current Crown site. Wal-Mart, in turn, would purchase much of the property where the dealerships are located to give the retailer room to expand. Wal-Mart also would purchase some of the Payless property for a bigger recycling center.

Attempts to reach Miles Schnaer, president of Crown Automotive, were unsuccessful.

The project doesn’t affect Wal-Mart’s plans to build a traditional Wal-Mart at the northwest corner of Sixth Street and Wakarusa Drive. City commissioners have rejected those plans, but Wal-Mart has filed several lawsuits objecting to the city’s denial.

“We’re still committed to that project,” Morris said Tuesday.

Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commissioners are scheduled to hear the South Iowa Street rezoning requests at their June 23 meeting.

Most of the existing Wal-Mart and Crown property is zoned for retail uses. The Payless property would require rezoning, because current zoning only allows a home improvement center to operate on the site.

“There is obviously not a big demand for that type of use at that site, especially now that Home Depot has opened,” said Todd Thompson, a Lawrence attorney representing Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart has filed plans with city officials to expand its existing store, 3300 Iowa, by 86,636 square feet and add a grocery department. The expansion will be on the south end of the building.

Thompson said he was hopeful the expansion project would not become embroiled in the type of controversy the company had experienced with its Sixth Street and Wakarusa Drive proposal.

“I think there is an awful lot this project could bring to the community,” he said.

Thompson said plans called for traffic improvements to the store’s entrance at 34th and Iowa streets and removing a “hazardous” frontage road that serves the development. The area’s overall appearance would improve, he said, because the Payless building, vacant since 2001, would be renovated.

The plan, though, creates concern in the city’s grocery market.

Jim Lewis, owner of Checkers Foods, 2300 La., said he wasn’t sure the city could absorb another grocery store.

“Lawrence is way overstored for its population,” Lewis said.

A Wal-Mart Supercenter could make it more difficult for some existing stores to survive, he said, but Lewis wasn’t concerned about the viability of his independent supermarket.

“I’m not sure people want to buy groceries and wait in line to do it,” Lewis said. “That’s what happens sometimes in the big-box stores. People may be willing to wait in line to buy a TV, but they don’t want to do that for groceries.”

As part of its filings, Wal-Mart submitted a market study that determined the city could absorb an additional 500,000 square feet of retail space during the next five years, including about 100,000 square feet of new grocery space.