BANGOR – It’s official. After months of speculation, confirmation came Tuesday that Target is coming to Bangor.

Construction on a 125,000-square-foot Target store is slated to begin next spring, according to project developer John Corbett of W/S Development Associates LLC, headquartered in Chestnut Hill, Mass.

Corbett said that the Bangor store, scheduled to open in the spring of 2004, is one of several Target stores planned for Maine. He declined, however, to divulge where those stores would be located.

According to Target’s Web site, the national department store chain operates 1,148 stores in 47 states.

The chain, which opened its first store in Minnesota in 1962, was the first retailer to offer well-known national brands at discounted prices.

The Bangor store will be the company’s second in Maine, Corbett said. The other Maine store is located at 200 Running Hill Road in South Portland.

“We certainly are delighted with the opportunity to work with them during the construction project and in the future,” Jonathan Daniels, the city’s business and economic development director, said Tuesday.

“For a community to be able to land a Target certainly says something about the continuing vitality and strength of the retail market in this region,” he said.

According to Daniels, the Target and a proposed Wal-Mart Supercenter will bring the amount of active retail space in the Bangor Mall area to nearly 3 million square feet.

The Target Store will be constructed on a 12-acre parcel next to The Home Depot, Alton M. Palmer, vice president of Gorrill-Palmer Consulting Engineers Inc., said during a planning board meeting earlier this month.

Based in Gray, Gorrill-Palmer is providing civil engineering and submitted the site plan application for the Target store on behalf of the developer.

The Target store site is bordered by Home Depot, Longview Drive, Stillwater Avenue, the Ski Rack, McQuick’s and a city-owned lot at the corner of Hogan Road and Stillwater Avenue.

The tenant of the proposed “big box” store had been the topic of speculation for the past several months.

During a planning board meeting earlier this month, Palmer declined to reveal the identity of the retailer that would occupy the building, telling board members that it was his practice not to announce projects but rather to leave that privilege to the future occupants.

Palmer did say that the proposed retail store represented the second part of a two-phase project first proposed in 1997, when the construction of a Home Depot store was approved.

While plans for the land not used for The Home Depot initially called for a 51,000-square-foot building, additional land was acquired and the size of the proposed second building was increased.