AUBURN – Plans for a Great Falls Plaza parking garage, a hotel and smaller, separate bus station across from the Auburn Esplanade apartment building goes before the city’s Planning Board on Tuesday.

“The site just requires planning approval at this point,” said Planning Director David Galbraith. That approval would let developer Platz Associates begin designing the six story, 100 room hotel and let the city begin designing the parking garage.

The Auburn Planning Board meeting is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. Tuesday in Auburn Hall.

Plans initially placed the garage in the center of Great Falls Plaza, across from the Esplanade, with an attached bus station. The center of the plaza is now reserved for building development, with plans for a new hotel along Turner Street. The 330-space parking garage would be tucked away in the Great Falls Plaza lot with its back to the Maine Central Railroad tracks.

The new bus station would no longer be part of the garage. It would be moved to the corner of Hampshire Street and Great Falls Plaza, in front of the Esplanade. The city received a $247,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation in 2004 to pay for that work.

The city has planned to build the garage and bus station since 2004. The original plan called for making it part of a Great Falls parking garage. Councilors approved $5 million in bonds in 2004 to build the garage on city land on the northern part of the plaza, between the Esplanade and Tom Platz’s surface parking lot.

Construction work in Great Falls Plaza could begin this summer on both the garage and the new hotel. But acting City Manager Laurie Smith said the hotel will have to start first.

“I won’t move forward on the garage at all until the hotel is confirmed,” she said. Smith didn’t know when work would begin, however.

“I can’t even give you an estimate now,” she said. “There are too many moving pieces at this stage.”