Weblog of the PoP Building Committee activities

Our discussion was centered on preparations for our presentation at the annual meeting, some discussion of additional parking spaces at the front of the church, better signage and talk about painting the steeple. Tom will have a sign maker friend take a look at our property and give us some signage recommendations. Tom has also staked out the location of possible additional parking in the front of the church. See Below.

Neil had updated the Annual Meeting slide show presentation with some pictures to give it more visual impact. Mary has volunteered to update the Survey Analysis for any more surveys that come in before the Annual Meeting on March 7. Mary is also working on a Top 10 list of new building needs. We plan to pass out as many surveys as we can at the annual meeting. Neil agreed to send out a slide show presentation about a multiple phase master plan for building at Prince of Peace. This document was prepared in 2005 around the time that the Besecker Youth Center was built. Our next meeting is scheduled for Thursday, March 25. [Addendum: We received additional survey responses at the Annual meeting on 7 March 2010.]

Our October meeting was basically a status report and review of the survey responses to date. we also discussed a congregation forum to get input from those who had not found another way of providing input. The proposed forum date was subsequently canceled to avoid unfounded confusion of a possible building program commencing during a time of deficit finances. We will search for better timing and will at least make a presentation at the 2010 Congregation Meeting in February 2010. Tom had received a bid for the Capital reserve Study for $12,000. So we won’t be doing that! We also briefly discussed the results of PoP’s poorly publicized Long Range Plan. Neil volunteered to send a copy of it to all Building Committee members (done 11Nov09). We also discussed the use of Building Fund money to construct the BYC. All agreed that this was a valid Building Fund expenditure that did not require any paybacks as future budget line items. This will be brought to the Church Council and the Congregation, if necessary, to settle what is an issue in some people’s mind.

Status of Building Committee Surveys as of 27 October 2009. We are batting a little under .500:

• Staff (Neil, Cherie) – Completed by Pr Steve, Sarah and Pat, remaining are Danielle, Claire and Dave Swanson
• Worship & Music (Kurt) – Completed
• Social Ministry (Steve) – Completed
• Education (Kurt) – Open
• Church Use (Cherie) – Completed
• Witness (Tom) – Open
• Youth (Jim) - Open
• Property (Neil) – Completed
• Finance (Mary) – Completed. 3 responses!
• Stewardship (Tom) – Completed
• Fellowship (Steve) – Completed 17Nov09
• Creation Care (Jim) -Open
• Decluttering Team (Cherie) – Completed
• Church Council (Tom) – Completed

We all agreed to get all of them done before 20 November. We’ll see how that works out! Our next meeting is Tuesday, 1 December 2009 at 7:30pm in the BYC. All PoP members are invited.

2005 – The PoP Building Master Plan, the Besecker Youth Center (BYC) Plan and Construction

From 2003 to 2005 Prince of Peace planned and constructed a modular building on our property to provide Sunday School classroom education space. The building, dedicated on April 17, 2005 is named the Besecker Youth Center, after our founding pastor, Samuel L. Besecker. It is know informally as “The BYC.” The BYC Building Committee presentation to the congregation from the spring 2004 time frame is available for review. Also discovered is a diagram of the multiphase plan developed for future building expansion on our site. The BYC was Phase 1 of this multi-phase plan. All five phases of the Master Plan are described in a slide show entitled Growing Prince of Peace which was created by Jim Bostrom in 2004.

For those interested in details of the BYC construction effort from July 2005 to April 2005, an annotated pictorial history of the construction phase is available.

2004

Back in 2004 Peter Norgren, the staff architect of the ELCA visited Prince of Peace and made up drawings of a couple of possible building expansion concepts. Here is Peter’s drawing.

2000

In 2000 we had a Capital Fund (a.k.a. Building Fund) drive which ended up raising about $135,000 over 3 years for new construction. Below are some of the presentations and drawings used in that campaign.

1. A New Educational Wing for Prince of Peace (Proposal) – This document is a detailed proposal for new building which was created by the PoP Building Committee in 1999-2000. Even though it is out of date, it makes interesting reading to see the level of detail and specificity of the work which was done to plan for the future space needs of the congregation.
2. Information Meeting Presentation – This was the slide show used to present the new building proposal to the congregation back in 2000.
3. Conceptual renderings of a possible building expansion. These images were used during the 2000 Capital Fund campaign.

PoP Site-01

PoP Site-02

PoP Site-2A

PoP Site-2B

PoP Site-2C

PoP Site-03

PoP Site-04

PoP Site-05

Attending: Tom Kettler, Mary Delaney, Jim McKenna, Neil Howard, Kurt Nelson, Cherie DeGeorge, Steve Sullivan, Pastor Sarah (Steve and Neil were there, but not in the picture below)

Tom discussed some work he had done on his own to check out any big possible hangups if we were to get into a new major building project. Based on a short discussion with people at Loiderman-Soltesz (a site planning and engineering company which has worked for us before), increasing the parking lot would be a big hitter because of storm water management issues. Tom related that he has solicited a proposal for a Capital Reserve Study from a company named Facility Engineering Associates (FEA). We have sent them our info, but have not received back a proposal from them.

Neil reported no interim feedback on the building survey questions we brainstormed last meeting. Mary added one additional question (#1) during the meeting. See the attached Building Committee Survey for a list of the questions. We divided up all the ministry teams for contact as follows:

Staff – Neil, Cherie
Worship & Music – Kurt
Social Ministry – Steve
Building – Tom
Education – Kurt
Church Use – Cherie
Witness – Tom
Youth – Jim
Property – Neil
Finance – Mary
Stewardship – Kurt
Fellowship – Steve
Creation Care – Jim
Decluttering – Cherie
Church Council – Tom

The plan is to contact the chairperson (or ministry team members in the event of no chairperson), send them the list of survey questions in advance and solicit their input in any format: attending their meeting and getting on the agenda, via email, via telephone, face-to-face, etc. We will gather up whatever feedback we have to date at our next meeting and then decide if and when to have a public forum soliciting input from anyone else in the congregation who did not otherwise have an opportunity to respond.

Pastor Sarah suggested we start a Building Committee blog. Neil will look into this. Since you are reading this, looks like it happened!

Next Meeting is Tuesday, 27 October 2009, 7:30pm in the BYC. Everyone is invited.

Our Challenge
Do you think that PoP has any building needs? Some ideas that have been informally bandied about are: Hey, when do we get a real Fellowship Hall? Where am I supposed to put all the stuff my ministry team needs; we don’t have any room to store stuff around here!