Archive for June 13th, 2008
What is going on?
A couple people have asked what is going on with the renovation so I thought it important to update the blog with what is keeping the Renovation Oversight Committee busy. We have basically been dealing with a number of techinical issues to keep things moving. There are a number of design issues that still need to be addressed that we will endeavor to keep everyone informed of when we get through this technical bottleneck.
We have NOT made any final decisions on chairs, carpeting, ark design, torah table design, colors and a few other miscellaneous items. The committee will be meeting through out the summer with the architect to finalize these items and at some point we will hold an open forum to update the congregation.
1. Contractor bidding – Contractors are in the process of bidding the construction documents – we have scheduled a number of times where members of the committee and the architect are available for the contractors to come by the temple and carefully examine existing conditions and ask questions. Believe it or not this takes a lot of time trying to keep everyone interested in our project. Just because we have contractors bidding the project doesn’t mean all the design decisions have been made – some of these items will be sub-contracted separately or the contractors have been given enough information to price the work without the final design.
2. Finance – the committee (especially Jayne Grudberg-Mocera) has been working with the Capital campaign and the finance committee to double check the accounting to balance how much money has been received by the capital campaign and plan for how money will be allocated during the renovation. They have been working with banks to find the most competitive loan during construction to bridge the time until all the capital campaign pledges come in and the loan the Board of Trustees voted to take to make up the shortfall. We really appreciate the hard work of the both the finance committee and the Capital Campaign.
3. Contracts – the process of coming up with a construction contract is technically complicated and very important to protect the liability of the entire congregation. We are very lucky to have pro bono legal work from congregant.
4. Permitting, surveying and insurance – we are coordinating the logistics of the project with the Town of Belmont in order to make sure our permits will run smoothly. We needed a new survey for the Town and were lucky that the grandson of a past president (Harry Feldman) was able to to help us out pretty much at cost to get this done. At the same time we have been reviewing the Temple’s insurance policies to make sure we are adequately covered during the renovation and beyond.
5. Cleaning out the sanctuary. We are planning how to record the legacy, honor the past and make sure the sanctuary is properly prepped. Thanks must go to our extremely capable office staff lead by Marie Bustard who have anticipated this along with our hard working custodial crew. Irving Gerber has also been extremely helpful in finding a home for our old pews and making sure they get reused in a worthy new worship space. Much still needs to be done and in late June a work day will be scheduled to clean up.
If you have questions before we are able to schedule a forum please post them and the Committee will try to answer them here. Remember we are all working hard to do the right thing try to be pleasant!
We are hoping to begin construction in mid-July.
