Hurray! We Submitted the Site Plan to the City.

We had an eventful Building Committee last Thursday night. 

The committee met with Rich Keilman (architect) and 3 people from Faurot (our general contractor) to begin the review of our next round of cost estimating. Significant engineering work (landscaping, site planning, HVAC, etc.) had to be done, then results of that given to Faurot for estimating. 

The most challenging work has been around site work and HVAC (distribution of heating and cooling, ground source heat pump). The biggest addition to cost, as we expected from the engineering, is in site work—sidewalk, retention/detention basins, drainage pipe to South Boulder Road and also HVAC.

We now need to work on reducing costs. We went through the estimates in detail and have identified areas where we may be able to save on costs. We also need to update other costs (architecture, transition, technology, etc.) before we can present a total picture. We will be working with our architect, Faurot, and others to find areas to cut, and some items that may go up. 

Rather than cut out items, we will establish a Phase II for them. For example, we may opt for enough landscaping to meet city codes now and delay other items to Phase II. 

As we move through the next 3-4 weeks we should have a better idea of our capital campaign contributions and cost data that will enable us to decide how best to move forward.

However, the Building Committee decided to go ahead and submit to the city our site plan and architectural review. Since this process takes a couple of months, we were concerned about slippage in the schedule if we waited. We can make adjustments with this plan later if needed, but we thought we were close enough to move forward.

Jim Highsmith, 
Co-Chair of the BVUUF Building Committee