January 20, 2009

Aloha Members, Attendees and Friends of Koloa Missionary Church,

We trust and pray that the Lord will grant you a most blessed new year!  We would like to give you a brief update on where we are with our building program.  For months, we waited for the architects to send us the constructions plans (the detailed plans) for our new facilities.  Finally and just recently, we received a whole bunch of architectural plans with much more detail in the drawings.  We have not received all of the final construction plans but we expect to receive all of them soon.

Once we have received all of the plans, two of our contractors will go over these plans and will attempt to determine a more accurate cost of the project.  We are hoping and praying that with the economic downturn, the cost of building materials will start to go down.  Once we have determined a more accurate cost of the project, we will then know how much more we will need to raise to complete the project.  Our original faith vision for the cost of the project was $2,000,000.   That was based on the cost of materials plus other expected expenses in the building process.  We are planning on volunteer labor through work teams from the Mainland. 

Also, once we have received all of the plans, we will submit them to the county for the final approval process.  Once the plans are approved, we will be given our building permit.  I am told that this process will take three to six months.

So when do we actually have our ground breaking?  We cannot set a specific date until three things fall into place.  The first would be the obtaining of the building permit.   The second would be the raising of the rest of the funds.  The third will be the lead time we need to plan for the work teams.  Since the work teams will be coming from the Mainland, we will need eight to twelve months to plan.  If we are unable to raise all of the funds to complete the project, we may have to build in phases.  However, our desire is to build everything at one time.  Our earliest projection for ground breaking is the fall of 2010. 

Due to the economic downturn we experienced last year, we all faced the financial crunch.  Yet, the income for our building fund has been steady and encouraging.