Ambassador Presbyterian Church

As Steve Brown stated in the congregational meeting today, there are seven sub-committees representing each of the major areas of the new building.  Here at Ambassador, we are blessed with folks having many different skills and talents.  We urge you to prayerfully consider becoming involved, either as a member of a sub-committee or simply volunteering to consult on some particular aspect of an area.

Please contact the chair for the area in which you desire to serve.  It’s a great time to get involved!

Dear Friends,
A quick update on the building progress. We are thankful that our rezoning petition passed the town council and our site plan approval should come through any day now. An architect has been secured to draw up our building plans and once we have those, we will be able to negotiate a formal contract with the builder and apply for building permits. There will be more congregational involvement in this next phase of building construction as we put together subcommittees to oversee different decisions that need to be made about the building details. Please continue to pray for smooth sailing with the town, with our new neighbors around the property, and with the the builder and subcontractors with whom we will be working.

Thanks,
Steve Brown
Building Committee Chairman

Tonight the site plan that we submitted to the Town of Apex was unanimously approved by the town council.  We are now waiting for some additional staff approvals, which should happen over the next couple of weeks.  Meanwhile, the architect is working on the drawings.

God continues to bless us in this process!

On February 5th, we submitted our site plans to the town of Apex.  This included the site layout, landscaping, building elevations, and more (14 pages of drawings).  We should begin to get feedback later this month from them on the issues that we need to address.  I’d encourage everyone to pray that this goes well.  Getting through this process quickly would be a blessing!

Steve Brown discussed the committee’s current activities at the info meeting after church on 12/10/06. The main points are below, along with viewable site and building plans.

We would like your feedback regarding the floor plan in particular. Please submit your comments or questions through the website–anonymously if you prefer–by clicking here.

Click on these pics to see large, zoomable versions of the floor plan and site plan:

Update:
* Preparing to negotiate a contract with Farrior, the construction company
* Working on a site plan in conjunction with the site engineer
* Finishing the floor plan
* Working with the site engineer to submit a plan to the Town of Apex
* Working on the exterior materials and design with the architect

The most pressing deadline is to get everything ready to submit to the Town of Apex in February. We believe that our plan will be considered a “minor” plan, which would mean we could receive approval as soon as the end of April. Apex requires our site plan to conform with its “small town” requirements, which place constraints on the site layout and building exterior.

If everything goes well, we hope to be in the building around Easter ‘08. The current cost estimate is $1.3M - $1.4M.

- from Steve Brown, Building Committee Chairman

The Building Committee is working with Arks and Farrior to develop a draft floor plan for the new building based on the space needs presented several months ago. After several iterations, we are nearly ready to present a recommended plan to the Session for their review. We are also developing a site layout with the goal of submitting it to the Town of Apex for site plan approval, hopefully by the end of the year. The Apex site plan approval process will be the critical path for the project schedule, and will likely take about 6 months. Once the site plan is submitted to Apex, we will return our focus on the building itself and seek input from the congregation on specialty areas such as worship service arrangements, music program needs, Sunday school, nursery, hospitality, building and grounds, interior décor, and others to make sure the diverse needs of Ambassador’s ministries are suitably addressed. All of these other activities will occur parallel and simultaneously with the site plan review process. Our goal is to have all of these details resolved and begin construction once the Town approves the site plan. We will have more specific schedule details once the early key issues get resolved. Stay tuned!