I’m filling in the details as I understand them. I’ll probably update this section many more times.

Pre-purchase.

Apparently, first you get an architect to draw you up a “site-plan”. The site-plan is the first of three phases. It’s a general overview of where the building would sit, what its size/height would be, foundation, with a rough rendering. etc. That’s the part we’d use to do rough planning, and it’s what we submit to the township for building approval. So it has be done in order to have the township approve us which is what we’d need to have before we buy the property.

update 8/5/20: This township meeting is scheduled for Thursday Aug 13th.  

I’ve set Jeannette Woodard (architect from Jackson who built the monastery church) on this task. It’s about $2K for this. Using her for this part does not lock us into using her for the rest, it’s just the first bureaucratic hurdle.  I’d be up for having this done even if we vote against buying the property, then we’d have it all ready for if this comes up again. (update 8-5: parish council agreed, we commissioned her to get this done for us.)

Then I guess you pester township officials to deal with you, even though they’re open only 1 day a week and can’t seem to locate their own zoning records. I’ve started this, waiting on return calls from them. On one hand they seem utterly friendly to me and these plans, on the other they seem a bit disorganized about follow-through.

Parish Meeting:

Anyway if the township says yes, then we are free to buy the property pending our own decision.   Or we could vote before that approval and simply make our vote depend on the township’s approval.  The parish as a whole has to vote on it.  Buying property is specifically required to go to a whole parish vote by our bylaws, which is a good idea since you’d want most people to be on-board before doing such a thing.   And it requires 2/3 (not just a majority).   We’ll need to schedule that when enough bars have been cleared.   Given the current covid stuff, we’ll do it outside so that everyone can attend whether or not they’re back in church yet.  We also have approval from the bishop to vote remotely. (update: see upcoming meeting).

Post-purchase

We could have the same architect (or a new one) do the “second phase”, a more accurate rendering with a floor plan etc., and we’d use that as our preliminary plans while we figure out funding, etc. Or we get different plans from different architects and compare? Not sure how this part works.  I imagine we’ll have a lot of design decisions to make here, a whole new topic.

If we get to the point of building, whichever architect we have draws up final plans that have all the details for the builders and they start to dig.

No idea how long that might take.

Meanwhile, we’d have a building to take of that we wouldn’t be using (much).  Just to be clear, I don’t intend for us to have church services in that building, I wouldn’t want to move over until we had a church to move into.  There’s another post on what to do with building meanwhile (new property details).