Dear St. Catherine Parish Family,
This past January I announced that we were beginning plans for the construction of a new parish hall and a capital campaign to help pay for the new hall as well as retire our debt and also build up a capital reserve for major facilities repairs and maintenance. As I mentioned in my previous letter, when I arrived at St. Catherine’s, I immediately fell in love with our parish and began to express my hope that I would be pastor here for a very long time. Consequently, I quickly began to think about the long-term needs of our community, and I formed a committee, called the Capital Planning Committee (CPC), consisting of parishioners, school parents, and staff members who have expertise in business and finance, and also those with expertise in building and construction, and we began meeting regularly to discuss our long-term financial and facilities needs.
The committee quickly recognized the importance of addressing the debt burden we have been servicing which is due to several large upgrades to our campus we had undertaken over the years. The committee also recognized the need to build a healthy capital reserve to provide for major facility repairs and maintenance, particularly the flooring, lighting, and the HVAC system in our church. And finally, the CPC discussed the possibility of expanding our facilities off of Herbert Hall, which was third phase of the master plan for our campus developed about ten years ago. In planning for an expansion, the CPC, in consultation with our superintendent of Catholic schools, as well as our school advisory council, discerned that a new parish hall which could be used by both our parish and schools would be the greatest benefit to our entire community.
Our goal for our capital campaign, Honoring Our Past, Building Our Future, is $4 million dollars over a 3-5 year period. This is certainly ambitious, but I am confident that with everyone’s participation, we will be able to reach this goal and move forward in faith together to continue to build up our parish and schools to serve the Lord’s Church. And I am pleased to let you know that even prior to the official public phase of the campaign, we have already been able to raise about $1.4 million in pledges!
Our timeline for building is aggressive; we would like to begin building as early as June of 2018 (over the summer) to keep disruptions to the campus to a minimum, and we hope to be complete by early 2019. In the coming weeks I will be speaking more about our building project as well as the other facets of our capital campaign, and we will be hosting special information sessions for parishioners on March 11 and April 8 at 11:30am in room 316/317 as well as an information session for school parents on March 20 at 7:00pm in Herbert Hall. In the meantime, I would invite you to visit our campaign web page to learn more about our building plans and how you might support our capital campaign in anticipation of our in-pew pledge commitment weekend, April 28-29, 2018.
