The Challenge

The St. John Neumann Catholic Church community had a yearslong goal of building a beautiful new church and sanctuary. They had been holding mass in their existing facility’s auditorium and after a multi-year capital campaign, were finally in a position to proceed with construction.

Prior to AQUILA’s involvement, the church had already engaged a project manager, who had solicited a negotiated fee and general conditions with a general contractor.

However, once the drawings were finalized, the pricing from the General Contractor was way above what the church had budgeted and could afford.

On top of the budgeting issues, the church’s building committee noticed that there were features and finishes shown on the plan that did not reflect their intended design goals.

The Solution

A member of the building committee contacted AQUILA’s project management team with the issues and, eventually, AQUILA was retained to take over as the project manager on the project.

AQUILA worked with the building committee, the architect, and the engineers to correct and modify the drawings to meet the goals and desires of the building committee.

Based on the favorable market conditions at the time, AQUILA recommended taking the new drawings to a competitive bid process with the goal of achieving pricing that would fall within the necessary budget.

The Results

After the bid process, two potential contractors were interviewed as finalists. The decision was made to enter into a contract with the actual low-bid general contractor, and the final pricing was more than $2 million less than the previous General Contractor’s price.

AQUILA Project Management was not only able to achieve the savings that Saint John Neumann needed in order to maintain the viability of the project, but AQUILA made sure that the construction process was a smooth one, that the church was built according to the specifications called for and also within the expected timeframe. The Saint John Neumann community now enjoys a beautiful place of worship that has become well-known throughout the state.

 

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