St. Dominic Catholic Church

Pastor's Corner

October 22, 2017

As you can see from the picture here, work is progressing on the upstairs “multi-purpose” room in our community center.  A bathroom is being remodeled, and the main room is almost complete.  The new flooring and doors need to be installed and then the audio/visual equipment will be brought in.  The new metal fire escape stairwell is finished, too, and is much more sturdy than the old one ever was. I’m told we should be ready to use the room in early-mid November.  We are purchasing lightweight chairs and tables for the room.  We are planning on having an open house on the weekend of November 19-20 to show off the space.

I’ve heard that some people are wondering why we’re going to all this expense to renovate an old building, instead of tearing it down and building a brand new one.  Well, first of all, demolishing a building is not cheap.  You end up spending money to get to a starting point, and then you have to pay to erect a new building! 

Secondly, and more importantly, we could never build a structure nearly as large because we do not have enough parking.  There are, at most, 17 parking spots in the community center lot.  Current LA requirements, as far as I can determine from online information, states you need 1 parking space for every 35 ft² of auditorium space.  This would require us to have 60 parking spots alone for the multi-purpose room. We can’t include the parking spaces for the church in the calculations. The whole building has over 10,000 ft² of space we can use, so it is definitely a much better idea for us to renovate, rather than demo and rebuild.  By doing this, we will have much more space at our disposal.