http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/news/robot-99398-vinci-espinoza.html
Residents building 50,000-square-foot Jehovah's Witnesses assembly hall
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June 27, 2009 - 9:09 PM By GABRIEL SALDANA, Valley Morning StarLA FERIA - Contractors, construction machinery, power generators and RV trailers are strewn about a 30-acre construction site on South Parker Road.
The workers there are not paid and the land on which they are building was donated like much of the heavy machinery they use. The rest of the machinery is rented with donated money.
Everyone at the construction site of the 2,500-seat Jehovah's Witnesses assembly hall is a volunteer. The 50,000-square-foot building is expected to be complete in late December and will serve as a meeting place for 157 Jehovah's Witnesses congregations across South Texas, officials said.
"If you take a straight line from Corpus (Christi) to Laredo, everything south (of that line)," Dan Castillo, one of the project's managers, said describing the area where the congregations are located.
"The building itself and parking will be built on a 20-acre tract," he said.
The assembly hall, which will cost between $4.8 million and $5.4 million when completed, is also expected to boost business in the city and surrounding areas, La Feria Assistant Manager Darla Jones said.
"We're going to have all these people coming into town on the weekends ... eating at our restaurants, buying gas at our gas stations, staying in our hotels," she said. "We're going to need more hotels; we're going to need more restaurants."
The hall is expected to bring more than 1,000 local people and travelers into the city weekly.
"Our church has assemblies throughout the Valley all year long," Castillo said. "It will be used approximately 42 weeks out of the year.
"The minimum amount of attendees would be 1,800. The maximum would be 3,000."
The hall will hold about 38 regular meetings a year for the different circuits in the region.
"Every six months, circuits - and there are about 22 congregations in a circuit - form a group and have a weekend meeting. So maybe about 1,500 people or 2,000 will come," Project Administrator Keith Hutchison said.
"Those are just the circuit assemblies," Castillo added. "We also have special assemblies, which are eight additional assemblies (per year.)"
Hutchison said volunteers include congregation members from across the country, although the donated money came from members in the South Texas region.
He said the construction project has already started pumping money into local businesses.
"The machinery, some of it has been loaned to us from somebody that came out of Round Rock. ...The others we rent," he said. "We pay Hertz Rental, a local company. So there's tens of thousands of dollars going into the local rental companies and diesel companies and gas companies and electric companies."
The building itself will be built using some of the most stringent regulations in the country, city and Jehovah's Witnesses officials said.
"We build a quality building, not one that's going to be a detriment to the community or an eyesore," Hutchison said. "They design it using the highest code standards in the United States. So it's built (to withstand) 130-mile (per hour) winds."
He said the hall will be built according to national standards that exceed those used by big-box retailers including H-E-B and Home Depot.
Currently, volunteers are working on the site's foundation and infrastructure. Stage two of development, the interior fit-out, is slated to start at the beginning of August.
"It's going to be a tilt-wall construction," Hutchison said.
Tilt-wall construction is where entire concrete walls are raised using cranes. The walls, said Jones, have built-in holes for running conduit wire and plumbing.
Castillo said that once complete, the project will have cost between $4.8 million and $5.4 million. It was conceived at an August 2007 meeting in Elsa with Jehovah's Witnesses elders who approved the plan.
"From there, they started just pouring in their donations," Castillo said.
More than 200 volunteers working on jobs ranging from tractor operation to janitorial work crowd the site on any given day, officials said.