Bond ideas becoming clearer

Thursday night, architects from Huckabee Inc. gave several proposed options, or in laymen's terms, examples of possibilities for changes to the physical sites for Marshall Independent School District campuses.

We would like to commend Huckabee Inc. for giving a plethora of examples of what changes could be done to MISD schools, i.e. from building new schools to renovations.

After supplying the committee with an abundance of facts and figures last week, Huckabee Inc. came back this week with a clearer presentation. This was in part due to bond steering committee members asking viable questions and prodding the architects and financial advisers to find different answers.

Thursday afternoon, Huckabee Inc. staff met first with the MISD Board of Trustees for a workshop. The trustees presented similar concerns to the architects that steering committee members had at last week's meeting.

Using language that was universal during the MISD board workshop and the steering committee meeting, the architects personalized their original estimations by sharing building quality examples from schools in districts similar to MIS, such as Sabine and Longview.

Where initial costs that were presented as hypotheticals last week, that caused committee members and trustee members to panic, this week's proposals were acceptable as the architects seemed to put themselves in the Marshall's citizens' shoes.

Basically, the architects appeared to "hear" what was being asked and issues of concern that were discussed.

And, let's face it, that doesn't normally happen in the business world. A business doing what the architects are doing are stereotypically concerned with the bottom line or what profit it will incur.

We encourage the steering committee members to keep asking questions and assigning homework to the architects. The more you ask, the more they look for other possibilities.

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Bond ideas becoming clearer