New Center Progressing
Plans for a new conference center are moving from the drawing board and into reality, members of the Baltimore-Washington board of trustees report.
In January, members of the Baltimore-Washington Conference voted to build a new $7.5 million office and meeting space in Maple Lawn, a planned community off Route 216 in Howard County.
The conference hired Turner Construction as the builder of the new 30,000 square-foot facility. This is the company that recently built the new dining hall at the conference’s West River United Methodist Center near Annapolis. Design Collective is the architect on the project. It has designed many of the buildings in Maple Lawn.
Construction is expected to begin in September, said the Rev. Deborah Scott, who chairs the conference’s building task force. If all goes according to plan, the construction will be complete by May 2010.
A task force spent eight months studying 38 options on where to house the conference staff when the lease on the current space expires in September.
Conference Finance and Administrative President Charlie Moore calculated that buying land and building this new center, rather than continuing to lease space, will, over 20 years, create a $3.9 million or 17 percent savings in apportioned expenses.
A report on the new center is expected at the annual conference session June 5.
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