Professional builders, engineers, architects and laborers rally for Discovery Square,

and no one's punching the clock.

The Columbia Falls professional community has once again demonstrated it’s volunteer spirit and is turning out on Saturday, May 16^th for a kick off of the remodel work for Glacier Discovery Square, the new community center in Uptown C Falls. A crew led by the Green Builders Guild, with technical assistance from GSS Electric, Grover & Company Architecture, and APEC Engineering, will spend two Saturdays removing the old teller line and some of the interior walls from the former First Citizen’s Bank building.

“Building contractors stepped forward and offered to donate their time and expertise to improve the space at Discovery Square,” says Dave Renfrow, President of the First Best Place, which owns the building and is developing the project. “This is a great example of how things can get done – even in a down economy – when a community comes together.”

In addition to the professional building team, volunteers from as diverse connections as the Glacier Mountaineering Society and the CF Rotary will be on there to lend a hammer to the effort. The work is intended to open up the main event space in the facility, to better accommodate the large crowds that have been attracted to the seminars and lecture series being hosted at the Square by the First Best Place. The materials will be salvaged as appropriate, and then any remaining refuse will be recycled by local recyclers.

"This is just a small piece of a big remodel effort" says Erick Robbins, who is one of the Steering Committee members for the First Best Place, "While we continue to raise the funding for the bigger work to relocate the library to Discovery Square, we are seeking to use the building as much as we can, and this will help make even more possible there."

The First Best Place intends to utilize this volunteer spirit for future phases of the remodel project. Utilizing “contracted volunteerism,” where volunteers are contracted to work in much the same way that a typical subcontractor would be on a build project, rather than simply “show up and pick up a hammer. This will allow professional tradesmen to contribute to the project at discounted rates, or with free services, and still allow the job to be professionally managed and scheduled. The group intends to announce future phases of the project as they are scheduled, and to put out calls for bids as appropriate.