Dear Friends of the Sweetwater,
We know that you are all anxiously waiting to hear how the new site for Sweetwater is coming along so here is an update:
All site planning, architectural, acoustic analysis and permits were complete as of August 2008. But the project has experienced a number of costly delays and other issues not the least of which were surprises like:
- Higher than expected costs for seismic work
- Fighting an unexpected $80,000 bill from our local water supplier just for the rights to use water at the site even though the site consumption volume was designed to be significantly lower than the old site which consumed less you’re your average home. Now if they’d been billing for volume of beer consumption then, well….perhaps we’d have understood
- New FEMA rules which took effect in 2008 that no one from Sacramento to local inspectors had had time to fully review or understand. Being in a flood plain, we had to determine whether or not we needed to comply with these guidelines – getting the answer to this question caused over a month of construction delay.
By August we’d successfully navigated the major hurdles: primary plumbing work and rough framing, baseline electrical and new emergency exit work have been roughed out – we finally had the green light to complete the build-out and given sufficient funding we would have likely been open and operating by December. However, timing has not been on our side: during the initial build out the economy was still healthy and material and contracting costs were high and in high demand. The funds we raised for the total cost of the build out turned out to be a third of what the actual costs will be, and the original raise was depleted by August – in part due to fees to architects, attorneys, ADA requirements, and the list goes on.
The key reason for the delay is that the landlord is carrying a significant portion of the build out – the building had to be brought up to code whether it was to be a nightclub or a hat shop. At the end of August a new requirement was placed upon us – we needed to have the full cost of the remaining build out in an escrow account before we could conduct any further work on the structure.
Even though the actual work on the site is not happening right now we are very hard at work on behind the scenes working with teams of very well meaning and experienced people to raise the funds to satisfy the landlord so we can complete the construction and get Sweetwater open. We have also moved some of our already booked shows to 142 Throckmorton and will be working with Lucy on keeping our music alive until the opening date, which will be 3 months from the time we restart the build-out. In the meantime we’re still paying the rent and other fees associated with maintaining the site through a series of bridge loans and other such financing.
We expect that we’ll be able to announce the news on the final phases very, very soon.
We appreciate all of your support and concern and we promise you will all have a great new Sweetwater very, very soon. All of our musicians are behind us to get this project finally finished.
Thank you again for supporting Sweetwater and keeping music alive in Marin.
Sincerely and with much love,
Thom and Becky