Our Signing Town

Greetings!

Funding Update on Laurent

For all of the people who have been anxiously waiting to move to Laurent, SD or make their plans to work or do business in Laurent, we have an update.

We have been fairly quiet on the media front. One of the major reasons is that we had hoped to be able to announce, with fanfare, that our funding package had closed and we would be moving forward with the rezone application.

We waited and waited.

It turns out our original funder has delayed the closing to a later date. We were disappointed, yet we knew we were not going anywhere else. We are here to build Laurent, period.

We continue to work with our funders, and they have told us that they remain firmly commited to funding Laurent at the earliest possible time.

With the delay, we have begun the process of contacting other investors to make Laurent, SD a reality sooner.

Our initial contacts with several investors in South Dakota have been positive, and we will be working with them in the next several weeks toward financing the Phase 1 development of Laurent.

We expect Phase 1 to include single-family lots, live/work units, apartments, loft apartments, condominiums, and low-income housing. We also expect phase 1 to include business spaces for lease or sale.

Sure, we’re frustrated and we want Laurent built yesterday! Yet we know we will be successful in building our town. We now know that we will not be able to break ground this Spring, as planned. We are aiming for a Spring 2007 ground breaking.

We are so committed to this endeavor because we are confronted daily with the need for a fully accessible town for sign language users.

And more news…

A Visit to Milwaukee, Wisconsin for Deaf Senior Citizen Housing Tour

We will be traveling to Milwaukee this Sunday for a tour of the successful Water Tower Senior Housing. The brand new building was filled to capacity within a short period of time, and they now have a waiting list of more deaf seniors wanting to get in. We understand that the facility is considered to be state of the art in architecture and accessibility. John Dickinson, a deaf architect from Winter & Company Special Needs Studio, was involved in the design of this housing.

Presentation on Laurent in the State of Washington

Marvin Miller and Monique Roberts will be in Lynnwood, Washington to give an hour-long presentation at Edmonds Community College for their Brown Bag Lecture Series. The admission is free. Hope to see some signing Washingtonians there! See their web site at http://brownbag.edcc.edu/

Marvin and M.E. continue to be available for presentations and lectures, and if your organization is interested in having one of them come, you can e-mail Monique Roberts at [email protected].

All in all, we continue to work in our office in Salem, S.D. We continue to have visitors stopping in to say “hi” and learn more about the vision of building Laurent.

Please know that we are committed to building Laurent, even when faced with delays. We continue to work behind the scenes to make this dream become reality. We especially appreciate all of the support we have received from our sign language community and from residents of McCook County and all of South Dakota.

Please do feel free to e-mail us with more questions or visit Marvin’s Laurent SD Blog at http://www.LaurentSD.com/blog/ for more frequent updates. (Yeah, Marvin now promises to update his blog more often.

Thank you for your prayers and kind words of support,
Marvin Miller and M.E. Barwacz
The Laurent Company
www.LaurentSD.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 6th, 2006 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Laurent. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.