By the middle of May, Sage Creek will be looking at a brand-new performing arts center.

Erickson-Hall Construction Co. has made considerable progress in Sage Creek’s new performing arts center. The Sage was able to sit down and talk to Site Superintendent Gary Minch to get his take on how the building is going and the overall timeline for the project.

“The building is starting to speed up now that we have more subcontractors on site,” Minch said. “The structural steel is going in. It’s a challenging building. We are pretty close to our schedule.”

This is a good sign for the senior theater students, who are looking to perform on the stage before they graduate next June.

The Sage was also able to sit down with Jillian Porter, the theater teacher, and a few theater students on how they are feeling about the center.

“[I am] very excited about the Performing Arts Center and I think it has had a lot of progress over the last year which is pretty excellent,” Porter said.

As of now, she does not have any plays planned to take place in the center of this school year. She is looking to open up her season next year.

The construction hasn’t gone by without a hitch. There have been multiple setbacks along the way. One glaring difficulty that stuck out was all the rain the company had to deal with.

“[They] had about 50,000 gallons of water down there in the orchestra pit so [they] just kind of moved to the ‘drier ground’ so to speak and just started footings,” Minch explained. “This building has about 80 steps in the footing and they’re 14 feet down below the finished floor so we had some challenges as far as mud and stuff like that.”

Kyle Turner
Rain wasn’t the only issue for this company either. They also has to deal with a very thin and curvy road to reach their site, and loading all of their equipment wasn’t easy.

“It’s been a challenge to backfill the building,” Minch responded. “It was a big challenge because you have the fire lane on this side and we had to get to the back by the administration building to backfill so we actually brought a conveyor in that conveyors dirt out on a system.”

After discussing all of the difficulties of the building, Minch revealed the overall timeline of the project.

“At the first of the year, well probably in about 30 days actually, we are going to start the front glass on the building, which is a curtain wall, and then we will be doing the theater seating,” Minch said. “Another milestone will be… probably around December. We will be bringing the theater folks in to do the stage rigging and all the stuff that goes up above in the black box area, and we will start putting the lights in the building, the finishes, after the first of the year you will start seeing the bathroom partitions go in and then painting the building inside.”