2018-11-07 Hearing Transcript - Kurtistown Assembly of God USE 18-078

Home

people that were utilizing it instead of having the hours being so tight and, you know, constraining that if they wanted to change that, we'd have to come back in to amend the Use Permit to change those hours. So, he's going to talk more about exactly what they're offering and what they're doing there so I just wanted to point that out, and yeah, again, it's not open to the public. I think we've done our very best to mitigate, you know, everything that we possibly could. And, at this point, I'll turn it over to Pastor Shrinski so he can tell the story. SHRINSKL Good morning, my name is Pastor Damien Shrinski. I'm the pastor of Kurtistown Assembly, and I just want to thank you for giving us the opportunity to sit in front of you. Our church has been working in the area of Kurtistown since 1956, and we have two goals: Glorify Christ and be an asset to the community. And, I feel like we're growing in that. One of the most outreaching ministries that we do is we have our food pantry. We give out containers or packages of food twice a month. We've been doing that since the early 90's, and eight years ago, we started a soup kitchen. We service the community four times a month, and it's grown. Over the past two years, I think we are averaging over 10,000 meals are being distributed yearly. One of the biggest in the district. One of the challenges that we had or one of the things that kind of came up in the past couple of years is that in applying for grants, they asked us how to measure success, how we are measuring success, and initially, our thought was oh, we measure success by more. More food, more people. And, it kind of made us rethink what our goal was to be. I mean, there will always be people that need to be fed, but it made us think longer—we want to make a longer lasting impact in the community. It made me think of the well-known saying, if you give a man a fish, they'll eat for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, he'll eat forever. And, we're realizing that numbers were increasing in the people desiring food, and it wasn't really having a lasting impact, because for at least some of the fraction, we'd want to think that food distribution would be giving them a leg up so that they be able to provide on their own and stand on their own two feet. So, our intention with this new building is not to add any more food distributions. We're not adding anymore. We're not taking it away, but we're continuing with what we have. There's nothing—no additional scheduling. What we want to do is stuff that we've already started in our church, and that is, work with people one or one or in small groups to get education. We've helped people get their GED, applying to college, get grants. We've helped people with interviewing skills and helped them use, helped them use our computers to apply on-line and things like that. So, the intention of the new building is to—well, the building that we're currently in is over 60 years old, so all the people that we feed kind of takes a wear and tear on this older building. So, part of the use of this building is to move the current services that we have now to that building. Also improve the parking because as you can see from the site plans, the properties are very, very narrow, and currently most of the parking that we do is on a neighbor's property that they have graciously allowed. So, the new property will allow for parking to reside on our, on our own property. So, we want to move the current services that we have on that property and the only thing that we're going to be adding is these new services that we feel are going to do a new kind of work to help people get jobs, be able to get education, and then furthermore, in land behind the property, use that area to teach self-sufficiency, personal farming that they can do on their own property. EXHIBIT D 5