The Crookston Public Schools bus garage committee will meet Thursday, April 25 at 5:00 p.m. at the Crookston High School. The committee will meet for the first time with ICON Architectural Group out of Grand Forks, who was hired to design a new bus garage.
Kyle Kvamme, Business Development Manager, said ICON has grown steadily over the past two decades with a wide range of experience dealing with K-12 schools on limited budgets to higher cost Department of Transportation and Public Works projects. “ICON Architectural Group was formed in Grand Forks about 18 years,” said Kvamme. “We’re fortunate enough to have grown pretty steadily up to six offices and almost 70 people. We are able to a lot of fun awesome projects all over the Midwest. We’re currently working with maybe 10 different school districts across the region and have almost 100 K-12 projects under our belts. So taking that experience in addition to our transportation experience where we’ve done everything from lean-tos to DOT projects, to large public works facilities. Taking our experiences and scaling them right for our different clients is one of the reasons we were drawn to put our name in the hat for the Crookston School project.”
ICON projects are dotted all over the region including the addition being built at Sacred Heart School in East Grand Forks. “At Sacred Heart, we are adding on an elementary addition there,” said Kvamme. “That’s a really fun project, 100 percent donor-funded so we helped them with their fundraising piece. That one we’re adding six classrooms and a great commons area for their kids to work together and collaborate. In Grand Forks, we worked on the ICON Sports Center, one we felt so strongly about we ended up putting our name on the building because we wanted to make sure that happened for our community. We’ve worked on a lot of projects at UND – Chester Fritz Library, Athletics High-Performance Center, Aerospace Building, Law School.”
Kvamme said the group also has done varying degrees of transportation facilities. “For our transportation experience we’ve done things with extreme budget constraints, resource constraints, land constraints creating that solution when you are faced with an interesting mix of problems,” said Kvamme. “At the same point we’ve worked in very different areas where resources are plentiful, maybe they have oil around them. For them, it’s about doing things right with great quality and high function. We’ve done the mix between smaller facilities, maybe three or four bays, up to 40 bay facilities that are really large.”
Kvamme said the goal will be to drive value, save money and become a partner with the Crookston community in finding an affordable solution. “We take pride in driving value in every decision that we do,” said Kvamme. “If you call any of our past clients they’ll tell you that our effort is to do as much as we can with what they have and their abilities to create a project. There are a thousand decisions that happen at any point in a project and those decisions can cost you a dollar more or a dollar less. When we sit at the table we try to think of those opportunities to save money, drive value and hopefully Crookston will appreciate the effort we’re doing to make this an affordable solution for them. Ultimately that’s our goal to be a partner for the district and the community.”
ICON plans to bring some basic bus garage designs concepts to the meeting as a starting point for the committee and architects to work together and educate each other on needs of the district and costs related to those needs and government code and regulations.
