the Preservation Commission is the issues of the meeting rooms that they may or may not want in this space, the configuration of the auditorium, the capacity of the auditorium. Mr. PASTOR. Let me stop you there. I have a hard time understanding how you are going to do a design and yet not know how many offices, how many rooms, what the auditorium is going to look like, I mean, that is a major design and you're going to have the design within 6 months. The Preservation Committee may not meet for another couple of months. Somewhere I am missing the boat. Maybe you might explain it to me. Mr. HANTMAN. Design development, actually, sir, serves that function. We will be going to the staff of the Preservation Commission with all of our questions. They will be bringing it to the individual members for resolution if, in fact, that is the nature of the type of question we ask. Design development is to do just that. We have an auditorium configuration, and we are looking at several alternative configurations at the request of the staff. We need to bring it to the Preservation Commission and say this is the one that makes the most sense, this it where we will go in the process. We will still have the construction document phase after the design development phase. There is another step of the design process. We are not turning them loose to do construction documents for bidding purposes until after this phase. Mr. PASTOR. I think you are being optimistic, to say you are going to get it done in 6 months. If you are going to have the Preservation Committee, first of all, get together and look at the different designs that you are proposing, so I think you are pretty optimistic, don't you think? Mr. HANTMAN. I think we need to be optimistic. Quite frankly, Mr. Pastor Mr. PASTOR. In this environment, yes, I will grant you that. Mr. HANTMAN. I frankly think if we hadn't been optimistic with the planning and validation phase, we wouldn't be as far as we are today. We need to put it out there and communicate most effectively. We plan to have monthly meetings with staff members of the Preservation Commission to feed them information, to give them issues that need their resolution, and hopefully they can bring back to us some kind of resolution themselves. VISITOR CENTER TIMELINE Mr. PASTOR. I want to understand the timeline. Right now you have a letter of intent? Mr. HANTMAN. That is correct. Mr. PASTOR. What is that going to do? Mr. HANTMAN. Basically we are having the General Accounting Office review the full contract that has been submitted by the consulting team. We need to have them sign off on that before we sign a full contract. But we know the full scope of work. We have been negotiating with them and before we go ahead-this is basically to get them started before we sign the full contract. But we have full intention and all expectations that their numbers are within the ballpark that we proposed and that we will be able to proceed with |