Barron Companies: They Go Where Angels Fear To Tread

Aledo resident Greg Barron has never been one to shrink from a challenge.

Standing across Weatherford’s square from the building project that’s on his mind most often

these days — South Main Church of Christ — he talks about what motivated him to take on one of

his company’s most complex, difficult and challenging tasks in its 25 year history. “I just kept thinking about members of this congregation and how they must feel,” Barron, CEO

of Barron Co. Inc., said. “I felt badly for them.” CEOs of commercial engineering/construction firms are not generally known for their warm

fuzziness, but then, perhaps that’s why so many church building committees in Texas have

entrusted Barron to build their churches, sanctuaries and family life centers. Barron never planned to establish a company specializing in design and the building of houses

of worship. It was something that materialized almost miraculously. Barron’s company was barely a year old when he accepted a small remodeling project on a

modest church in De Soto. The project went smoothly and Barron knew his company did a good

job but didn’t see it as anything spectacular. Apparently, those who made up the small congregation thought otherwise. While word spreads fast in the secular world, among ministers buzz travels at the

speed of sound. Soon other church building projects were coming Barron’s way, and they became increasingly more challenging and extensive as Barron’s company matured.

Sure, other kinds of projects, such as hospitals and medical centers, came along as well. But, it

seems the company is best known for church projects, an area that many commercial engineering/architectural/construction companies tend to avoid.

Why? “It is for a good reason,” Barron said. “Designing and building a church is like designing a

custom home where six couples will live and have six different pets. You have to bring all these

needs and ideas together into one project. Yeah, we have a division as we call it because everybody seems to gravitate toward us when they want to do a church because a church has got a little bit of

everything in it: acoustics, sub-floor systems … It’s got a school usually, with education comes theatrical arts … It’s got everything. People are now calling us the ‘Church Guys.’”

In the past quarter of a century, G.L. Barron has designed, built or expanded hundreds of

churches. Today, churches account for 80 percent of the company’s projects. One of the company’s more recent church projects, one that it’s has become famous for

building, is a house of worship located in South Dallas called the Inspiring Body of Christ Church. Sitting on a 36-acre campus, the 176,000-square-foot facility is packed with between 7,500 –

10,000-worshippers each week. The stunningly opulent house of worship boasts a 75,000-gallon

acrylic saltwater aquarium, home to more than 80 different species of fish. The aquarium is a

breathtaking, 18-foot high, 70-foot long, metaphor symbolizing how God’s Word draws from every walk of life to live together in harmony. An archway bears the inscription, a quote from the

scriptures: from Matthew 4:19, Jesus’ words, “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” The aquarium was the brainchild of IBOC Presiding Minister Rickie G. Rush. But, Greg Barron

was not the first person from the engineering/building/design industry Rush talked with about his

vision. He was the first to give him any encouragement. “I told him, ‘Pastor, if you can pay for it, I can design it,’” Barron said. That was all the

encouragement the minister needed to hear. “They told me it couldn’t be done,” Rush said in a press conference shortly after opening the

facility. “They thought it was just some fantasy of mine, a fantasy I couldn’t pay for.”

Seems “they” were wrong on all counts. Rush liked Barron’s positive attitude. He liked it so much, in fact, he awarded G.L. Barron Co. the contract on the aquarium, (more than $4 million for

design, construction etc., including fish) but the entire facility costs 10 times that. Engineering and designing the aquarium was no small feat, building it was even more

complicated, but Barron made the entire project work and transformed the vision Rush had into a

dazzling, teeming, bubbling reality. The congregation moved into the facility in early 2010, receiving some attention, but last fall, the

national spotlight was turned on the unusual worship campus when Animal Planet’s Tanked series aired an episode about the aquarium.

Shortly following completion of the Dallas eye-popping palatial-worship center, G.L. Barron

embarked on a project much closer to home — a new auditorium at Weatherford’s North Side Baptist Church to seat 1,100 with precision acoustics.

“Our church has been really supported and helped by Barron Construction,” North Side Senior Pastor Van Houser said.

The first building project Barron created for NSBC was construction of The Children’s Building.

“It’s a wonderful facility,” Houser said. “We had them come back to do the auditorium, our worship center. Their design and build was just absolutely a real gift for us. We had a very limited

amount of space to try to build on, to try to get a 1,000-seat auditorium. To still make it comfortable as well as functional, they just did a marvelous job of taking the space available and creating a very

fine facility. It’s a very wonderful company to work with. There are just great people there.”

Once completed, the building became the toast of Weatherford, with acoustics often compared favorably to Fort Worth’s Bass Hall, but the project was by no means an easy one to complete.

“The purpose of a church is communications,” Houser said. “I don’t care how beautiful you make something, if it doesn’t function well for its purpose, it’s not a good building.”

In the midst of the project, a key member of the company’s staff who had been working closely

with the project died. Greg Barron took over the project. “We were right in the middle of North Side Baptist, which was close to a $10 million dollar

build-out,” Barron recalls. “It was a tricky little project, but a great project. There was one slight error of dimension on the floor, that’s a sloped-floor system. Acoustically, that building is tuned — I

call it the ‘Little Bass Hall.’ It has amazingly beautiful acoustics, and it was designed that way.”

It was great but, unfortunately, it wasn’t perfect. The congregation had already moved into the new building, but Barron told Houser, “I need it

back for six more weeks.”

Immediately, the Barron Group began reworking the structure.

“We tore the floor out,” Barron said. “We’re not dealing with an easy business to begin with. It’s not unusual to make mistakes. It’s just about how you fix those mistakes, and how you address

them.” Six weeks and $300,000 later, Barron turned North Side Baptist Church back over to Houser and

his congregation.

“Well, with a situation like that, it’s never a question,” Barron said. “You know? You just do the right thing. The question is, ‘Did Barron screw up?’ Answer — ‘Yes, we did.’ I stood before the

congregation when we finally turned it back over to them and I said, ‘Thank you for your patience. The six weeks won’t seem like much in three years. I promise you, you got what you paid for.’”

Today, Houser is one of Barron Company’s biggest fans.

“Barron is a great company,” Houser told PCT. “It’s operated by great people.”

A Challenge Their Way Comes It’s been nearly two years since that January evening in 2011 when a privately-owned helicopter

made an unscheduled landing in the ground terrain of Mineral Wells State Park, at the west end of

Parker County. It was dark by the time Parker County Sheriff Larry Fowler received a call from The Civil Air

Patrol giving him the last GPS location of the helicopter. Because the meadow surrounding the creek bed where the helicopter landed was filled with scrub oak, mesquite trees and prickly pears,

the sheriff and his team would have to hike in to get to it. They went in not knowing what they’d

encounter while hiking through the meadow that had once been an artillery field as part of the old Fort Wolters. It had been a military base where the Army sent men to learn to fly helicopters. It was

shuttered in the 1970s. The sheriff decided to wait until after sunrise to go in. It was just after 8 o’clock in the morning,

when the Sheriff and his deputies found the helicopter. It was a still, quiet morning. As the sheriff

approached the helicopter, it was apparent the man at the helm wasn’t going to disrupt the still of the morning.

The pilot of helicopter was identified by the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office as Dempsey Stice, 42, of Weatherford, owner of a locally based commercial construction company

bearing his name.

A lot had been going wrong lately in Stice’s life. He was undergoing a criminal investigation. One legal filing read, “What Dempsey Stice … had done … was stamping a fake engineer’s seal on

construction plans for his projects.” That wasn’t his only legal woe. The family of a Stice Construction worker who had died as a result of a construction site accident in Weatherford had

filed a $30 million lawsuit. Stice had filed for bankruptcy a few months earlier, and his wife had

filed for a divorce. A group of law enforcement agents had stormed his office, wielding search warrants. They seized all his computers and cell phones.

That’s when Stice climbed into his helicopter and flew to Mineral Wells. There, according to the Tarrant/Parker County Medical Examiner’s report, Stice ended his problems.

But, it was hardly an end to the problems of the South Main Church of Christ.

The church’s building project started out as an expansion, adding classrooms and offices off the original stone chapel that early congregants lovingly built themselves in 1904.

When Barron first considered the possibility of his company taking over the South Main Church

of Christ expansion, the project had been in a state of suspension for what seemed to parishioners

like an eternity. “Everything about the project had to be reassessed and re-evaluated,” Barron said. “I had trouble

even being convinced that this was what we needed to do.” The Barron Company is now within weeks of completion of the project, something Barron refers

to as “a victory” for the congregation. It’s been a delicate process, almost like brain surgery to

assess, analyze and then repair the building that connects to the 1904 sanctuary. “Unprecedented,” Barron said. “It’s just unprecedented … what happened. Even the basement

was in question. We didn’t know totally what they did there.” But what Barron did know was the hundred-plus-year-old building was sitting conjoined to a

foundation that may or may not be structurally sound.

Accepting the job was not an easy decision for Barron, knowing how difficult the project would be.

“I tried to push it back across the table a couple of times,” he said. “Truthfully, in 25 years, I have never heard of what happened here. Nobody has. Fraud was committed at the highest degree.

It is what it is. I don’t even know that I would’ve been able to have really seen what was going on

because of the high degree of fraud that took place.” Barron personally made sure he was there to work with the board members of the church at a

meeting that took place in the early days of his company’s work on the project. “Because we model things a little differently engineering-wise, we better understood what was

done, and we had to come up with a plan and a solution to remedy it at the lowest cost for the

benefit of the church,” he said. Barron also spent a lot of face time with his company’s own crewmembers.

Barron said, “So the conversations I would have with my crew was like, ‘Guys, you’ve got to understand that it’s kids who are going to be occupying this building so, we’re not going to take any

shortcuts.’”

He decided there was only one way to approach the project. “That’s forensically,” Barron said. “We were going to do it right. I said, ‘If you’re OK with doing it the right way, then let’s go.’”

The forensics behind the project was an especially costly, time-consuming process that took almost a year to work through.

“So, you have to forensically go back piece by piece by piece,” Barron said. “Every connection,

every bolt, every weld, and you have to remodel that whole building from the basement up the way that it presently stands and oh, yeah, most of it’s covered up.”

The process included x-raying the building. “First you turn in what it was, and then you go back and say, ‘OK, based on that, this is how we

fix it.’ That’s before you ever decide how much it’s going to cost. So, it’s not unusual that since we

have engineering in-house, and since we have architecture in-house, and since we have commercial in-house, there’s not too many others that could’ve done it.”

There was one thing the members of the congregation made clear to Barron they wanted in connection with the project. “I know they want their historic building to be sound and safe. What

they wanted was for us to do it right,” Barron said. “They can say now, ‘you know what? Whatever

you might think, we did it right. This time. Big time.’ And they did. It took a year for us to figure out what right was.”

The South Main Church of Christ project was just weeks away from completion when PCT went

to press. Members of the congregation are busy planning a celebration.

Barron smiled, as he said, “Now, that’s a victory.”