Gennaro pledges $5,000 for dorm engineer review

City Councilmember James Gennaro joined with opponents of the St. John’s University dormitory under construction in Jamaica Estates recently and pledged $5,000 toward hiring an independent engineer to review the plans for the building.
Standing under an umbrella in the cold drizzle of Saturday February 9, Gennaro said of the project at 172-14 Henley Road, “It’s important to have this project reviewed by an engineer that is a completely independent third party.”
The original plans for the 485-bed dormitory were “self-certified” by an engineer/architect hired by the developer, H2H, and not reviewed by the city’s Department of Buildings (DOB) before the plans were approved.
According to published reports, the self-certified plans were found to have “errors and miscalculations” when reviewed by DOB at the behest of elected officials and community members.
Opponents of the dormitory have been collecting money to hire their own civil engineer, and Gennaro indicated that his allocation would lift the financial burden from the backs of private citizens.
“As your representative and ally in preserving the quality of life we enjoy here in Jamaica Estates, I’m putting my money where my mouth is with $5,000 of my discretionary funds,” Gennaro said.
Last October, he stood with supporters on the steps of City Hall and called for his colleagues to pass legislation to remove “student dormitories” from the list of “community facilities” entitled to erect much larger buildings on a given lot.
About three years ago, the so-called “community facilities loophole,” was amended after hearings by the Zoning and Franchises Committee, chaired by Councilmember Tony Avella, to remove “faculty housing” from the list.
Avella’s bill specifically left student housing on the list.
“It makes no sense to call a student dormitory for a private college a ‘community facility’ when it performs no community function,” Gennaro said. “We made a mistake not removing student housing from the list last time,” he admitted, adding, “We have to fix that.”