Southeast Queens School Gym Renovation Stuck In Funding Feud

CAMBRIA HEIGHTS, QUEENS — Southeast Queens residents voted in 2018 to spend nearly a million dollars upgrading a gym and locker rooms at the Campus Magnet High School complex.

One year later, the fate of the participatory budget winner is unclear.

The project's future hinges in part on a 20-percent cut taken by the School Construction Authority, the city agency that oversees construction projects in public schools.

Locals had awarded $900,000 to renovating the campus's Chuck Granby Gym, named for the legendary basketball coach who coached a handful of future N.B.A. players there, in City Council Member I. Daneek Miller's participatory budget that year.

Then, the School Construction Authority told school officials in February that the project, as envisioned, wasn't possible with that sum.

The agency had taken $180,000 to pay for a number of non-construction costs, like scoping and design. That left just $720,000 to build the project, which the agency said required them to either narrow the project's scope or get more funding.

"The numbers for these proposals didn’t fall out of the sky," the councilman told Patch in a statement. "The estimated cost of every SCA project my office funds through participatory budgeting originates from the agency’s own assessments. We expect the Authority to be transparent throughout that process."

The agency's withholding raised red flags in the city comptroller's office. In April, Comptroller Scott Stringer asked the School Construction Authority to detail how they budgeted their costs and what expenses were included. Stringer also asked how the agency communicates those costs.

A School Construction Authority spokesman said the agency had included the 20-percent cut in the initial cost estimate it gave to Councilman Miller before the participatory budget vote.

"All costs were included in the original estimate," the spokesman, Kevin Ortiz, wrote in an email. "However, when we moved forward with scoping out the project, it was determined the project would cost more than our original estimate."

School Construction Authority President Lorraine Grillo said the agency takes the same percentage fee for all participatory budget projects, referred to internally as "Reso A" projects. That fee equals 25 percent of the construction contract cost — which, in this case, was $720,000.

"We in fact were fiscally responsible and implemented the transparent process that you espouse," Grillo wrote in a letter responding to Stringer.

The comptroller's office disputed the School Construction Authority's take, insisting that the agency was not transparent about how much money they'd withhold or their justification for taking that amount.

"In this case, elected officials, schools, and parents did not understand SCA’s plan and the agency’s response fails to support the data they’ve provided," a spokesman with the comptroller's office said in a statement, declining to provide specific examples.

The councilman, through a spokesman, declined to comment on the School Construction Authority's response.

School Construction Authority officials will work with the school and the councilman's office on ways to still move forward with the project, according to Ortiz, the agency's spokesman.

The NYC Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment.