The Village of Old Westbury Board of Trustees on Monday approved the site plan application from New York Institute of Technology for a special-use permit to build dormitories, an academic building and dining facilities.
“You’ve been a great applicant and you have a great consultants but we just wanted to cross out ‘t’s and our ‘i’s before we moved forward with anything,” Mayor Fred Carillo said.
The trustees also granted NYIT site-plan approval for mitigation work to alleviate the existing flooding problems in the south parking lot of the school’s campus.
The project calls for four residence halls with a total capacity of 699 beds, a campus commons building, an executive office building and an academic building all totaling 297,888 square feet .
Architect Patrick Curley, representing NYIT, reviewed the location, configuration and architectural make up of the proposed project.
“We chose the location of this project to unify the heart of the campus,” Curley said.
Curley said half of NYIT’s 1,050 acres of land is located in the Village of Brookville while the other half is in the Village of Old Westbury.
The seven proposed buildings are all on the village of Old Westbury side of the school’s property, Curley said.
He said the campus commons will be outfitted with a dining hall for residential and commuter students, conference rooms, offices for the school’s administrators and spaces for students to relax.
The proposed four-story residential halls are 40 feet higher than existing adjacent buildings, Curley said.
“Once the structures are built, the buildings will be well buffered by trees,” he said.
Since 2005, NYIT students, have been sharing residential halls with students at the SUNY Old Westbury campus, NYIT Vice President for Information Technology and Infrastructure Niyazi Bodur said.
Bodur said although the Old Westbury residences on Spruce Road are within driving distance of the NYIT campus the school intended the partnership to be a temporary solution.
“NYIT has been contemplating the student residences for quite some time,” Bodur said. “Having student residences on campus will enable us to create a much more coherent and vibrant campus life. That is the primary reason to build student residences. We have been open with SUNY Old Westbury about this from the start.”
He said the school was not able to begin work on the building plans until 2011 when the design and approval process began almost in parallel with State Environmental Quality Review process in February 2015.
Bodur said the estimated cost of the project is still unknown because the approval process is not complete and the school has yet to put the construction work out to bid.
“As the approval process is not complete yet, we cannot predict when it will be completed. We will be using various funding vehicles,” Bodur said.
