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State-funded ‘Guild’ gets city cash when Albany can’t pay

State-funded ‘Guild’ gets city cash when Albany can’t pay
Photo by Georgine Benvenuto

Call it an exceptional gift.

A largely state-funded Bay Ridge organization helping the developmentally disabled got an $800,000 Council grant to renovate an old folks home, because Albany hasn’t been ponying up special-needs funding in recent years. The Guild For Exceptional Children — which actually serves people of all ages — will use the cash to overhaul the Gabriel P. Martini Residence, a Senator Street home for the aging, by making it handicap-accessible and improving mechanical systems. The city stepped in because the state has tightened its purse strings in recent years, according to the councilman who provided the money.

“They’ve been asking the state for over six year to renovate and each time they ask it’s been ‘No we don’t have any funding for that,’ ” said Councilman Vincent Gentile (D–Bay Ridge), who kicked in the cash from his $5-million capital discretionary budget. “That’s when they turned to me and the Council — the sky wasn’t going to open up, they weren’t going to find a bundle on their front door.”

The guild was founded in the 1950s by parents of developmentally disabled children and now houses 120 and employs 550. The organization opened the Martini Residence in the 1980s as a lifelong home for special-needs children, according to administrator Mary Perrotti. The home’s 10 residents — now in their 50s, 60s, and 70s — have aged, but the facility has not grown up with them.

It is not handicap-accessible, and caretakers had to partition off parts of the first-floor living room as bedrooms for residents who could no longer make it up the stairs to their second-story digs.

“This was absolutely needed,” Perrotti said. “We don’t have handicap-accessible bathrooms, our hallways and doorway are narrow, so it is really difficult to get people in wheelchairs and walkers around. We had to put a lot of manpower into getting people in and out, it takes two people to get someone in a wheelchair out because of the stairs, we have to do that on a daily basis.”

Soon those residents will be able to cruise up and down on an elevator, freeing up common space downstairs. The money will also pay for a central air-conditioning system, upgrades to electrical and plumbing, a new recreational area, and a fire-sprinkler system.

The renovations are paid for by Council capital funds and are earmarked for the 2017 budget, although Gentile hopes work can start within six months. The Martini Residence is one of the largest of the Guild’s 17 residences around Bay Ridge.

Reach reporter Dennis Lynch at (718) 260–2508 or e-mail him at dlynch@cnglocal.com.