Available housing for university graduate students should have doubled this month with the planned opening of the Mazza Grandmarc apartment complex. Instead, the proposed site in north College Park remains empty due to a prolonged negotiation between the developer and Prince George’s County Councilman Tom Dernoga.

As a leader of the graduate student community at the university, I have followed the developments of this case closely. What I have observed has made me question the county’s approval process for development – and the prospects for solving the worst student housing crunch in 20 years.

There are 10,000 graduate students at the university, but university-affiliated housing for only 700. Anyone who lives in the College Park area is aware of the high cost of living, so it should be no surprise that it is very difficult to find affordable housing near the campus.

Naturally, I was thrilled when I found out about the Mazza project because it would nearly double the amount of dedicated graduate housing near the campus. As an environmentalist, I was especially excited to find out that the developers had volunteered to convey 6.5 acres of parkland to the county, to restore parts of Paint Branch Stream and to create an extension to an existing bike path so that grad student residents could more easily bike to the campus.

Area residents have been in favor of this project – it’s environmentally positive and a big step forward for the university. Surely no one would oppose this, right? I was dismayed to learn, however, that Mazza was being held hostage by one man: Dernoga.

Dernoga has caused numerous delays in approving the project by adding new requirements, without notice, at county council hearings over the past 15 months. One of the worst examples was the county council meeting of June 18, when Dernoga imposed a new condition – that the development conform to the highly restrictive LEED standard, which requires compliance from each category of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating system, including preserving water efficiency, energy conservation and indoor air quality. He informed the development team of this new restriction literally 25 minutes before the meeting; hardly enough time to fully analyze it. This new condition came 15 months after the project was first approved.

Meeting the LEED standard will cost the development team $1.5 million, and there is nothing wrong with the standard itself, but if Dernoga proposed this for purely environmental reasons, then why did he do this 15 months after initial approval? He should have been explicit about these restrictions from the very beginning, or at the very least given adequate notice to developers so that they could plan accordingly.

Incredibly, this was not the only restriction imposed by Dernoga 25 minutes before the June 18 county council hearing. He also decided to require that the commercial portion of the development have an approved site plan before a certificate of occupancy would be issued. This is highly unusual in the development world, and would cause at the very least an eight-month delay for the already much-delayed project. The commercial site plan would go before the county council – the same body which has already caused long and unpredictable delays for this much-needed project.

Recently, Dernoga “compromised” on this restriction. If the county council does not approve the commercial site plan in time for residential site occupancy, the development team will pay a $300,000 fee, for no designated fund or purpose. At least this adds some predictability to the process, but it hardly makes it fair.

I wish I could say that these last-minute stringent conditions were unusual in this drawn-out process, however they are just two of many that Dernoga imposed. I have tried to discuss my concerns with Dernoga, but he did not respond to my attempts to contact him.

I fear that the council’s handling of this project will only serve to discourage the much needed redevelopment of the Route 1 corridor. I also fear that this process has set a very bad precedent for how the county does business.

Laura Moore is president of the graduate student government. She can be reached at gsg-president@umd.edu.