Over the past year, it has become clear that the current governance of Roosevelt Island must change. The State's leg of our three-legged stool (Citizens, City, and State) has performed badly. But even if it were performing superbly, the State's role here amounts to a non-representative form of government that controls minute details of our lives at a distance (in Albany) too great to see the consequences of its actions, or to care about those consequences.

It comes to this:

If we could start over again, how would you want to organize the government of Roosevelt Island?

Website NYC10044 and The Main Street WIRE want to bring interested Roosevelt Islanders together for a series of informal seminars and discussions. The sessions will be reported on Website NYC10044 and in The WIRE.

We've asked David Bauer, an Island resident and long-term City Manager (Lititz, PA, Wethersfield, CT, and New Haven, CT) and Government Consultant (L'viv, Ukraine) to serve as discussion guide. His background makes him an ideal leader, but this question of How Shall We Be Governed is a matter of interest and concern to all of us and we hope that, over time, a broad cross-section of Islanders will come to these sessions, participate, and contribute to the collective thinking on the matter.

It's likely that the Roosevelt Island Residents Association, and/or the State, and/or the City, will finally have the major say in the evolution of Roosevelt Island governance. These sessions are not intended to pre-empt those roles, but to enhance the dialogue among us, to serve as a forum in which ideas on the subject can be discussed freely and creatively, and contemplate the possibilities in a setting that begins by recognizing that change is both inevitable and desirable.

Join us for the first session, or for others to be announced. No session will last more than an hour.