What will you do the day it's announced Jerry Blue is gone?

OK, after the party, what will you do?

The election, just over three weeks away, is a watershed moment for Roosevelt Island.  Many Islanders have marked the next day on their mental calendars as the first possible day of Blue's departure.  If it happens as expected, they'll turn out to reset Roosevelt Island's town clock to run forward again.

The conventional wisdom has been that Governor George Pataki would not replace Blue before the November 3 election, because that would be an admission of an incredible blunder in naming him in the first place.  As true as that may be of the blunder, it may be true of the timing as well.

But an equally likely reason is that no competent replacement would take the job with only months or weeks – now days – to run in Pataki's term: Why take a flyer on a job that could evaporate in an election night surprise?

The job has been shopped around.  There are even some indications that a successor has been chosen, and Blue has been given the word.

Among the straws in the wind:

• Blue's public relations guy, Michael Greason, is gone.  No announcement – just a quiet disappearance, followed by professions like, "He's not in right now" and "Don't know," from other members of the RIOC staff (who truly may only suspect).
• This week's RIOC Board meeting was cancelled.  Why have a meeting, after all, when everything's about to change?
• Blue's been to Albany within the last two weeks on some slightly mysterious errand – very likely to hear what's in his future.

There is the possibility, as well, that he has been given some incentive to leave quietly, without leaving behind any smoke-solid claim of "mission accomplished," or charges of racist motive in the opposition he has stirred over the past two and a half years.

Whatever the case, there may be reason for increased confidence in Jim Kaufman's laconic pronouncement: "He's toast."

Now what?

It is a watershed moment for Roosevelt Island because Pataki is not likely to appoint another individual unwilling or unable to work with the community.  That's too risky a course, given the Island's high level of activism and demonstrated ability to make waves in the political firmament – waves out of proportion to the Island's reasonable place as a concern for any Governor.

We are likely, therefore, to get someone who will at least appear to be more sensitive to residents' concerns.  More willing, at least, to play the game of listening and seeming to heed.  A really smart administrator might even find a way to pull the Roosevelt Island Residents Association into a working relationship – to use its Common Council as a sounding board and its monthly meetings as a forum for trial balloons.

However that goes, there is likely to be far less immediate incentive for residents to demand the fundamental change that local governance would represent.  There could be an even further diffusion of the available effort, which is already fragmented into a glass menagerie of fragile and distant hopes.

It could mean less Island support, and legislative support harder to recruit, for the self-governance bill Assemblymember Pete Grannis has put into the Albany mill at the request of the Island's Maple Tree Group.

But relaxing would be a mistake.  Whatever relief politics brings Roosevelt Island after the election, it will not produce the fundamental change required to remove the threat of some future Jerome Blue being assigned here in a high-paying parking spot to buy his silence, as a political reward, or just to sideline him where the damage will be limited to Roosevelt Island, sparing the rest of New York State.  The Pataki political organism, and its future replacements, will still have more reason to value Roosevelt Island as a dump for hazardous political waste than as the valuable experiment it was before Jerry Blue changed everything.

All the more reason, then, for those who have doubts about the Roosevelt Island Drive for Democracy (RIDD, curiously enough) or the efforts of the Maple Tree Group, to reconsider those doubts and weigh them against the likely shape of our future.

As good as the next administrator may be, and as appealing as it may be to engage in the wishful thinking that New York City may one day ride to our rescue, as long as Roosevelt Island is a possession of the State, our only really good future is likely to be one controlled by the voting power of residents, electing a Board of Residents, and carried forward by a professional administrator whose loyalty is to the Island and its people – not to a political patron.