Editorial
A Time to Act

The apparent determination of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation (RIOC) and the State Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR) to ignore the prime tenets built into the creation of Roosevelt Island, and embodied in its Lease for the property, has led both agencies into a narrowing path from which there is little hope of liberation.

When RIOC-DHCR publicly seek ways to distort the intent of the Lease and the General Development Plan in order to justify commercializing parkland at Southpoint, both agencies demonstrate that they have drifted from the path of good purpose and have been drawn to a course of expediency and short-term gain.

That’s not what Roosevelt Island is about.

Now, Island residents, who do know what it’s about, need to harness the legal system to realign government with their interests – and, for that matter, with government’s best interests.

As a resident, you have a stake in putting things right. Come to the May 4 Town Meeting. Bring your checkbook. Think wisely and generously about your future here, and be prepared to fight for it.

Secret Government

When government goes behind closed doors to do its work in secret, away from public scrutiny, citizens are right to be suspicious – suspicious that those who govern are working for their own interests, and not for the interests of the people.

Jerry Blue’s bunker management at RIOC is a perfect example that taints everything around it: The State Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR) looks bad for its association with an operation that does all it can to keep its activities hidden. The State as a whole looks bad. The Governor, in particular, has continued to associate himself with a tinhorn despot, endorsing – by his failure to act to have his RIOC Board appointees remove Blue – a shabby operation that threatens to take the Island down with it.

Is the Governor so callous that he can blithely allow this to continue? Are his appointees on the RIOC Board, who have the power to dismiss Blue, so loyal to the Governor’s misplaced interests that they are paralyzed in the face of migraine-caliber mismanagement?

By his administration’s secrecy, and by his continued use of faked liaison committees drawn from his claque, Blue has made residents of Roosevelt Island the subjects of an experiment gone awry, rather than participants in a great experiment in broadly integrated housing.

In this country, government is supposed to be responsive to the people – open, and subject to regular scrutiny. Because Blue’s RIOC administration is anything but, residents can only assume that decisions are made in private because they are made against residents’ interest. Residents believe they are excluded from the process for the worst reasons.

And the State administration, as a whole, is his co-conspirator, smeared with the sleaze that oozes from Blue’s bunker.

When will the Governor wake up?