W: Tell us about the successes.

DK:   Remember, before RIOC was invented, this Island used to be run by one Director from DHCR and some administrative people. RIOC, all of a sudden, became this big agency. So they're wasting money by definition, because they are spending more money on the same operational and administrative stuff than before they had this big agency there. Anything you can do to improve operational efficiency has to be counted as a plus, and Jerry Blue did a good job on that. And if you look around this Island you will see that in terms of general appearance, we look as good as any other part of the City, including the Upper East Side.

Another success is that he opened up the discussion process to a wider segment of the community. This seemed to bother a lot of people because in fact his relationship was outside the channels that we are used to. But in fact these people feel that they finally had access to the governing process and, regardless of the structural difficulties, the notion of opening up the communication channels to as broad a spectrum of the community as possible cannot be considered bad.

W: What are the minuses? If he had these successes, why didn't he stress these?

DK:   He was far too secretive and his Board was highly irritated by that. And he had certain management deficiencies. Everybody had to report directly to him. Everything was in his hands. He made all decisions. It was a nebulous management structure or non-management structure, in my view, with bad results. Nothing gets done until the boss makes a decision. You don't know what's going on because there's no clear reporting up and down. There is no clear line of responsibility. And worst, it leads to secretiveness, which was the glaring deficiency of his nature. His Board was always surprised. Everything from the Eldercare facility to the hotel proposition on Southpoint to the second story on the mini-schools came as a complete surprise to the Board when it appeared on the agenda. I wondered why things were being brought to the Board in this way. We tabled everything for years because proper information wasn't available for the Board.

Dr. Blue never understood that if you have three hundred people in a room screaming at you because of a decision you made, you have to either reconsider the decision or defend it. For instance, he never explained the reason we're developing on the Island.. No RIOC President ever has. And it will be just as necessary when we move eventually to a home-rule situation of one kind or another.

W: And that reason is...

DK:   This Island is in imminent danger of sinking into the East River like the Titanic, and I mean physically sinking. The place is falling apart. We have been undercapitalized for years. We are deficient in our operational spending. We have huge expenditures facing us just to hold the Island together physically, and I am not exaggerating. There is a $6-7 million seawall capitalization required, for which the money was set aside prior to the Pataki election. And we lost it.

There is one place on the Island where the seawall is not high enough to meet the requirements of a hundred-year storm.

W: Where's that?

DK:   The northeastern corner of the Island, roughly from the vicinity of Motorgate up to Lighthouse Park. It's the one last piece of seawall that hasn't been rebuilt, and it needs to be. I don't care what the Corps of Engineers says, you can see it. If you walk along up there, just to the side of the tennis courts, the road sinks down and the concrete is so wet that the railings are always rotting and have to be replaced. The grassy area between the sidewalk and the street is completely eroding, which means the area behind the wall is filling up with water. One good storm and that's going to get knocked down and it'll take out half the hospital when it does. It will flood the hospital and the ground will sink away. If you want evidence of it, all you have to do is to see what happened on the west side of the Island when there was a big storm two or three years ago and a big chunk of the seawall was washed away. We had to take every spare dollar we had to repair that. This was under Lerman. The Board voted in a hurry. We had some spare money.

And, we are about half a million dollars a year short on operational expenditure to make this place as it should be. Adding the Tram to Metrocard is going to cost about $700,000 a year. Stuff like this. Where's the money coming from? That's the reason we're developing. I don't favor development for development's sake. I'd love to see empty space and open fields here but from where everyone else is sitting, here's this vast, mid-Manhattan, middle-of-the-river empty space " what are we doing with it? I think we should be developing to the point where we have sufficient income to support this Island, to keep it from sinking and to run it efficiently. That takes money, that takes development. And that will be true whoever runs this place.

W: Do you support the self-governance idea?

DK:   Yes. It will happen, hopefully this year, although I have some reservations about the timing right now. But revolutions happen when they are supposed to. It doesn't matter that I see some deficiencies in the proposed system, it's going to happen, even if it's four or five years from now or ten years from now. I disagree with something I read in the paper that if it doesn't happen now it won't ever happen. Guaranteed, it's going to happen and, when this happens, the people who end up running this Island, elected from the community, are going to face the same realities as RIOC did.

W: Why do you think it's guaranteed?

DK:   Because I'm an American. The natural impulse in this country is to devolve the decision-making to the lowest and most local level possible. And it's a particularly apt model for this community. But if a new Board of elected citizens came to this Island in November, it would take them two or three years to see the inevitable necessity of development on the Island and to figure out how to develop and, most important, to understand that any development is going to upset and anger some number of residents. If you are going to take on an elected position of responsibility in a small-town situation, you are going to find that half your neighbors are really mad at you, about half the time. And the numbers shift.

W: You feel like you've been in that position?

DK:   Yes, but I can handle it. I'm not sure that some of the people preparing for self-government really understand it and I hope that the people who have worked hardest for self-government will then have the guts to stand up and run for those positions and find out how very difficult it is to take responsibility for the changes they have wrought, because somebody is going to have to do it.

W: Would you run?

DK:   I'm not sure. There's nothing more fun than politics, and there's nothing more important than taking a role in the community, and I suppose I'd be foolish enough to stand one more time.

W: What will be the major challenges for the people who take up that responsibility?

DK:   Keeping the money flowing right is the only challenge. We've lost our State subsidies. In the operations area and capitalization area, they will have to move quickly. You can see in any rainstorm that Main Street is sinking. After a rainstorm you can see the pattern of puddles.

Here's another: Every inch of the sidewalk from Rivercross to Westview has buckled. Things like that have to be taken in hand. Commissioner Lynch knows this. He said to me privately at the time of Rob Ryan's accession that we have to move quickly to protect the physical plant, the capitalization of the island. So DHCR is saying quietly what I've been sayng in my flamboyant and rhetorical way. The place was built twenty-five years ago. It has to be recapitalized as soon as possible and any new Board that comes in has to face that. We live on a precarious Island protected by a sea wall, very vulnerable to natural effects, and that'll be the main challenge for any elected Board.

DK:   You hope to God that you can hold the line until you can get some development going around here and start getting some income. Perhaps when development begins, you can borrow that money, and a new Board of Directors is going to have to borrow that money, mortgage our future to some degree and that will force them to develop, as quickly as necessary. I can't see any of these new projects developing income for this community any sooner than three or four years out, and that's if we started today.

Maybe two years for the mini-schools and that's the most hated project of all. It is just too strange a change for people to accept. The question is, do we want to screw up some people's view for a lousy quarter of a million? I don't know, but if you find that a newly-elected Board comes in and they need to come up with a quarter of a million a year, then they may have no choice but to build that thing.

W: What about the other development plans?

DK:   It's a strange idea. You better understand that I am very much in favor of adapting old buildings and finding uses for them and getting income out of them. To convert the mini-schools into town houses seemed a good idea until the developer said she had to add a second story to make them viable. That's when people got crazy and you can't blame them. In my view, most of the public arguments against the mini-schools are emotional and illogical and make no sense. But the hard-core argument is that some number of apartments are going to have their view and air and light severely impacted. The question is, how many people are going to be actually hurt for what net gain to the Corporation? Let me illustrate by an extreme analogy. If you came to the Board and said, "I have a project that is going to screw up a thousand existing apartments for a net gain to the Corporation of $5,000 a year," you would be laughed out of the Board meeting. If on the other hand you came with a proposal that said, "I'm going to totally trash one apartment in return for a million dollars a year," the Board would probably go for it. The mini-schools fall somewhere in the middle. This kind of decision is one that a Board, elected or appointed, has to make all the time, and it's the basis, I'm sure, on which the mini-school issue will be decided.

DK:   I'm of two minds about it and will be forever. It is a brilliant project on paper, an ideal homesite for sixteen families. But it is going to seriously affect the quality of living of thirty or forty apartments. Am I willing to trade sixteen for forty for a quarter of a million dollars? I don't know.

W: Review the SSJ-hotel development for us.

DK:   That will be another tough call. My sense is that the community's reaction to the SSJ Marriott project is not altogether as negative as has been expressed. My issues with SSJ are two. I have lived on this Island twenty years and I would like to go a park at Southpoint more than on the Fourth of July. Right now there ten or eleven acres down there which under the current master plan are dedicated to parkland. But there's no park. I would vote against SSJ in an instant if someone gave me the five million dollars or so it would take to develop that as a park... It could be the most beautiful park in NYC, and one of the most important.

That's a challenge for our elected officials. If Pete Grannis and Olga Mendez and Gifford Miller and maybe Congresswoman Maloney too, could put together some kind of $5 million package I'd take it right to the Board and the Commissioner and say, we can't build a Marriott, the money is in place for a park, how dare you vote for SSJ. But I don't see that happening.

But SSJ is offering a trade. They're going to take five or six acres of that acreage for their development and give me a finished four- or five-acre park. And that might be a good thing. It will provide people with access to that Southpoint area which is one of the genus loci of New York City " sacred ground. People should have access to it all the time. And we can have access to it by giving up some of it. I hate to leave land fallow if it is never going to be farmed and Southpoint has lain fallow for the entire twenty years I've lived here. Those are the reasons to do it.

Reasons not to do it? First, we'll be giving up six acres of parkland which is dedicated as parkland in the current plan. And the traffic around here will go up. I'm not talking about construction traffic: if they build it while they are building Southtown, construction traffic won't even be noticed. What are two more towers when they are building seven or however many are being planned for Southtown over the next five years? The Southtown project is the real construction problem. I don't care if they barge in every piece of concrete and brick and girder that they use to build, the traffic problems on Main Street while that project is being built are going to be horrendous. Throwing in a couple of more buildings won't even be noticed in terms of increased construction. This construction is already going to be so rough on all of us.

But after it's built, it is not just the question of deliveries. Every visitor who comes to that hotel requires four cab trips. People will not come here from the airport by NY Waterway vaporetto. Who is going to land at LaGuardia, take surface transport to the Marine Terminal, and take a boat that takes 30-40 minutes to get here when you can get here by cab in 20-25 minutes in virtually all traffic and weather conditions? There'll be constant traffic coming from there; there's only one Main Street and that's the main physical reason not to build. I don't know if Main Street will be more crowded than East 64th Street but East 64th Street, to use a technical term, sucks!

W: Could you review the Octagon Park development?

DK:   You know, I think Jerry was finally learning how to do things right. He was bringing people into the community to propose their ideas and get community feedback to the Board instead of a signed-off fait accompli for a yes-no decision. I am not opposed to building in that area. I have no reason to be as long as Octagon Park gets built properly. I remind you that there is a plan made by the Weintraub and de Domenico architectural firm going back thirteen years. We built the soccer field, we built the baseball field, we built the Community Gardens, and the rest of it is covered by the water-tunnel project. That plan exists and it should be built. We lack park space on this Island even as it exists right now. The only place you can sit out on a lawn under a tree is the Rivercross lawn. Lighthouse Park is another, maybe some of the interior parks. I want to see the park and picnic area in Oc

tagon Park. New construction there might impinge upon it or it might support it. That was the deal with the Eldercare facility except that they put it in the wrong place. That was wrong, and it's no wonder people were up in arms. This one might get it right or it might be pie in the sky. These developers seem to have the sensitivity but they are still going to put two very long wings on that Octagon building " which exists on the original ground plan, which I guess is some kind of justification " but that is not the way we live now. We cannot claim the right to build a building where there was a building before or someone would tear down Eastwood and build a jail.

W: What about the Eldercare facility that is now to be sited on part of the Sportspark footprint?

DK:   This was one of those situations where the Board was presented with an idea late and had to respond in turn with the best idea they could. The fact is that Sports Park was desperately underutilized and it is not such a bad idea to pull it down if we can keep a gym area and save the pool and so forth. Granted, the new building might be roughly thirty or forty stories in height. The fact that you are going to see something new in your view is not good enough reason not to build it. This is Manhattan after all. My idea is that it is the best eventual location for an Eldercare facility " and there should be one: It fits in with our community, despite all the irrational opposition. It would be best to fit it into Southtown itself. But that calls for developers to get together, and they might never do so.

Let me just conclude, in the area of development, that the Island is going to face tremendous change. Even if we build only Southtown " which everybody claims to understand was part of the original Master Plan " Southtown itself is going to be the biggest change this Island has seen and change is always painful. And we'd better recognize that we have to go through with it. All other projects will have minimal impact, compared to the general dislocation or difficulty of getting Southtown built.

W: You were talking about balance and dislocation, but what is the bottom line? Economics? People's emotions? Any amount of development is going to hurt someone. At what point will you decide it is not an emotional issue " it's going to be economics?

DK:   Remember I am a Director of the Corporation and have total responsibility towards the Island and am the only resident who has this responsibility currently. I tend to see as positive any notion of development as a financial matter. As I said, on paper RIOC is supposed to develop, operate and maintain this Island, but it doesn't say anything about people's emotional well-being or political happiness or public points of view. I think of these things personally and I think the rest of the Board understands these issues. There are no stupid people on that Board, there are no insensitive people on that Board. They understand that their decisions have a huge impact, some of them negative.

But we've been living in a dream here and one of the things the Pataki administration did was to call a halt to this. They say, "We're Republicans and Republicans don't subsidize people's happy lives. We don't do that. You want a happy life, you've got to pay a happy price in terms of development, because we're not going to pay for it any more." I don't see any change any time soon in this area. Governor Pataki has years left in this term. If he doesn't become the next Vice President of the US, he may have a third or fourth term. Anybody, Democrat or Republican, who runs after Governor Pataki will have to accede to the general political climate of the State which is not to subsidize concepts like Roosevelt Island. So we have to get income to this Island, and as a responsible Director on the Board, that's supposed to be my goal. As a person who lives here, I wish it were not so. I see that I am going to have to make decisions at some point that will cause discomfort to my neighbors. This is a responsibility you undertake if you are functioning at any level of town government. My neighbors have a right to be angry because I wasn't elected to this position but I was President of the Residents Association and I took on the burden. Whoever replaces me on the Board, or an elected Board, will have to take it on themselves. That'll take some courage. I believe there are courageous people living here: I just want to see them show up.

W: Whatabout the changing demographics?

DK:   Our basic problem in the public discourse on the Island right now is that there are two conflicting definitions of what the Island's original purpose was in terms of demographics and economics generally. The original plan for the Island was conceived in response to the fact that the middle class was deserting Manhattan in the 50's and 60's at a great rate, moving to the suburbs, leaving the City to people with a lot of money and people with none. And the notion was to develop a community with a housing support program that allowed the middle class per se to live in or near Manhattan and that was part of the experiment we are involved in. At the same time the definition seems to have been developed that we are by definition a mixed-income community. And I am not sure what that means because no one has defined what the middle class means and how mixed are our incomes. We currently have people in this community who receive welfare support and we have more millionaires than are willing to speak up and be recognized.

Let me backtrack a little. A lot of people have reacted to the Eldercare facility on the grounds that it might cost $3,000-5,000 a month to live there, which is $60,000 a year, and that seems rather excessive for Roosevelt Island people. Except that, if you were to describe a median Roosevelt Island person, it might be fair to describe that person as a schoolteacher or a mid-level civil servant with a Master's degree. That might be a fair description of a median person, a civil servant with some education and goals. Such a person currently makes 45 or 50 thousand a year. Such a person retires after twenty or thirty years with $60,000 in retirement income. Seen in this light, an Eldercare which demands $60,000 in full support is not just for rich people, it is well within the grasp of the median Roosevelt Island person.

So this question of what is middle class and what is well-off is the domain of public discussion. Are we supposed to be a community that allows a middle-class person to remain and survive in New York City by one definition or are we totally dedicated to a mixed-income concept? And if that encourages some lower-income people to live here, then it should allow some that are maybe not at the highest level of income but surely what is considered upper middle class today.

So, what is the demographic here? It could be defined either way and you can make arguments for the future development of the Island based on either perception.

W: Do you think it is just a dream to have this full-range community?

DK:   It is not a dream, we have it right now. Is the Roosevelt Island experiment successful in terms of a group of people living together in terms of the full range of incomes? Absolutely. Unimaginably successful. We are the only community in the City and, I suspect, the world, where people across so many economic and race and ethnic and country of origin and age and abilities are living so close to each other. Are there frictions? Well, yes. Are we living in a paradise? Well, no. Are we doing something that is unimaginable in the mindset of America and the world today? Yes, we are doing it.

That's our problem with dealing with the City and the State and with the Feds for all I know, and with the New York City newspapers. They do not see it. They do not get it. They don't understand what we are doing here and they don't understand that we are living the dream. If they want to spend attention on the frictions then they are missing the point. Every community has frictions. This is the greatest social experiment that's ever been performed. I wish the Governor understood it, I wish Commissioner Lynch understood it and I'm not sure he does, I hope Rob Ryan comes to understand it.

Jerry Blue had a sense of it, except that, being Jerry Blue, he couldn't take advantage of it, and things factionalized in one area. But you have to understand that things have long been factionalized in nother area. People were surprised and they shouldn't have been. People who I thought should know better met me in the street and commented that suddenly a large proportion of the staff at RIOC seemed to be of African- American heritage. I was shocked to hear them tell me that and I'll tell you why. It is common and endemic in all cities, not just NY, that whoever comes into power, of whatever background, tends to surround himself or herself with people they feel comfortable working with. Now, when an Italian takes over from an Irish person or a Jewish person takes over from an Italian, the staff all change but the difference doesn't seem to be apparent. When an African-American person is in charge and the staff becomes African-American, all of a sudden people are up in arms. Ed Rademaker and I agree that there was a subtle shift of power under Dr. Blue towards or away from some community polarities and it was not a bad thing. It was not a wrong thing. Nellie Velez grabbed me years ago and said, "David, people have to understand that there is a change on Roosevelt Island. Our demographic has changed. Our population base has changed and our economics have changed." She was absolutely right.

W: You served as President of RIRA and have watched it closely lately. What's your feeling about it? What can be done to make it more effective or is it effective enough?

DK:   I think it is the wrong question. I think the real question is: If you go to a home rule situation in November, what would be RIRA's purpose? The answer is, we'll always need a Common Council. We will always need a representative citizens' group to fight the power and that is true even if the power is made up of people from the community, and that's RIRA's job. I think that Pat Stewart got forked by the Jerry Blue situation in that he was forced to respond and defend constantly. Not just him, but the Residents' Association as a group, were forced to fight this guy all the time because of the decisions he made and the way he went about doing his business and I'm sure it must have left Stewart immensely frustrated.

W: Talk about self-governance in the broad sweep of RI history.

DK:   Despite all the talk and the public turmoil on the major development decisions we've been asked to make, actually the Board has not acted upon them. We're waiting to learn more about them, to be better able to judge their impact on the community. If I've been effective at all in working with Dr. Blue, it is because I had his ear in a lot of small things. I could drag him out of his office and say, "Look, this needs fixing," and get his response. When Ron Vass was on the Board, he and I walked the Island and gave Dr. Blue a long laundry list of things that needed his attention. Ron was frustrated that Dr. Blue did not give them his immediate attention, but eventually he addressed most of them. If I've been effective, it's been first by keeping him focused on some small things which got done, and second by representing the historical community view, giving other Board members a sense of what the community might feel, how the community might be best served by some of the decisions we are asked to take, so I think it's been useful to have me there in some of the small things. Whether I have the vision or the broad point of view to get my mind off the sidewalk pavement and see where the sidewalk leads, I'm not too sure. I'm not sure where I stand in the big picture.

W: Twenty five years from now, where will it lead?

DK:   The first shovelful of dirt turned at Southtown will begin a process of change that will make the future unreadable in terms of where we have come from. It is up to whoever is in charge, whether an elected or an appointed Board " and I hope it will be an elected Board " to see that these changes are as uch as possible in line with the dreams that we hold from the past. But whether such a change can be managed by any group of people, I can't say.

Personally, I don't know whether my proper function as a Board member is to enunciate a vision of a future of this Island or just to work through things that need fixing on a day-to-day basis. I don't know what's right for a person in public life and I suspect it's a mixture of the two.

I may be weak in terms of the larger vision. I do have the vision that when there's jobs to do around here, I'm pretty good at doing them. When little changes can affect or ease things. Do you know that I'm responsible for putting the bus shelter in front of the chapel? They changed the bus stops to accommodate the larger buses and put a stop in front of the Chapel. Al Lewis came up to me yelling one day in the winter of seventeen snowstorms, five years ago, and said, "Why isn't there a shelter here? When the bus comes we've got to run across the street from in front of the Senior Center in the snow and someone's going to fall down, because there's no shelter." I said, "You're right." So I made a call. And we got the bus shelter there.

What's more important: To have a great vision for this Island or see where the bus shelter should be? I don't know. I can do the bus shelter. Maybe the bus shelter is a part of the greater vision.