Last WIRE, you'll remember, Residents Association President Patrick Stewart rose to the defense of Frank Angelino, Chair of the RIOC Board's Capital Planning and Development Committee (CPDC), calling Angelino "the greatest asset this community has on the RIOC Board of Directors," and challenging The WIRE "to produce any shred whatever of any evidence" to contradict Stewart's evaluation that Angelino's "long history of community service in New York City" is anything but "remarkable and impeccable."

That's a diversion.

Angelino doesn't need defending, and the analysis was not an attack on him.  It was a simple rendering of the facts - that although the CPDC "sense of the committee" vote was clearly only an approval of Hudson/Related as Southtown developers, the RIOC Board went further - it also gave its green light to the developers' "project and plan."

In short, the RIOC Board, Angelino included (and with not a whisper of protest from Stewart) voted a resolution that went well beyond the advisory "sense" elicited, by Angelino, from CPDC.  As Stewart told a meeting of the Residents Association Common Council (with RIOC President Robert H. Ryan at his side), "My understanding of all of that was that it was the sense of the committee to approve the developer, not the plan, not the architecture, none of that, because there wasn't anything to approve...  They haven't done any of that stuff yet, so what we agreed to was to approve the developer and nothing else."

With those words, recorded and transcribed exactly, Stewart made his own position-of-the-moment clear:  CPDC had not recommended approval of the developers' plan.

RIOC President Ryan also made it really clear in the CPDC meeting in this exchange with CPDC member Marc Diamond:

Diamond: We're looking for final approval at this point, but it's final approval of the developer as opposed to final approval of his project.

Ryan: Correct.

And that's the "process" Stewart chooses to defend with Frank Angelino as its proxy: A setting in which the few resident members of CPDC generate advice which will then be ignored if it conflicts with plans already in place, or followed if it fits those plans, or exceeded if it doesn't quite include all the RIOC Board would like.  That's no "process" at all.  It's a cynical game of "Let's pretend," and by both his comments and his silence, Patrick Stewart (who, let's remember, is President of the Residents Association) seems too eagerly to have taken on the role written for him by the Pataki administration: Chief resident pretender and apologist.

But they're not even doing a good job of pretending that residents have a chance for meaningful influence over the shape of Southtown.

When Stewart claimed, at the last RIOC Board meeting, that the Capital Planning and Development Committee "has met in the open nine times; it has been publicized; it's open to anyone who wants to attend those meetings," he had a convenient lapse of memory.  The facts:

• CPDC meetings weren't opened until Spring, after a late-March request from The WIRE to Commissioner Joe Lynch of the State Department of Housing and Community Renewal for a ruling on the matter.

• All CPDC meetings were held off-Island.

• Had residents been invited, and attended, the conference room used would have accommodated only a handful.

• The meetings were generally held at 6:30 on week-day evenings, an unworkable time for most interested residents.

• Not all the meetings were publicly announced.

• Comments from the general public were not allowed.  A couple of residents who did attend found that only members of the Committee and designated developers or RIOC staff were allowed to speak.

• Not all the meetings dealt with Southtown, and in fact...

• The CPDC meeting at which that "sense of the committee" vote was taken did not even have Southtown on the agenda.  Any resident hoping to comment on Southtown would not have been forewarned, even if the meetings did provide for public comment - which they did not.

In his last President's column, Stewart himself described RIOC's request for a CPDC endorsement of Southtown developers as "precipitous," thereby admitting that critical decisions about the future of Roosevelt Island are being made on a hurry-up basis.  "Precipitous" applies equally to the RIOC Board vote in which the "plan and project" were approved in an end run that exceeded the scope of the advisory sense of CPDC.

Stewart finds himself in the odd position of endorsing precipitous decision-making about Southtown.  But development is not a decision whether or not to clean the streets.  Development is permanent.  The WIRE points these things out not as a criticism of Frank Angelino, but as a telling of the facts the community has a right to know.

The reason given for the precipitous decision, incidentally, was that the developers had located an east-side medical institution willing to provide tenants for an entire building - very likely a fairly transient population (nobody was quite saying) - and if it turns out to be a population of folks who are unlikely to have any long-term commitment to this community, that in itself is a matter that should be reviewed by residents, by RIRA, by CPDC, not simply ratified by a quickie vote of the non-elected RIOC Board that has only one voting resident on it.

If there is "process" and a provision for resident input, these questions:

• If the community is to have something to say about development (including Southtown), why hasn't RIRA put together a brainstorming session in which residents can have a genuine dialog with the developers?

• Why didn't somebody in Patrick Stewart's close orbit think to challenge the RIOC assertion that the order of construction must be tailored to fit RIOC's budget rather than what's best for the community?

So the substance of Stewart's last WIRE column has to be rejected for attempting to divert attention with an unnecessary defense of Frank Angelino instead of addressing the embarrassing questions and the main point of the December 4 analysis: The process has been used to thwart resident influence and input, not enable it.

That is, no doubt, on the minds of those who are collecting funds to mount a legal challenge to the RIOC Board's approval of the Southtown plan.  That's a move which has yet to play itself out, but it's what happens when the "process" is used to circumvent real input by residents, then is defended by those in power.

DL