The tangle of Southtown issues now squarely on the desk of State Supreme Court Justice Harold Tompkins brought six contenders to his courtroom just over a week ago in a battle over whether RIOC acted properly in approving Hudson-Related's plan for the development.

The area in dispute in current Article 78 actions against the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation is at the center of this aerial photograph, between existing Northtown buildings at the left, and the abandoned Nurses Residence, which lies halfway between Northtown and the Queensboro Bridge to the South. The area between the Nurses Residence and the Bridge is not in dispute. Residents claim that because the Island General Development Plan calls for six acres of park separating Northtown and Southtown, the three acres provided for in the current Southtown plan are not adequate.

Judging by the array of attorneys in Tompkins' courtroom, the meter was ticking at an alarming $40 a minute – $2,400 an hour or more – a big part of which is going for legal services to defend RIOC's action.  In addition to RIOC's house counsel, there were two hired guns from Carter, Ledyard & Milburn ready to do the heavy lifting.

The combined legal costs are at least $200,000 at this point.

Having observed the development of these matters over the past several years, we place the blame for such wasteful litigation on RIOC.  More specifically, it is the result of the monumental mismanagement of the public benefit corporation under Dr. Jerome Blue.  Blue escaped the situation a year ago, after three years in which he stripped the corporation of its best people, then polluted it with minor-leaguers who scurried to serve – badly, as it turned out – his burning eagerness to reignite Island development at any cost.

We want Southtown built.  And this developer team is right for the job.  But RIOC has messed up its part in the matter.  The result is a financial deal that can't pass muster, a housing plan not likely to build a sense of community, a layout that treats existing buildings as a backwater, and a construction plan that will leave Main Street unserviceable.  And at least two buildings – the first two to be built – are on parkland.

Financially, the plan makes little sense because the return is far less than the required State investment could produce on the open money market.  Thousands of truckloads of construction materials will destroy Main Street – and maybe some of the crucial infrastructure under it.  And the community nature of the Island will be compromised by a plan that has 91% of the first units planned as studio or one-bedroom apartments that won't attract families.  And the buildings on parkland violate the GDP and remove our community greensward.

And the layout.  The first building to be built puts a kind of dead-end wall across views down Main Street, as illustrated in these photo-drawings generated by experts working on one of the residents' cases:

Before

After

RIOC was in too much of a hurry to give this project a green light without enough information.  Even worse, its refusal to hold discussions with the Residents Association, looking toward a solution, was a reckless desertion of a cost-saving course in favor of a showdown using tax money to buy litigation muscle.

RIOC should seek a settlement, to end this madness.

DL