I’m writing this late on Wednesday evening, June 30.  I’ve just come from the Residents Association Common Council meeting that I hoped would give direction to the constitutional debate that has raged for so long.  Was there more light than heat?  About equal, unfortunately, I would say.  Those who came to express outrage did so.  Those cooler heads who looked to devise a rationale that would govern the Common Council and enfranchise the RIRA membership worked hard to come up with a plan and a mechanism to make that happen.

I was glad to see about a dozen Island residents at the meeting. This just about equaled the number of RIRA members who have participated in Public Sessions for the entire last year!  I said to them that I hoped they would make RIRA Common Council meetings (on the first Wednesday of the month from September through June) a habit.  Also, I tried to make the point that any set of rules, constitution or bylaws, is only a skeleton upon which the flesh and blood of the organization, the volunteers, is built.  Without a solid volunteer group, people attending regularly and ready to work, the constitution can just be preserved under glass for all the value it has.

First Vice President Steve Marcus tried valiantly to keep the debate on the constitutional issues that have most concerned those residents who have been paying attention, but it was an uphill fight.  The existing constitution is virtually impenetrable, and those who support the status quo have done so by diverting the debate into crevasses and backwaters difficult to get out of.  I believe that dividing the existing constitution into a short constitution (containing the fundamental tenets of the organization and subject to amendment only by a quorum of RIRA members) and bylaws (containing the rules and regulations of the Common Council and amended by a two-thirds majority vote of that Council) is the way organizations should operate.  This is not the U.S. Constitution, folks, and your fundamental rights are not at stake. We are an organization of volunteers, residents who give of their time and effort to improve the community, and the constitution merely gives us structure within which to work.

We have little money and less power.  What we do have is the right to call ourselves the voice of Roosevelt Island, and it is by virtue of being elected representatives that we get to make that claim.  Every Council Member who exercises a vote as an organization’s appointee damages that claim.

That the last two Councils have accomplished as much as they have, despite a flawed set of rules, can only be attributed to the endurance and determination of the Council Members with whom I’ve served since 2000.

I served on two Common Councils prior to my election as president in November 2000.
These Councils were never called upon to raise money, to spend money, or to devise programs of any sort.  There was a period in which we went without the services of a Treasurer for six or eight months and it didn’t make a difference; there was no movement in the Treasury to report on.

In the last four years we have reversed that trend, and monthly Treasurer’s reports have been necessary and required.  As a matter of fact, we have commissioned the services of an auditor for the first time in my eight years on the Common Council (despite the constitutional requirement for one), and the first audit of the RIRA books in recent memory will be presented to the Council at the first regular fall meeting.

So where do we go from here?  There was a concerted effort to have the Common Council just vote the revised constitution in tonight and be done with it.  Very tempting, I can tell you, but a bad idea in the long run.  The RIRA membership takes little enough notice of the Common Council, and to deprive this electorate of their one opportunity to learn what we do and how we do it would be wrong.  I hope we can bring back to a Town Meeting a somewhat reworked document that will meet the expectations of the residents as well as the needs of the Common Council and that can be amended to fulfill our needs without all this jumping through hoops.

Democracy is messy, and it demands a level of personal responsibility that other forms of government place in the hands of the leadership rather than in the hands of the governed.  In other words, it’s your responsibility to educate yourself on what this constitution and bylaws entails and to do so before you come to a Town Meeting.  If you have questions, take them to your elected representatives; that’s what they’re there for.  Ask for answers and for documentation, and keep at it until you understand how things work.  This is no different than when resolutions or charter-revision questions appear on regular City and State ballots, and the League of Women Voters hasn’t bothered to inform you of the issues.  It’s still your responsibility to dig out the details and learn what you need to know before casting a vote.

We’ve spent a lot of time on this issue, and some have questioned whether it’s worth it.  Well, it’s worth doing once and then, getting back to the issues, projects, and programs that have made this Common Council, Class of 2002, a pleasure and a privilege to work with.  Over the past two years we have managed to start our meetings on time, to debate and vote without rancor, and to finish our business in an hour or so, two hours tops.  The old days of four-hour marathons in which progress was minimal and the speechifying interminable are behind us. Why don’t you check it out?

On to other business:  I’ve learned that the Roosevelt Island Day blood drive amassed 60 pints of blood.  In a city not prone to excessive blood donation, this is the gift of life pure and simple.  Produced by the Icla da Silva Foundation, the blood drive has been a RIRA Common Council project for the last three years.  My thanks to you RIRA members who sat under the tent at the Farmers’ Market and in Church Plaza persuading your neighbors to cough up (but not literally) a pint of the red stuff.

I’m happy to announce that the first meeting to consider contingency planning for Roosevelt Island has been set for July 9.  RIOC and the City and State Offices of Emergency Management will be represented, and I’ve been invited to represent this community.  Your Common Council presented RIOC with a letter listing items of special concern shortly after the Blackout of last August.  Roosevelt Island has unique considerations when planning for emergencies because of its special population and because this Island community has access to emergency services over a single bridge and without the water-borne backup available that a working dock would provide.  We will have much to talk about.