Endorsed by Island’s Reps,
Spitzer Calls Authorities Pataki’s “Dumping Grounds”
Pledges Reforms for Roosevelt Island at RIOC

Eliot Spitzer’s candidacy for Governor received an enthusiastic endorsement last Sunday from the City’s elected Democratic politicians representing parts of Carolyn Maloney’s 14th Congressional District, including Maloney and three of the representatives of Roosevelt Island.

In answering a question put by former Residents Association President Matthew Katz, Spitzer promised a pre-election meeting on Roosevelt Island problems. "If I’m fortunate enough to win," he said, "here’s the most important point: I will appoint – because my understanding is it’s a gubernatorial appointment to that authority – I will appoint people to that authority from Roosevelt Island, who understand Roosevelt Island, who will speak to the public purpose and who have the understanding and knowledge base to make smart decisions."

"What you are feeling," Spitzer continued, "and perhaps it’s a little worse in terms of Roosevelt Island because you read about it and feel as though the colony is back, pre-1776, except that there’s no tea to throw overboard... You’ve done that? All right. But we will address that. But what you are going through is symptomatic of the larger problem at the public authorities, where this [State] administration has used them, by and large, as a dumping ground for friends rather than as an opportunity to govern effectively.

"The authorities – and understand, there’s a little schizophrenia here – the authorities were created based upon a theory that if you put smart people in charge, you could get decisions made, outside of raw politics, that perhaps would be better. The understanding was that you also lost something in terms of transparency and accountability, but with the right people in charge they said the trade-off may be a fair one. Now what you have is the worst of all possible worlds – no accountability, no transparency, and the wrong people in charge, and so you get bad decisions being made by the wrong people and it’s somewhat akin to what I’ve said about the off-balance-sheet partnerships at Enron: You take all the bad stuff and hide it in these authorities and we’re stuck with it. It’s a real problem."

Earlier, speaking for about 20 minutes, Spitzer had contrasted Republican and Democratic attitudes about government, paraphrasing Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who represents Roosevelt Island: "I think it goes back to what Carolyn has talked about for all these years – making government work. Certainly since Bush has been there, and... in my view, since 1976 when Ronald Reagan... began to speak to a different ethic than what most people in this room believe... His ethic was "government is the enemy, government doesn’t work, government can’t help, there is no necessity of having a government that deals with our social fabric, invests in our communities," and so we have seen government wither over the last 30 years – wither in terms of its effectiveness, to the point where our intelligence agencies were fundamentally wrong in the most egregious ways, and that is because [they] didn’t know how to run government because government didn’t care.

"It wasn’t a happenstance that FEMA couldn’t respond to Hurricane Katrina. Government has withered because they’ve spoken about government in denigrating ways [so] that they can’t recruit good people.

"If the CEO – of any product – at the top of the company denigrates the very purpose of the product, [saying] we want to have a bad product, of course the infrastructure of the product and the infrastructure of government will disappear. And that’s why government – whether it’s Washington... [or] here in New York State where George Pataki never had a good thing to say about government – government has failed."

"We believe government can help... We believe in the restrained, smart use of government. When you spend the dollars, do it wisely. Do it effectively. Invest in education because we know it is the fulcrum of economic growth. Invest in our infrastructure here because, if we don’t, we will see New York City begin to wither."

Spitzer had mentioned Roosevelt Island as a missed opportunity earlier in his talk, perhaps responding to the relatively large delegation of Islanders who attended the meeting of Maloney’s 14th Congressional District Caucus.

A full transcript of Spitzer’s Sunday speech, with Grannis’s introduction, and Spitzer’s responses to the question about Roosevelt Island, is on Website NYC10044 with this issue of The WIRE.