Editorial

Spitzer as Cavalry

The enthusiastic crowd that listened to gubernatorial candidate Eliot Spitzer Thursday night consisted of Roosevelt Islanders paying attention to citizenship and matters political, starved for someone speaking their language. The Attorney General hit virtually all the right notes.

Careful not to promise what he might not be able to deliver, Spitzer pledged to do his best and to demand the best from the right people, whom he said he would bring into his Albany administration and into service here on Roosevelt Island.

"I always come back to a very simple rule," he said. "Good people with bad process will still get good results. Bad people with good process will still get bad results. The critical issue is – who do you put in charge?"

Spitzer was careful not to bash his "client," Governor George Pataki, but nobody in the Good Shepherd Community Center had any doubt about his real views – that he and his people will do a far better job of governing than George Pataki & Company. As it happens, that’s The WIRE’s view, as well.

But it won’t come easy – not all of it, anyway.

Spitzer knows what has become all too obvious about New York State, and he talked about it Thursday night – the State’s hidden government of some 700 authorities, which, in the past, have operated too far from the scrutiny of legislators, the press, and the public, and too often without any effort to ask simple questions about what constituents want. In fact, for most authorities, the only constituent has been the Governor’s office, where patronage appointments are dispensed and contracts steered.

The Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation falls squarely in that category, and the recent enactment of the Public Authorities Accountability Act has not wiped away the memory of Dr. Jerome Blue or Robert Ryan in the RIOC Presidency, each collecting well over $100,000 a year and only half-supervising a staff of political hangers-on whose jobs depended more on political allegiance than workplace skills.

Spitzer, who says he’s never asked lawyers their political affiliation before hiring them for the Attorney General’s office, promises to bring that same philosophy and practice to the Governor’s office and to Roosevelt Island. His Democratic colleagues believe him, and Thursday night’s audience clearly wanted very much to believe him.

George Pataki’s overextended stay in the Governor’s mansion has been a disaster for Roosevelt Island. From the misappropriation of parkland to the $2,000 garbage cans whose openings won’t accommodate the trash-bagged leavings of a Lighthouse Park picnic, to contracts and leases that look reasonable (or don’t) but smell just a little like spoiled cod, to a Tramway inadequately supervised and kept out of service far longer than necessary, to the employment of a real-estate "consultant" whose ability to fill the Island’s empty storefronts has become legend while he’s promoted grandiose and inappropriate schemes whose greatest virtue would be the high commissions he would receive – and much more – the Pataki era has brought little of real value to the Island, and it has taken away resources that could have contributed greatly to the future of this community.

Spitzer looks like the cavalry coming over the hill.

DL