To the Editor:

I would like to respond to several of the statements made by RIOC Board members about the dismissal of the Octagon lawsuit (The WIRE, April 30). I believe they are not factual or are misstatements.

Deborah Beck stated, "When I attended the January RIRA meeting to alert Common Council members to the risk and cost to Roosevelt Island residents [regarding the Article 78], I was not allowed to speak." Not exactly. I was sitting next to Deborah and the facts are these:

Deborah declined to ask for recognition during the RIRA Common Council "Public Access" portion of the agenda that begins every meeting and sought to speak after Public Access ended and only elected Councilmembers could participate. I don't know if she has ever attended a RIRA monthly meeting in her many years residing here, but there are rules as to how and when one may address the Council, just as there are at RIOC Board meetings. Community members who wish to address the RIOC Board learn that this is possible only every other month, when the Board meets in the afternoon, and not during the bi-monthly morning meetings. Further, a resident must wait until the Board meeting has adjourned and the Town Meeting is called in order to be recognized. What makes this process so frustrating and so insulting is that the Board often will call an executive session that can last hours prior to adjourning, leaving those with issues to share cooling their heels, waiting for the Board to return. Deborah should have known that anyone will be heard at RIRA Common Council, and prior to any other business, if only they will learn and abide by the rules. And clearly, neither RIRA nor RIOC could function if anyone could interrupt the work of the members as defined by the agenda.

John Mannix discussed RIRA's use of ".its resources in productive ways to improve the community." RIRA's resources are a couple of thousand bucks; RIOC's annual operating budget is $12 million. RIRA accomplishes miracles with its minimal resources; RIOC threatens to spend $300,000 defending a suit that RIRA brought for peanuts (because of the many courageous lawyers who volunteered to work on our behalf pro bono) and then uses this as an excuse for why our landmarks have been trashed for years. Give me a break!

David Kraut argues that, ".hundreds of construction jobs have been saved." I didn't know this was a concern of the RIOC Board of Directors, but even if it is, building an Urban Ecological Center, as required by our General Development Plan, rather than 500 units of housing on our parkland, might have accomplished the same thing. This is the argument that the construction unions have used to build the Westside Jets stadium instead of housing and I don't think it flies.

Bottom line: You will be hearing much rhetoric from RIOC about the foolish Article 78 suit just as you did after the Southtown suit. The premise is, if the suit failed, it must be frivolous. Don't you believe it. We Roosevelt Islanders are in a desperate fight to have input in development that has no correlation with the planning that our community's founders had in mind. And one thing is clear: You can't win if you don't fight.

Matthew Katz

To The Editor:

I forced myself to read the most depressing April 30 issue and I must respond to the more egregious statements.

RIRA President Steve Marcus has been chastised for somewhat caustic remarks on the recent Article 78 judgment (which was against the entire community, not just RIRA's named litigants). I think his comments were pretty restrained when you consider the frustration over lack of any democratic representative governance here while trying to get an intractable RIOC to work with the community.

Bob Chira (commentary, April 30 issue) had one thing right: Judge William Wetzel did show his contempt for this community by making clear that our Octagon Park, Lighthouse Park, and Southpoint Park, are not parks at all, as you and I might have thought, but only open spaces that can be developed in any way by the unelected representatives of Governor Pataki at RIOC. We knew there were holes in the 2002 "Open Spaces" law, but Judge Wetzel has seen to it that a bulldozer can ram any development down our throats in our damned non-park "parks" at will. If this was true of Central Park or Prospect Park, you would see a neighborhood and politicians turn out in droves.

I take exception to RIOC President Berman's disingenuous remarks: "RIOC was forced to divert nearly $300,000 in resources to defend the lawsuit brought by RIRA... How unfortunate that RIOC had to spend its money defending against RIRA's claim, rather than channeling these funds into much more worthy causes, like fortification of the Renwick Ruins..."

But the minutes of RIOC's Board meeting of December 23, 2003, note that: Mr. Berman addressed the Board, stating that although the Board had authorized the expenditure of $200,000 for the stabilization of the Renwick Ruins, upon further inquiry it was discovered that permanent stabilization work on the Ruins would require the stones to be taken down and then reset. Mr. Berman then referred to the alternative process of photometrics, at a cost of $25,000-30,000, whereby detailed photographs of the individual stones are taken so that after the stones are removed, they can later be reset. This would enable RIOC to go through the winter without the expense of the stabilization work. Mr. Berman advised that the cost savings obtained from utilizing the photometrics approach could be transferred to the Good Shepherd Center and Blackwell House projects.

So the funds were "diverted" long before the lawsuit. But Blackwell House remains in ruins and much work remains to be done on the Chapel - and to date we have only excuses instead of starting dates.

Did or did not RIOC have the $300,000 all along? And how much of the legal cost did the developer pick up?

Finally, if RIOC had to divert so much to pay attorneys, perhaps their own counsel was ripping them off.

Berman also suggests the suit may have cost our seniors any "more frequent bus trips." C'mon now - first RIOC tells us they can't take Red Buses to Queens, after the blackout, due to insurance issues (which never existed before); then, when that can't be backed up, they say the buses are too old and can break down (whose fault is that?); then they go back to the insurance issue; and now it's the lawsuit.

You can take your pick of the ever-expanding list of excuses at the root of RIOC's ever-expanding list of administrative failures. Just be sure to note that none of the failures are ever theirs.

Finally, regarding Herb's last remark inviting "all residents to engage in a constructive dialogue..." Berman doesn't live here and he missed all the meetings about the Octagon project in which the community consistently condemned it as ugly and overblown and an improper use of parkland. Dialog, indeed. In any case, Berman is never seen on the Island after 5:00 p.m. Every community event that might have required him to stay late or come to work on a Saturday - Roosevelt Island Day, for example - found occasional substitutes in his place.

Once past those early community "open houses" at RIOC, Berman's interactions with the community have been minimal to the point of being cursory.

There was Jerry Blue, then there was Robert H. Ryan. Now we have Herbert E. Berman, and sad to say, he appears to be cut from the same bolt of Pataki fabric.

Herb, Marybeth Labate, are you paying attention? What this community wants is not to lose our parkland/open spaces to every developer that comes along and promises you a pittance for the use of the land. We would, however, love to lose you and this politically appointed Board whose primary mission seems to be to rubber-stamp any project for any developer who will contribute to the governor's campaign coffers.

Deal after deal cut at 591 Main Street is malodorous. Southtown land is essentially given away; parkland is destroyed for truly ugly developments, and RIOC continues to be run by a marginal bunch of political cronies whose astronomical salaries are matched only by their towering incompetence.

Sherie Helstien
Secretary,
RIRA Common Council

To the Editor:

Bob Chira, in his April 30 letter to the editor [responding to my commentary published April 2], announces that (1) I have not "correctly understood the meaning of the City Council's recent 50-year extension of tax abatements" to Mitchell-Lama buildings; that (2) I am mistaken in stating that a Mitchell-Lama building normally loses its tax abatement when it retires its mortgage ("not correct", according to Chira); and (3) that the lease agreement between the City and the Urban Development Corporation poses no problem whatsoever to the applicability of the resolution to Roosevelt Island.

Had Mr. Chira troubled himself to read either the text of the resolution itself, or the applicable statute which defines the terms of Mitchell-Lama tax abatements, he might not have ventured such unsupported pronouncements as, "Buildings can remain in the Mitchell-Lama system after they retire their mortgages and still receive the benefits of the systsem, including tax abatements. The one does not depend on the other." To use Mr. Chira's language, this is not correct.

The one does depend on the other - unless the local legislative body grants an extension, which the statute recently gave it the right to do. If Chira had bothered to read the Council's resolution even as far as the second paragraph, he might have paused over the following sentence, which announces the problem the Council was seeking to redress: ".Whereas, each of those real property tax exemptions [for Mitchell-Lama buildings] is or was for a period of time that was limited to the length of the mortgages [emphasis mine] of the respective housing developments ." The Council, in its resolution, was exercising the authority given it by recent legislation, to grant an extension of a tax abatement to a Mitchell-Lama building commencing from the moment the building has retired its mortgage - not before ("to take effect upon the expiration of the current real property tax exemption").

Had Mr. Chira further troubled himself to consult Article II of Private Housing Finance Law (referred to by the Council), he might have found in Section 33 "Tax Exemption" a clear statement of the period of the tax exemption (repeated for every variety of project, including State urban development projects): "The tax exemption shall operate and continue so long as the mortgage loans of the company .are outstanding." - §33.1(a) of PHFL.

Finally, subdivision 6 of that section gives the local legislature the authority "upon the expiration of the tax exemption period" [i.e., the retirement of the mortgage] to grant an additional tax exemption period of up to fifty years - effective on the expiration of that period. It was this recently granted authority which the City Council was exercising in its recent resolution, a resolution which Mr. Chira clearly neither read nor understood.

Tim Johns

To Jerome Belson:

Before you thoroughly destroy the original conception of our Island, consider making substantive, not just cosmetic improvements. For example: Create a viable, safe means of washing high-floor apartment windows outside; create a means to track switches for hallway heaters; renovate elevator motors; and clean vent ducts and repair fans so they pull bad air out, not blow it in.

While you're at it, a cosmetic overhaul might help too; the place looks like hell.

Sharon A. Stern