When Ponton raised the "what happens if" question, RIOC President Herb Berman responded, "I couldn’t speculate as to what their actions would be. That’s something they would have to decide." David Kramer, representing the developer partners, said that RIOC had agreed to the requests well in advance – during the planning for Southtown’s housing. While Kramer’s attitude was non-threatening, one developer option would clearly be to sue RIOC.

Ponton was alone in voting "no" on the Hudson-Related request. This not only illustrated his contrary view of real-estate matters, but it probably explains why Boatright replaced him as Chair of the real-estate committee – he isn’t going along with the program. In fact, he found his fellow real-estate committee members and/or RIOC’s real-estate consultant simply unavailable for meetings over the past half-year.

With Ponton’s chairmanship of the real-estate committee chair now at an end, The WIRE asked him to sit for a series of questions about how real-estate development on Roosevelt Island has been managed. The full transcript of the conversation is available with this issue of The WIRE on Website NYC10044 at nyc10044.com; what follows is a condensation. The first questions concerned "Requests for Initial Proposals" (RFIPs) recently issued by RIOC, offering to entertain developer ideas for a portion of Southpoint Park, a portion of a parking lot near the north campus of Coler-Goldwater Hospital, the properties surrounding the Tram station, as well as the Main Street retail strip and RIOC’s interest in the Motorgate parking facility.

The WIRE: Since you have been the Board’s person in charge of real-estate matters on the Board in recent months, I have questions about the recent requests for initial proposals (RFIPs) that RIOC sent out recently. Why did the Board approve an offering of land at Southpoint and at the Tram-station area?

Ponton: The Board did not approve the offering of any land anywhere. The Board did what I said they were going to do – go to the development community to find out if there was any interest in doing anything on Roosevelt Island.

Q: How were the parcels selected for possible development?

A: I think a fair statement was that whatever there is should be looked at, since we were only talking conceptually, anyway. It was a question of looking at the Island in total, determining what areas presented interest, and then having the Board decide whether they wanted to make those available.

Q: Who chose those specific parcels?

A: I don’t think anybody made a decision to offer those specific parcels. I think, when we said, "Look at the whole Island," naturally, that included every parcel of land on the Island. And now you ask,"Well, who highlighted these [particular parcels]?" I guess you’d have to say that the highlighting of these five or six parcels happened with the company to whom we’ve given the responsibility for marketing, and that’s Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL).

Q: It seems to me residents have good reason to wonder why JLL has put protected parkland at Southpoint forward for possible development. Can you explain that?

A: When you give a company the permission to look at the whole Island, then I think you can expect that they’ll look at the whole Island within the constraints that they see where they shouldn’t build things or offer things. For instance, when the talk about "big box retailers" came in [for the Tram station area], I said, "I don’t think you can build anything permanent under a bridge." I made that concern known, and apparently JLL pursued that and found that either you could or there was a way around it, and so that parcel came up for offer.

Q: But why look for a big-box retailer?

A: That was a suggestion of JLL.

Q: Not approved by any real-estate committee specifically, or by the RIOC Board?

A: Neither approved nor disapproved. If somebody had said, "I think we can put a blacksmith shop there," the real-estate committee might have said, "Well, I don’t think we want one." But when somebody said, "We think we can put a Big Box Retailer there," some people, including myself, didn’t like that idea, but there was no reason at that point to say, "Wait a minute, don’t consider that."

Q: You said you wouldn’t favor that yourself, so it sounds as though it was a two-to-one vote, or a two-to-one sentiment, and your sentiment against big-box at that location lost out.

A: That’s a little stricter than my recollection. I don’t think it was a yes or no in most of the things we talked about. I think it was a question of, unless there’s some gigantic, huge objection unanimously felt by everyone, that the recommendation of JLL would be followed. I think that’s a fair portrayal.

Q: Perhaps followed through to its logical conclusion of actually having a big-box retailer there?

A: I think you would have to expect that if the Board did not turn it down.

Q: So your sense of this, I gather, is that a big-box retailer could end up under the bridge in the Tram-station area, and some kind of commercial development could end up on the northern edge of Southpoint Park, based on the way this process has been executed so far.
A: I think "could" is correct, but I think it would take the approval of the Board. The way that I tried to set the situation up – and, unfortunately, I wasn’t very successful at it – was that JLL was going to report to me. They were going to tell me what they had in mind and what they were doing and why. I was going to review that with the real-estate committee and, based on what we as a committee decided, I was going to tell the Board. I was not successful in getting that process in place.

Q: Then how did it work?

A: It worked out a number of random ways, as a matter of fact. Occasionally, someone would call RIOC directly. Occasionally, someone would call a member of the real-estate committee directly; and, occasionally, someone would call JLL directly. In my opinion, we never had the channeling and funneling of that information through one central point that I would have liked us to have.

Q: Is the process out of control?

A: I can’t say "out of control." I can say that I was unsuccessful in implementing [real-estate committee procedures] the way I wanted to. As far as today’s process is concerned, I’d suggest you’d have to ask the [new] chair of the real-estate committee.

Q: Are there dangers in the way the process works?

A: In my opinion, the single biggest danger is that we will be offered, for Southpoint, an amount so obscenely large that we will not have the courage to turn it down, and that all the dreams of parklands and open land will go away, replaced instead by a 100-story condominium. When you look at that land and what it has and the uniqueness of it, it’s impossible for me to believe that money will not come into play in a way that’s irresistible for those who chase money over quality of life.

There’s a second danger, and that is one that I’ve been talking about since the first night I was on the Board, and that is that we have no plan for the Island. There’s no question in my mind that someone has a plan for the Island. We have a capital expense plan, but what we don’t have is the vision – the strategy [which] that capital expense plan supports. You have to start with a vision of what this Island is going to be when it’s reached its full maturity. That can be an amusement facility, it can be a residential community, it can be a military-industrial complex, it can be whatever.

But we have that [vision] only in the vaguest, vaguest terms. We don’t know, for example, if we ever have to sell another piece of land in order to remain [financially] self-sufficient. You can tell me yes, and show me data that supports that, and I can tell you no, and show you data that supports that. And the reason is, we don’t have the vision, supported by a strategy, supported by a financial plan.

Q: What can be done about that?

A: Somewhere, the leadership has to say, "We are going to stop now doing anything we’re doing, other than preventive maintenance, until we have an agreed-upon vision in place, supported by a strategy, supported in turn by a plan.

Q: What leadership?

A: It either has to be the Board or it has to be at the direction of a committee appointed by the Board, or it has to be, in my opinion, by the President of RIOC.

Q: Do you see that leadership coming from the Board?