Spitzer Names Stephen Shane RIOC President
In Cuomo Years, He Chaired RIOC Board for DHCR
by Jami Bernard

Appointment of RIOC’s new President and Chief Executive Officer, Stephen Shane, was announced late last week by the office of Governor Eliot Spitzer. The RIOC Board of Directors has final say on Shane’s appointment, but has traditionally accepted whomever the Governor has recommended.

As RIOC’s top man, Shane will have a substantial effect on Islanders’ daily lives by overseeing the many administrative and operational decisions that go into running the community and the services provided by RIOC (Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation). He will also be in a position to influence RIOC Board options and decisions on the fate of Mitchell-Lama buildings and new construction, and will be largely responsible for conducting Roosevelt Island’s official relationships with the DHCR (the State Division of Housing and Community Renewal) and other governmental entities – the State as a whole, the City, and the various corporations and authorities that provide services to Islanders, such as the MTA.

Steve Shane met Wednesday with five members of the Residents Association Common Council. Clockwise: President Matthew Katz, Betty Walker (Octagon Park Apartments), Vice President Mark Chipman, Margie Smith (Rivercross), Secretary Sherie Helstien (Westview).

Shane sat down for a lengthy and wide-ranging WIRE interview this week – possibly a sign that, under him, RIOC will be more accessible, transparent, and open to community interaction than it has been under past presidents. (He also met with a group from the Roosevelt Island Residents Association on Wednesday.) He is clearly aware of the unrest of Islanders and the history of mistrust between them and RIOC, and does not seem to underestimate the delicate balancing act he has ahead of him in carrying out the mandate of his boss, the Governor, while responding to various factions among residents. He was also commendably up-to-date on Island controversies: he admitted to reading all past issues of The WIRE online, and demonstrated that in his grasp of current issues, saying he’d made a list of up to 28 that need immediate attention. He knew about the fish store closing a few weeks ago. He knew about Jessica Lappin’s new baby.

Shane, 69, is no stranger to Roosevelt Island – or to RIOC. A real-estate attorney with a keen interest and background in affordable housing, Shane chaired the RIOC Board from 1988-1995 in his capacity as Special Assistant to then-Commissioner of Housing Rick Higgins, who in turn had been appointed by then-Governor Mario Cuomo. With the end of the Cuomo era came the end of Shane’s career at DHCR. Since then, he has been practicing law, most recently as General Counsel to Sparrow Construction, based in The Bronx.

The interview covered a swath of Island concerns. Among other topics, Shane discussed his views on the role of RIOC and Islanders in shaping decisions; the "two hats" he wears as a lawyer who has helped buildings exit the Mitchell-Lama program and a servant of the affordable-housing-friendly Governor Spitzer; his leadership style and sense of RIOC’s mission; the merchant crisis on Main Street; the Mitchell-Lama exit strategies of Westview, Island House, and Rivercross; and the problem of keeping Roosevelt Island self-sufficient while still ranking high enough on the Albany radar to merit attention.

The WIRE found Shane prepared, pleasant, and quite intelligent. He and his wife took the Tram during the recent snowstorm to take an icy stroll up Main Street as far as the firehouse to see firsthand how things have changed since his last visit in 1995. He seemed to have a firm grasp of such current problems as the Red Bus schedule and the crisis in merchant services along Main Street.

What follows are direct-quote excerpts from The WIRE’s interview. More of the interview is available on Website NYC10044 at www.nyc10044.com.

When Governor Spitzer was elected, his transition team put out a general appeal to the public for anyone who was interested in working for the Spitzer team and the government. I thought, "What the heck," so I submitted my resume. In my cover letter, I said that I would be interested in a position and that back when I was at DHCR [Division of Housing and Community Renewal] I did the following things. I had also sat as the Commissioner’s designated member of the Boards of HFA [Housing Finance Agency], SONYMA, [State of New York Mortgage Agency], and the AHC [Affordable Housing Corporation], which were the other private corporations on whose boards the Commissioner sits, ex officio. I said I had acted as the Commissioner’s designee to the RIOC Board and that I had put together the RFP [Request for Proposals] for the development of Southtown.

I got a call from the appointments secretary asking if I’d be interested in Roosevelt Island. I talked to my friends from the old days at DHCR and HFA, because I assumed they might be solicited for opinions. If someone had asked me to become Commissioner of Housing or head of HFA, those would have been jobs of interest, too, but that didn’t happen. Then, one day, about three weeks or a month ago, I got a call asking if I would be interested in President of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation. So here I am.

I know that I’m going to dive into it. I know that I’m quite enthused about it. I know that I’ve got a high level of energy about it. There are many things that have to be addressed. In reading through back issues of The WIRE, I made a list of 25 or 28 things that need attention, like the Red Bus scheduling, with the express buses from the Octagon leap-frogging ahead. There, it sounds like a traffic manager is what is needed.

I had an interesting conversation with Karen Brown from the office of the Director of the Budget. When I asked her about Roosevelt Island and the next fiscal year, she said, "Well, I haven’t given it much attention. Now that RIOC is relatively financially independent and doesn’t ask for anything, it’s no longer on the State’s radar or in their budget." I said, okay, that means that a budget needs to be adopted for the fiscal year and we need to pay some attention to that, but the State’s interest [in the Island] has clearly gone down a little, in terms of the relative requirements of the residents on the Island.

RIOC is there to function to make the place work – to meet the needs of the people, and to execute the plans for full development and for operation of the Island. That’s what RIOC is there for. And I think that’s my view of what my job is. My job is to keep the citizenry from having "tea parties" [In the ’90s, residents poured tea into the East River in a protest against the Pataki administration’s management of Roosevelt Island]… They were going to put banners across the buildings so that everybody on the East River Drive could read them. My job is to keep that from happening, to keep that from happening to my boss – and my boss is actually the Governor, as you know. And I want to make people happy so that this is an example of good government, and that this is how things can be done.

I see residents being in a position of being able to participate, to suggest. We’ve got, what, 11,000-12,000 on the Island? That’s a lot of interested people out there, and because of the demographics of the Island, there is a very high level of capability. They have a lot of suggestions, and those suggestions should be accepted, they should be filtered, they should be reviewed, they should be bounced back, they should be thought about. Good ideas ought to be implemented. We’re all in this together. It’s not the function of RIOC to do anything other than for the good of the people on the Island and the people of the State of New York – especially now that RIOC is relatively financially independent.

From what I can gather, there was a certain amount of "bunker mentality" that came upon people who were in RIOC. They felt estranged from the people on the Island. Some of them tried to do their best, which might have been perceived as not sufficient; nonetheless, they tried to do their best. And they felt underappreciated. People are people, and it’s very clear that you will never be able to satisfy all the people on Roosevelt Island all the time.

I hope to get across that particular piece of water. I know that there are a variety of constituencies on the Island. I know from my time out there trying to get my Southtown redevelopment plan put together and accepted by the community how much resistance there was to almost anything you might do. There was a group of tree-huggers; they didn’t want any tree on the Island cut down. There were the people who were in love with the soccer field in front of the Nurses’ Residence; their children had played soccer there, and that was like hallowed ground as far as they were concerned; the soccer field couldn’t be moved. About the need for re-development – they didn’t care. They were perfectly willing to pull up the drawbridge over the moat. They had theirs. They had a lovely little Island and they didn’t care about the rest of the development.

It’s a difficult problem to coalesce people to a public purpose on Roosevelt Island. I believe in the function of government to serve a public purpose, to make these things happen. The government is there to serve the people. People on Roosevelt Island are part of a noble experiment. It is a planned community. And it’s not an experiment that is repeated in very many places in this country. And it is one to which a lot of people have pointed over a long time as being one of the rare successes of a mixed-income community.

I was hired by the State of New York in October, 1988, as Special Assistant to the Commissioner of Housing, who was then Rick Higgins – just freshly appointed by Governor Cuomo. He was quite anxious to get somebody on board who was a real-estate lawyer, who knew something about development. The Division of Housing had gone into the development business again with the opening of the Trust Fund, and the old Division of Housing that had built most of the Mitchell-Lamas around the State had really gone into hibernation. A lot of those people had disappeared, so they needed expertise in development. I was contacted and met Rick and he offered me the job. I took it as a challenge, and I went to work for the Division of Housing.

One of the first things Rick did was to designate me his representative to sit as chair of the RIOC Board. The next task he gave me was to pull together the Southtown RFP. Rosina Abramson was then president of RIOC. She and I worked together. The EIS [Environmental Impact Statement] was out there being done, and we had a big struggle with that. Finally, I wrote the RFP and published it. I had a big meeting of prospective developers out on the Island. There’s a videotape of it somewhere in the RIOC files; I know Jerry Blue tried to study it [when he was President of RIOC].

We had a big meeting and the day came for bids … and nobody came. The real-estate market in Manhattan had collapsed. All of our projections involved what kind of rents we were going to be able to get on the market-rate units, which were effectively going to cross-subsidize the affordable units, which was a necessary part of the plan at that time.

One of the things I was able to do thereafter – and it was a great disappointment that nothing ever came of it – is that I went to Washington and saw the undersecretary of HUD who was in charge of public-housing programs. He was willing to waive for me the entire HUD handbook, because there was a big restriction on public-housing authority sites at that time, that the housing authorities could not pay for sites that were more than a very low market value. Effectively, then, you couldn’t site public housing anywhere in the New York metropolitan area. But he was willing to waive that for the opportunity to get some public housing onto Roosevelt Island to satisfy the affordable, lower-income component. He was willing to write a check for $50 million out of their development funds, which would have solved my whole problem of getting Southtown going, the problem of how to fund the necessary infrastructure. I had developers at the time who were willing to go forward with the buildings as long as the infrastructure was there. But infrastructure costs – water, sewage, streets, lights, that sort of thing – were going to be $10-15 million as a front-end load even before they knew what the market might be

I also tried to persuade the State Senate to go along with a bond issue. HFA would issue it and we could front the infrastructure costs and recapture them from the developers as they went along. It was just another infrastructure risk that we would take at the State level. I could not persuade them as a political matter – "political" with a small "p" – to allow a further bond issue. I mean, having the State incur debt at that time was a difficult intellectual exercise.

So all of that failed, sadly, and I continued. Obviously, the critical mass of Roosevelt Island needed Southtown to be developed, whether you’re talking about the budget for RIOC to run and provide necessary community services, whether you’re talking about a population which would allow merchants on Main Street and others like them to be economically successful. You needed a population base and the demographics had to be there. It just didn’t happen at that time because of the status of the real-estate market.

I continued to be involved in Roosevelt Island to try to push this way and that way to see what would happen. At the end of ’94, Mr. Pataki got elected. Mr. Cuomo got booted out. And in March of ’95, my career at the State Division of Housing was terminated abruptly. It’s a long story but, in any event, I was out of government and out of Roosevelt Island.

For a while, I followed what was happening on Roosevelt Island from afar, but my career took me elsewhere. I went back into the conventional practice of law at a couple of big law firms. I was at Thatcher Proffit and my office was on the 40th floor of Two World Trade Center. We got blown out of there on 9/11. I had been standing in front of the building. I was there for a closing at 9:00 in the morning, and I watched the planes hit the buildings.

A year after that, the real-estate department of Thatcher Profitt broke up because no one wanted to work downtown again, or to go above the 13th floor again, it had been such a traumatic event. The real-estate department broke up and I was looking at perhaps retiring.

But I wound up here at Sparrow Construction, a construction firm that has a long history of doing affordable housing. Starrett, the developer of one of the components out on Roosevelt Island, was the parent of the predecessor to Sparrow Construction. Graphic Construction was run by the late Sidney Silverstein, who was Randy Silverstein’s father. Randy used to work for Sidney, and Sidney was a partner of Starett Housing a long time ago. For this job, I answered an ad in a newspaper – a construction company is looking for a general counsel – and here I am. I have been here five years. I live in White Plains, so it’s an easy commute. And it’s a relatively easy job. My wife and I have enjoyed traveling around the world and playing with our grandchildren over the past five years. And then I got the summons for this job.

I was gone by the time Jerry Blue became president. He had been over at FHA, and we had been talking about the prospect of my coming back as, in effect, his right-hand man, to help run the Island because he didn’t know anything about it. I was looking to extend my State employment tenure. I wanted to stay involved. In fact, I thought at the time that he was going to offer me the position, but he couldn’t deliver on it, as it turned out. The job didn’t materialize.

I was reading in The WIRE that there was a lot of upset during that period. Jerry was a very strange person. I knew of his relationship with Senator Al D’Amato, because I’d done a lot of FHA work. That whole relationship was reasonably well understood within the profession.

By the time [Robert H.] Ryan was appointed, my interest had waned a bit. I was no longer following what was going on, on Roosevelt Island. I now know, because I’ve read all the issues of The WIRE back to as far as you’ve posted them on the website [nyc10044.com]. So I see what happened with Ryan, who came in riding on his horse as the Man of the People and who then arrogated to himself all kinds of perks and emoluments of his office. He got tossed, I guess.

I’ve talked to [current RIOC president] Herb Berman on the phone. I’m going to be on the Island [March 21] and meet with him.

It’s the first time [Wednesday, March 14] I’ve seen Eliot Spitzer since he was three, because I did some legal work for his father a long time ago. He’s taller now.

He’s a very skillful guy on his feet. I was quite impressed with him. When I walked in, I congratulated him on his election. He congratulated me on my appointment.

His interest was, first – how’s the affordability going on the Island? I mean, that was a very specific question. I pointed out to him what I thought was the inherent conflict issue between the Public Authorities Law and its requirement to dispose of property at fair value, and the desire to maintain affordability on the Island, which is a tension that has to be balanced. And he said, "Very interesting intellectual question – and good luck. Let me know how it comes out."

He’s very interested in the Island. He brought up the fact that he was there on the Island last October. He enjoyed the meeting. He said it’s obviously very contentious [there]. I said it’s very much like the West Side of Manhattan, and he agreed with that.

I had lunch with Paul Mas, the real-estate consultant [who has been representing RIOC in the deals at Island House and Westview]. I learned from him where he was with all this stuff. I have also been asked by the Commissioner to get involved with the Eastwood sale, which is now very, very imminent. The papers have been presented for the approval of the Board of RIOC. And I’ve been looking at them to try and familiarize myself with them. I am a real-estate lawyer – I mean, that’s what I am. And most of my career I spent doing Mitchell-Lama housing, so I am very familiar with all of that stuff. I’ve known Jerry Belson a very, very long time. He was a prospective managing agent for the very first Mitchell-Lama that I got involved with, which was Lindsay Park out in Brooklyn.

These exits from Mitchell-Lama are going unhappily. I mean, I have two hats: As a lawyer, I represented developers and I absolutely assured them that after the [required] time [under Mitchell-Lama regulation] was up, they would have the right to exit the Mitchell-Lama program and go forward. During the time of the Mitchell-Lama regime, they had to maintain the property as affordable. Their profit was limited. They were going to be subject to regulation. Their tenancy was going to be subject to the limitations in Article II of the Private Housing Finance Law. And that was going to be their life. If they wanted to be in the program, that was what it was going to be, and they should accept it, not chafe under it. And when the end of that time came, I wrote opinions that they had the absolute right to get out. And as a matter of constitutional law, they had a right to get out, which the State could not impinge upon.

As a result of that, the governments tried, in a variety of ways, to try to maintain the affordable housing stock – whether it was the Federal government with their LIHPRHA [Low-Income Housing Preservation and Resident Homeownership Act] of 1990, or the State government with their slowdown in the Mitchell-Lama processing, or the City, before they’d let people out, they made all kinds of demands.

As a housing professional and as a policy matter and as a personal matter, I believe [affordable housing] is absolutely critical, because it’s irreplaceable. There is no way to get this affordable housing stock back. This stuff was built at $2,500 to $3,000 a room, but now it’s ten times that. It’s not affordable anymore. There is no way to accommodate the affordable housing population in the City of New York. So, it’s a valuable public asset that is being lost.

At the same time, as a citizen and lawyer, I believe that the law made it pretty clear. And I knew the people who were the architects of the Mitchell-Lama Law – Al Lama and Mac [MacNeil] Mitchell. That’s what they intended, and nobody thought about what was going to happen after 20 or 30 years. Nobody thought about it.

Again, I have to come at you with my two hats. The philosophy as to what our society ought to be or might be or what the law might be or ought to be is one thing. What it [actually] is, is a separate thing. Maybe it’s a function of having been a lawyer for a long time that you can maintain that dichotomy. I don’t know. But I don’t think it’s intellectually dishonest to fulfill the law as it is determined to be, as long as I don’t consider it to be immoral – and on the other hand, to have a view that I wish it might be otherwise.

As a public policy person, I believe that the intent of the GDP [General Development Plan] was to maintain affordability on the Island as a planned community forever – not just for the limit of the Mitchell-Lama period. And if it is to be an idealized community, it ought to be that way.

At the same time, there are the issues of the contracts under Mitchell-Lama and whether that gives an out from that particular affordability issue and the conflict between the "requirements." Whether it’s a constitutional document or only a plan is a subject of considerable debate, which the Courts are reluctant to poke their fingers into if RIOC makes an administrative determination. But it’s not clear to me which way it should go.

As a housing citizen, I have one view. As a lawyer and as a prospective President of RIOC, I don’t know. And that’s the answer. I don’t know and it’s up in the air. Obviously, they’re moving down the road toward buying out of the program. And I know that DHCR is trying to impose affordability requirements, whatever they may be. Rivercross has never been what I would consider a really affordable co-op. I mean, it’s been a Mitchell-Lama co-op, but it’s certainly the most upscale of upscale Mitchell-Lama co-ops. But for Island House and Westview, I don’t know. Again, I have my job and I have my personal views.

Maybe, up until now, RIOC has been unable – whether institutionally or because of the governance issues with the Board of Directors or whatever – unable to have an effective retail operation in those stores. You will always have the philosophical question to deal with, when you’re dealing with service stores: Do I try and bring in the kind of stores that are important to the people who live here as a public service or do I try to maximize income? In that particular tension or conflict, we have a problem, and it is exacerbated by the Public Authorities Law, because, as you know, a retail store is disposable property.

I tend to think that those stores are essential for the well-being of the Island and you need to have a variety of service stores, whether it’s a shoemaker or a fish store or a pizza parlor. We need the people to service the people, and we need the stores to serve the people.

Here’s a hypothesis. Imagine if you had a third nail salon – and I see that there are two – and they pay a sufficiency of rent and they are highly in demand, if they are willing to pay $28 a square foot in rent – or whatever the number is and I have no idea – but the fish market can only afford $15 a square foot in rent to be able to survive, because that’s the mark-up in the fish-mongering business, then you have to ask yourself, "What happened to that other $13?" and, "Is it better for the people of Roosevelt Island to have a fish market at $15 a square foot or another nail place at $28 a square foot?" I think that’s a question that the people of Roosevelt Island have to come to understand – that they need the service and that the economics and the politics of it require that has to happen.

Personally, I think you need the service... There are only so many nails [that need polishing]. But if you’re one of those people who lined up to get their nails done and you can’t get into the store, you’re yelling and screaming for another nail place.

I know that, in the beginning, [RIOC] tried to micro-manage the retail-store distribution and service products – hence all the non-compete clauses. As if it were a mall and you do those things as part of your negotiations. It doesn’t surprise me – and I didn’t have anything to do with this – that in the Pataki philosophical era they stopped trying to do that and they just let the chips fall where they may. That’s part of, in my view, the Republican – with a capital R – approach to life – that it’s unfortunate if there are a few bodies lying around, but government shouldn’t get involved.

I think government has a function in some of these things to avoid the pain. It would be nice if the services that people wanted on the Island were delivered to them within the context of rational economics.

Let me also tell you that in looking at and in reading the paper and in looking at some back financial statements for RIOC and from my own experience back in the early ’90s, when you’re dealing with small merchants and the economics of collecting rent from them is miserable because they quite often can’t pay, to get them out of their space, if they choose to be recalcitrant, is almost impossible. You then run a deficit operation for a long time. You spend a lot of effort and legal fees and build up a lot of ill will. [Main Street] is not a big enough operation to support one person [on staff at RIOC to handle it]. It’s not a big enough job. It’s not a big enough deal, and yet you need that expertise to deal with the people you do have because it is an important part of life on the Island. Again, it’s a critical-mass kind of issue.

One of the reasons for Mas’s suggestion [to have one mall-type operator rent out all the spaces] is to just avoid all that. Deal with a big-time person who is experienced in that. RIOC is really not – I mean, they have a lawyer on their staff, or two sometimes, but not one of them is really equipped to go to civil court to deal with these issues on a current basis and in any way with real expertise, and it becomes a problem. That’s why one of the bases for Mas’s suggestion was to master-lease it and let somebody who knows what they’re doing do it, which is an interesting proposition. It needs to be thought about and talked about. It certainly would simplify life for RIOC. Whether it simplifies or makes better the life for residents is something else again; and that needs to be thought about and talked about.

I understand that there are five more buildings to come as part of Southtown. I don’t see anything in the plan that provides for further residential development.

I was surprised, frankly, to see Octagon go forward as a residential development, because that wasn’t part of the plan that I was involved in. But it’s done, and I’m thrilled that the Octagon tower has been restored. I mean, that was a great historical treasure, and the fire just gutted it, which was terrible. The restored tower is terrific. There are 500 units of market-rate housing up there. That’s a very good thing for the economics of RIOC and for the Island ultimately. I don’t see more residential development [coming]. I think the requirements of the Master Plan will have been fulfilled with the completion of Southtown.

I am absolutely ecstatic about the development of Southpoint as a park. I think that having the necessary revenues and the capital to do that park is an amazing thing. When I was involved with Roosevelt Island, we were running at a $7 million per year deficit or more. We were wholly dependent on the State, and the ability to raise the capital funds to do Southpoint was so far off in the distance it was beyond being a mirage.

We were talking about the FDR Memorial. We had the Louis Kahn plans. Jimmy Roosevelt and Congressman vanden Heuvel would appear every so often to talk about their love and affection for FDR and all we needed to do. But materializing the money that was necessary to get it done was a near impossibility. The infrastructure investment to get water and sewage lines down to Southpoint was huge, but with no economic return at any foreseeable time other than having a park. Now it’s been done. It has effectively been put together. That the construction is going to start in our immediately foreseeable future is an amazing thing; it’s going to be a beautiful thing. It’s very exciting as well. Coming back to the Island and to this now, and to see these things actually coming to fruition, is a very exciting prospect.

Well, people have asked me, you know, would I live on the Island. And the answer to that is that it would probably not be a great idea because of the broad constituency and the issues that come up. I would get no peace on the Island.

But I am going to be available. I am going to be accessible. I am going to be transparent. I’m going to be outspoken. I will be delighted to engage in an exchange with anybody on any point of view. I’m certainly not going to be reclusive – it’s not my style. I certainly would not intend under any circumstances that RIOC would continue to be uncommunicative or secretive. It’s a public-purpose agency.

Mass transportation for the Island was designed to be the subway. The Tram was only a stop-gap until the subway was opened up – with great fanfare in 1989. I remember when it opened. There was a ribbon-cutting. It was a big event. And it was supposed to solve all the mass transportation problems for the Island.

It did, then. And, in fact, the Tram had become such an icon by then, but it was supplemental. It has continued to be fully utilized because people love it, I think. But it is a money-loser, no matter what you do [but all mass transit] is a money-loser. It costs more to run the Tram than you take in as revenues, no matter what you do.

[Subway crowding] is a planning problem for the MTA, and it requires political will if anything can be done about it. I have no connection with the MTA. Anybody who tries to move the MTA to get anything done knows that you’re pushing a very big rock up a very big hill. It’s not that they don’t want to respond, but they get a lot of demands. And they are slow to respond. It’s who is making the most noise at a particular moment that gets the most attention.

In the early days, we promoted the Tram with King Kong hanging off it and that sort of stuff to increase the visibility of the Island, not to mention getting revenue from the moviemakers. One of the amusement parks down in Orlando had a Tram, and we got license fees from that. There used to be a map of the Island that we gave out. It had all the walking paths and the points of interest and all that stuff.

The kiosk is sitting there [at the Tram landing on the Island], obviously not yet developed or restored or rehabilitated or refurbished, and when it is, it should make a difference. That’s one of the items that needs to appear on the agenda, because the special-purpose funds that have been recommended for refurbishing the kiosk have to be approved by the Board.

When Southpoint Park is finished, it’s going to be a gorgeous attraction. It’s certainly to be hoped by the park promoters that it will attract all who want to use the park; that’s what parks are for. The tennis bubble is obviously an Island attraction, mostly for Manhattanites. The sports fields are used by some of the private schools. The whole promenade, the walk around the Island is a very pleasurable thing.

[I’d like to see] a destination restaurant somewhere on Main Street, which would require somebody having a lot of courage to step in there and make the capital investment required. Maybe that could be done. There are such restaurants in Long Island City that attract Manhattanites, who are typically the people who are willing to spring for that kind of place. It’s a question of promotion and getting somebody who has the vision to do it. We talked about doing that a long time ago at the Octagon. We were going to have ferry service – all kinds of things are possible.

I think that once Southtown has been built up and Southpoint Park has been completed, the need to beat the drums for the public relations of Roosevelt Island is pretty much over. So much of what we did to try and promote tourism and everything else was to try and get the idea of what a wonderful place this is to live and what a wonderful place this is to come and visit, to push the market value up so that we could do the future development. We were in the land speculation business in many ways, and we were from the beginning when UDC (the Urban Development Corporation) first took this on. We were trying to take a hunk of rock out there and turn it into a viable, vibrant community.

Part of what you do is a public-relations selling job, and ultimately it has come to pass – whether it is because of market pressures elsewhere or because, in fact, our dream for Roosevelt Island was meaningful and it’s coming to fruition, the fact is that people see value out there and they’re coming out there. They’re building the buildings that allow the broader government organization to be sustained and to be able to deliver the appropriate services to the people. So I don’t know that we have a big, future job to do in terms of selling Roosevelt Island.

The people who are marketing the buildings that are being built in Southtown right now are doing a pretty good job of beating the drums themselves. And it’s appropriate for them to do that. The people who did the Octagon did the same thing. When Starrett was building Manhattan Park, they did the same thing: "Come live on Roosevelt Island. What a wonderful place it is..." and it was. I remember being out there for the opening of the Little League Baseball season with a march up Main Street. I mean, where else could you live 300 yards from Manhattan and enjoy that kind of small-town, "burbish" kind of thing?

As far as Albany is concerned, I think that the ability of 10,000-12,000 people, including maybe 6,000 voters – it would be nice to believe they could influence legislators who would pay attention. I know that your City Councilperson [Jessica Lappin] is very interested in the Island. She is a good representative for her constituency – and she’s got a cute baby, whose picture I saw in The WIRE. That’s part of being in a democratic society, democratic with a small d. Our job – my job, because this is a State public-benefit corporation – is to have good governance. That’s what we’re there for. So, to the extent that you don’t get the attention from the total legislature in Albany, which really wouldn’t surprise me, it’s my job to do the best I can in context of the available resources.

I know that there is some debate going on as to whether confirmation is required by the Senate. Certainly, confirmation by the Board of Directors of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation is necessary; and, as I’ve said, the Commissioner knows that she needs to call a meeting of the Board for that, among other things. There are a whole bunch of things on the agenda which need some attention.

I was delighted to see it go forward. I know what it means to the economics of the Island and fulfilling the plan, allowing the original capital investment of the State to be utilized better. I’m not an architect and I can’t comment on the way the buildings are situated, their fenestration, or a variety of things. I mean, they are what they are. I assume the plan was adopted with the usual amount of debate about the aesthetics. It’s a nice development. I’m glad to see that the prices are going up in the market-rate thing. It’s a good indicator of its acceptance.

I report directly to the Commissioner of Housing, who is the chair of the Board of RIOC. It’s really her position. RIOC comes within her fiefdom, however you define that, and she, of course, reports to the Governor.

I certainly appreciate the desire for home rule in any community, but RIOC is a creature of statute, created by the State of New York. Until something like that is passed in the State legislature, it’s not for me to opine on the policy of the State. I’m there to carry out a statutory mandate, which is to operate the Island. That’s what RIOC is. It’s a public-benefit corporation of the State of New York.

Again, you have the governance issue on Roosevelt Island. As a legal matter, the Board of Directors has the corporate authority to do almost anything. As a statutory matter, RIOC is a creature of that statute. It’s a public-benefit corporation, and the members of the Board serve at the pleasure of the Governor for an appointed term of two years or until replaced. The President of RIOC is nominated by the Governor or by the Commissioner of Housing, in effect, obviously subject to approval by the Board of Directors. Directors in any corporation have the right to hire and fire people; however, that’s not exactly true here. And so, you have that tension. Certainly, the Board of Directors is the nominal entity to which any President reports, but this is a public-benefit corporation, so it’s a little different.

Roosevelt Island is a very special place. And I’m very excited about the opportunity to participate in the end-part of the dream – that is, bringing it to complete fulfillment. We’re ending the development phase of Roosevelt Island. It’s foreseeable. It’s on a timeline. Five years from now, it’ll be over. Maybe three years from now, maybe four years from now, construction on the Island will have come to an effective end.

My earlier experience with Roosevelt Island was so much devoted to pushing the development end because we needed it so badly. Services on the Island were always at the poor-relations end of things because that’s all we could afford. We were always begging from the State. Now, things are different. So we’re phasing into the more normal community-service kind of government and governance on the Island. It’s a transition time. I look forward to being a part of that.