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April 21, 2007 |
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I’m writing this on the Tuesday evening prior to this issue’s appearance, and I feel as if the world is suspended between the old and the new. Certainly the weather bears out my ennui. We’ve just emerged from an unseasonable nor’easter (April showers, indeed!) and, by the time you read this, balmy temperatures and sunny skies are forecast. Could a Roosevelt Island spring, replete with hot-and-cold running cherry blossoms, be in the offing?
Many of the governmental organizations that impact our lives have met since I last addressed you here. In my most recent column, I mentioned that the Community Board 8 Transportation Committee would address the RIRA resolution to investigate the feasibility of access from the Island’s surface to the Queensboro Bridge pedestrian walkway and they have done so. As a matter of fact, they understood that this was part of a larger question: How will residents and workers move on and off the Island as our growing population overwhelms our modes of mass transit, primarily the subway and the Tram? The Committee voted unanimously to endorse our resolution and to bring it to the full Board. I expect that that meeting, held here on Roosevelt Island this past Wednesday, will be reported on elsewhere in these pages.
The Transportation Committee understood that whatever emergency and evacuation plans have been formulated by the City OEM (Office of Emergency Management) and RIOC have never been disseminated within this community. They resolved to address this question in tandem with the CB8 Public Safety Committee.
This segues into another meeting I attended that same day. The RIOC Emergency Planning Committee has met sporadically ever since the 2003 Blackout, specifically to bring leaders and organizations together to plan for the unforeseen and the unpleasant. This has been useful in that contacts have been made and emergency materiel, primarily from housing managements and RISAR (Roosevelt Island Search and Rescue), have been inventoried. However, we’ve never produced a cohesive plan that can be shared with the residents. While it is impossible to fashion a plan that will anticipate every eventuality, I believe that a method must be found to get essential information to us. I can just imagine another blackout, with 12,000 Islanders telephoning Public Safety all at the same time! I suggested that the local radio station that once operated here be used to play a continuous tape loop containing important instructions.
We would widely circulate the frequency of the emergency broadcast channel to the community, and this would free public Safety officers to do more than just answer their phones. Now we’ll need to find out how practical this idea is, and how much it would cost to carry it out.
CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) Captain Howard Polivy also is included in this RIOC Committee. Two dozen of your neighbors completed eleven weeks of training to become certified team members and to perform as secondary responders in time of emergency. I understand that René Bryan, Deputy Public Safety Chief, will meet with the CERT team at their next meeting to determine how the two groups might meet, train, and respond together. This is truly an idea whose time has come!
The RIRA Common Council met the following evening, and we learned that the Island Arts Music School, founded by the late Robin Russell, is planning several benefit concerts on and off the Island. The Council voted to support this effort, and there will be more on this endeavor anon. Our next meeting will be held on the evening of May 9, and you’re all invited.
The RIOC Board of Directors met the next afternoon (did you know that so many important meetings could be packed into one week?), and addressed the questions I mentioned in my last column with the anticipated results. I was glad to see a good turn-out of residents, who offered some pointed questions during the Town Meeting portion of the exercise. The Board set its schedule for the rest of 2007, and you can access this on the RIOC website, www.rioc.com. Herb Berman took his leave of the RIOC presidency, and we all wished him well. Just prior to the Board meeting, several RIRA officers met briefly with DHCR Commissioner Deborah VanAmerongen, President (-to-be) Stephen Shane, and several DHCR bigwigs, and I made a pitch for better community involvement in the RIOC Board proceedings. This is the same pitch I’ve made with four previous Board Chairs, and Deborah suggested that a forum exclusive of the Board meeting might better serve our needs. If we can schedule this regularly, and do it after the Board agenda has been circulated so that we might comment upon, and even affect, the Board’s business, we might just have a solution to this perennial problem.
To my amazement and delight, the discussion during the Board meeting included the question of how to enhance community involvement in the choice of the seven RIOC Board Directors who could, potentially, come from the ranks of Island residents. As you may know, two Board members are, ex officio, representing DHCR and the Division of the Budget, and the remaining six Members of the current Board are our neighbors. An Island organization, the Maple Tree Group, has for ten years attempted to amend the statute that created RIOC to include provision for elected Board Directors but without success, even though the community has overwhelmingly endorsed the idea through referendum questions asked as part of the RIRA election process. An unwilling Governor and a State Senate that followed his lead made this effort an exercise in futility. By the time you read this, the first of what I hope will be many meetings to define the parameters of some sea-change in the process will have occurred. Stay tuned.
When the Board adjourned and the Town Meeting petered out, I scurried over to the East Side Democratic Club to hear a presentation on "The First 100 Days of Democratic Power in Albany and Congress." The featured speakers included Rep. Carolyn Maloney, State Sen. Liz Krueger and (presumptive) Democratic Assembly Candidate Micah Kellner. Carolyn and Liz were, as always, full of information on their activities in their respective houses, and Carolyn was bubbling over about the groundbreaking for the Second Avenue subway. She has been an ardent proponent of the plan for umpteen years, and has gotten a commitment of $1.3 billion in Federal transportation funds for Phase I. This quote struck me: "The Second Avenue subway will move more people on Day 1 than any other Federal project in history."
Micah will face a Republican opponent for Pete Grannis’s Assembly seat in June. He made some of his positions clear, and I’ll share them with you: He called for a full-time State Legislature instead of the part-time legislative houses that now exist, explaining that New York State has the third largest budget in the country (following the U.S. budget and that of California), and deserves and requires full-time attention. He said that he favored non-partisan re-districting of New York election districts, surely a hedge against gerrymandering. He advocated against term limits for City Council Members but favored them for committee chairs. And, finally, he promised a satellite Assembly district office on Roosevelt Island with 5 to 8 P.M. hours.
Friday of that week was the thirteenth, and I hid under my bed all day. Not that I’m superstitious, you understand, just tired.
I’ll end with a bit of housekeeping: Have you noticed that the lighting under the Westview arcade has been somewhat murky of late? We have, and it’s not surprising, given that 19 of the 25 lights are not working. We asked RIOC’s Erica Walker what gives, and she responded that "there is a circuitry distribution problem in that area and we are currently working on the problem." I know you join me in appreciating such a timely response and now, let’s keep a weather eye out for a timely resolution of the lighting outage.
For us keepers of the Mitchell-Lama flame in Island House, Westview, and Rivercross, it’s income affidavit time once again. And once again, Jennifer Jones of R-Y Management will hold marathon notarization parties (including your humble correspondent, a certified Notary Public) today (Saturday) from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. in the Westview Upper Community Room, and again on Wednesday, April 25, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. in the Island House Community Room. A word to the wise: New York State law requires Notaries to see picture I.D. (so bring it with you) and to witness the signatures of everyone in your apartment over 18 years of age (so don’t sign ahead of time). The State sets the fee at $2.00 (what a bargain!) and please bring two bucks; I don’t have a cash register. This is a quick and easy way to expedite this annual chore. See you then, neighbors!