Matthew Katz, President Roosevelt Island Residents Association e-mail: MatthewKatz@verizon.net

I think these past two weeks have set some kind of record for me; sixteen Island events and meetings in ten working days. The content has run the gamut, covering every aspect of Island life. Let me bring you up to date:

The perennial question of how best to utilize the steam plant, located just east of the Tram station, received new life two weeks ago when we toured the plant with representatives of the New York Power Authority. Bob Liss and Willard Warren, Islanders who are engineers, have made the case that the plant, which provides steam for Coler and Goldwater Hospitals, could be combined with an electrical generator to co-generate low-cost power to the Island. Not being an engineer, I can’t opine as to the feasibility or the cost-benefit of the plan, but I do know it’s high time that those in the know decide once and for all whether this is an idea with legs.

The planning for summer events continues and by the time you read this, RIOC will have hired an events consultant to provide a variety of mostly outdoor programs, for adults and children, to enhance our quality of life. We’ve been meeting with community liaison Erica Wilder to brain-storm some of the fun things we can create. Close to my heart are the outdoor film screenings RIRA produced at Southpoint Park several summers ago, and as many as six movie nights are in the works. We’ve asked to be included in the planning with this company and we’ve been assured that our input is welcome.

Do you remember the jazz Friday and Saturday evenings at Trellis Restaurant? My sources tell me that Kaie Razaghi plans to restore those wonderful summer evenings. Terrific!

I’ve recently toured the Island with an entrepreneur eager to bring a restaurant and pizza parlor back to Roosevelt Island. Dominick Louis, proprietor of Angels Restaurant on First Avenue and 62nd Street, wants to become a part of our community so much that he has offered dinner for two to a lucky blood donor at the RIRA/CERT blood drive on June 9. I’ve eaten at Angels, and dinner there is easily worth a pint or two of your best. We’ve been told that the Public Authorities Act that controls such disparate State entities as the MTA, the Erie Canal, and RIOC, is responsible for the snail’s pace of restoring a commercial presence on Main Street. RIOC President Steve Shane tells me that he is attempting to obtain a waiver or dispensation to relieve RIOC from having to comply with a law that never should have been applied to a public-benefit corporation charged with responsibility for people, not train tracks. When will the stupidity end?

Speaking of which, we are now watching three years of work towards first-time home ownership for Island House and Westview residents unravel.

Building leaders painfully negotiated Letters of Intent with the building owners under the watchful eye of DHCR, who assured us that the deals were considered "affordable" in their estimation. And a ground-lease extension deal has been in the works for over a year, working with RIOC’s own real-estate consultant, Paul Mas. Now we learn that the new administration, whose Roosevelt Island expertise encompasses weeks, not years, is redefining the parameters of what resident leadership considers an acceptable deal. It seems to me that the failures of New York City and State to provide new affordable housing as the Mitchell-Lama agreements reach their end-game has been dumped on the backs of Islanders as we strive to maintain our homes here. The Southtown agreements approved by three RIOC administrations barely scratch the surface of the City’s need for low-cost housing, and provide far less new affordable housing stock than required by the General Development Plan that is part of the Master Lease between City and State. A case in point: Riverwalk Landing (a/k/a building #4) is offering only 25 affordable units in the whole building. With Eastwood slowly going fair-market, we can expect to see the Senior and Disabled Associations disappear and this bastion of mixed-income apartments become gentrified. When we complain that the fundamental tenets of this planned community are being violated, we’re told with a shrug, "That’s progress," and, "That was the fault of previous administrations." It seems to me that every administration has criticized the egregiously poor oversight of their predecessors with the result that RIOC is never responsible for anything.

I see the people charged with the responsibility of maintaining affordable housing define it in terms of two-dimensional stick figures and "future tenants" rather than looking at the families living here now. I’ve spoken to so many of my neighbors in Island House and Westview, and I’ve never heard one speak in terms of making a killing or of windfall profits. All anyone wants is to keep their apartments and their special Roosevelt Island quality of life. For all their highfalutin talk, if RIOC and DHCR pursue some philosophical definition of affordable housing and, in the process, lose us our homes, then they have failed us and failed in their missions.

Kudos to Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who conducted a press event and photo-op on Monday to announce her plans to seek $10 million in the next federal budget to repair and extend the Roosevelt Island seawall. Rep. Maloney was key, some years ago, in helping us to obtain the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers report on the seawall that defined how much work (and how costly) the project would be. This Island community exists because of a seawall that keeps our streets and basements dry, which makes this allocation essential and timely. Thanks, Carolyn, it’s nice to know you’ve got our back!

While I’m handing out kudos, I should reserve some for Public Safety Deputy Director Rene Bryan. He has agreed to help train some of the CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) members, and we showed up this past Wednesday, in our day-glow vests, to learn from the pros how to direct traffic on Main Street should the Public Safety officers be too busy with emergency response duties. Learning to deal with traffic control was part of our eleven weeks of training, but book-learnin’ is never as instructive as actual experience on the street. Did you see us out there in our white gloves and serious expressions?

I’ve seen the design schematics for Southpoint Park that were presented at Thursday’s RIOC Board of Directors meeting and, I expect, you’ll get to see them too, when the Trust for Public Land presents its next informational Town Meeting sometime soon. The good news is that the City Hospital footprint, three acres that were included in an RFP (request for proposal) for unspecified development, are now to be included as parkland. Still pending are the southernmost three acres that may or may not be developed as the Louis Kahn-designed memorial to FDR. The Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute has had some sort of site control since Kahn’s death in 1974 and has now been given a firm deadline to raise the necessary funds or relinquish that control.

I was disappointed that the programmatic material put forward by Bonnie Sherk and the Living Library project over the last six years is not a part of this plan for Phase I. If you have been a part of this planning or have read about it in these pages over the years, you might attend the TPL Town Meeting and express your concern. After all, Steve Shane has told me that the community is the client for this park, so let’s start acting like a client by paying attention and making demands.

Today is the first Saturday in which RIRA and CERT members will be manning a table at the Farmer’s Market to ask you to make the gift of life with a blood donation. You will recall that our January drive produced 30 pints of blood. While this was a success, I was disappointed that 70 Islanders signed up to donate and over half never showed up. Folks, we do this for ourselves, for our families, and for our neighbors. When the necessary blood isn’t there, people die, and New York City is always on the verge of running out. We will be at the Farmer’s Market every Saturday, 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., through June 9, Roosevelt Island Day, when the Senior Center will be transformed into a donation center. If you can give, do. If you can’t give, ask a friend or neighbor to contribute a pint. The effort is minimal and the result, life-affirming. Please, make the effort.