You’ve just become part of New York City’s most special community.

We’re so fully and joyfully integrated – in terms of economics, race, ability – that this community can call upon an outstanding variety of talent and determination that makes every last one of us proud to be a Roosevelt Islander. Or we can tap into the strong side of just about every ethnicity, national custom, and religious persuasion known to mankind.

We’re like New York City – of lot of everything good that the world has to offer. But ours is a special situation, for we have it in just 144 acres, surrounded by water and views that will take your breath away.

We have a history, too, that mirrors the rough and tumble as well as the drive and delight of New York, New York. (You can find much of that on the WIRE website at nyc10044.com.)

Thanks for visiting. As you leave, take away the knowledge that, for a short time, you’ve been part of a community as spectacular, the year around, as the sky that blazed with fireworks tonight.

It may be that not everybody is totally happy with the latest re-revision of the Red Bus routing and schedule, but we’ve heard little grousing since it went into effect on Monday.

But what happened when RIOC and RIRA sat down together to hash out a means of returning to northbound service stopping directly in front of the subway station was more than a change in transportation patterns. It also marked a pattern in RIOC – lots of new people there – talking with RIRA – lots of old-timers there – about what has worked and what hasn’t worked in the past.

There’s a resident resource, and the work of revising the Red Bus service tapped into it, as residents have been wishing – for well over a decade – would happen.

It’s something fairly new and very welcome.

You can see the product of the resident resource not just in a better Red Bus service, but in the Visitor Kiosk at the Tram station, in the product of residents’ labors on Roosevelt Island Day, in our youth baseball, in Island Kids, in The WIRE, and in organizations far too numerous to list here individually.

RIOC is just catching on to how to use that resource, and it’s not perfect yet. There’s a movie series this summer at Southpoint that could have benefited greatly from an involvement of residents who staged movies there a couple of years ago. There’s the matter of those missing stop signs on Main Street and lax enforcement that has us fearing the first report of a child dart-out accident.

In short, there is more to be learned. But the new RIOC exhibits a willingness to learn, and there are hundreds of years of resident experience here, so it should be easy.

It’s part of governmental system that off-Islanders come here to run the place. It need not be part of the system that those off-Islanders ignore on-Island experience and expertise, and RIOC has shown the beginnings, at least, of being ready to integrate residents into planning and execution in making the wheels turn. It’s collaboration, and it’s welcome.

DL