RIRA President On 9/11 Memorial Service, RIRA Elections, Island Calendar, Retail RFP, RIOC Nominees, Roosevelt Island Governance & Upcoming Meetings

Image of June 2010 RIRA Meeting

Roosevelt Island Residents Association (RIRA) President Frank Farance sends the following report to Roosevelt Island residents. Mr. Farance addresses:

1. RIRA Sponsored 9/11 Memorial Service. On Saturday, September 11, at 6:45 p.m., the community will come together at the 9/11 memorial behind the Good Shepherd Community Center. There will be readings, performances, and moments of silence. Don't forget to bring your own candle.

2. RIRA Elections. Our two-year terms, which are up this November. I encourage you to consider running in the RIRA elections. The Southtown complex has grown since the 2008 elections and will have 9 representative (up from 6) to the RIRA Common Council. RIRA will post the details of nominations and elections after next week's Common Council meeting.

3. Island Organizations to meet to on Common Calendar. On September 21 at 8:00 p.m., I'm holding a meeting with all organizations invited with the hopes that we can have a common calendar through June 2011 so we can avoid gratuitous conflicts. We'll publish the calendar in well-known places, including The WIRE, RIOC, and Roosevelt Islander blog websites. If you are a representative of one of the Island's organizations (not just a member), please RSVP to me (rira-president@rira-council.org) no later than Friday, September 17.

4. RIOC Produces a Flawed RFP for Main Street Storefronts. The RIOC Real Estate Development Advisory Committee (Chaired by Jonathan Kalkin) has produced a poor RFP. Significant problems include the lack of resident input (and even RIOC board input). Right now the proposals use a notion of "best value", which is based upon three criteria: (1) total economic value and financial return to RIOC (50%), (2) proposer's plans to improve the retail space or retail units (25%), and (3) experience, competence and commitment of the proposer (25%). Furthermore, "RIOC will select the proposals for the Retail Space that, in the sole discretion of RIOC, most successfully fulfills the Selection Criteria" [the three above items]. Nowhere does it say that the residents or the RIOC Board will have any input on the selection of the choice of tenants. If the RIOC Board decides to change its evaluation criteria (e.g., "we're focusing on how much resident input there will be in new tenants"), then RIOC opens itself to litigation because the criteria has changed. This is why it was so critical to get input from us before the RFP was posted for bid. Or said differently: given the years of complaints about Gristedes and the residents' desire to have something different, now with a master lease we will have even less input on Island merchants. Regardless of the downturn of business at Gristedes, Gristedes can still afford to stay there because Gristedes is profitable across all its stores -- that's the same rationale for why we have a Starbucks here that would normally not have enough business to survive in other locations. Do you remember how Mr. Kalkin's real estate committee refused to participate in the Q&A of the RIRA Town Meeting in June that was specifically scheduled to discuss the master lease? Now Mr. Kalkin and his committee don't have to answer questions because the RFP demands "No board member, officer or employee of RIOC, the State or City of New York, or any of their respective public agencies or advisors are authorized to give interpretations of this RFP or additional information regarding the requirements of this RFP directly or indirectly". No discussion beforehand, and no discussion permitted afterwards. Mr. Kalkin's committee could have easily asked the bidders to include proposals on "how to address the needs of residents" and assigned it some percentage weight (a common idea in complex government RFPs), but Mr. Kalkin's committee chose to ignore the needs of the residents or the existing merchants and chose to avoid public Q&A.

5. RIOC Director Nominee Elections. I read the Maple Tree Group's report, as provided by Ashton Barfield (RIRA Chair of Government Relations Committee, of which MTG is a subcommittee). Essentially, they contradict their prior actions. In 2009 when two board positions were expiring in the future, MTG recommended that we have elections. Now then four board positions are available prior to the 2012 election cycle (one already expired, two in Spring 2010, and one at the end of 2011), MTG takes the opposite position. MTG's present position in postponing elections to keep incumbents in positions longer than their terms -- the opposite of MTG's prior position. An MTG member told me: now that the Governor has vetoed Kellner's legislation, maybe we should have elections sooner just in case the Governor tries to appoint people and there are no available resident nominees. This is not principled thinking, this is just expedience. All the Southtown and Octagon people can feel nicely disenfranchised because of MTG's postponement of elections. What's my plan? If you look at the 2009 RIOC director nominee election process, it had the same amount of advance notice as the normal RIRA election process. I plan on advocating strongly at next week's RIRA Common Council meeting that we should have RIOC elections this year. The RIRA election process is very similar to the RIOC director nominee process and we can use the RIRA election machines for the RIOC elections, too. I plan on asking RIRA to use these processes, regardless of MTG's recommendations.

6. Governor Vetoes Legislation. I'm sure this has been reported elsewhere. What is really disappointing is that the Maple Tree Group (the committee that meets in secret and only lets 13-year members vote) supported legislation that was technically flawed. If you read the Governor's (reasonable) explanation of his veto, the legislation Kellner and MTG proposed duplicated existing laws. How does this happen and why don't they understand that these kinds of flaws make for strong rhetoric against this legislation? I guess the experience of those 13-year members (to the exclusion of the rest of us) didn't help, right? The moral of the story here is: a transparent process and an open process produce better results.

7. Upcoming RIRA meetings. The next meeting is on September 15 at 8:00 p.m. in the Good Shepherd Community Center; future meeting is October 6. Last night (Tuesday) the overnight low was above 70 degrees, which will probably be the last summery night this year.

A version of the RIRA President's message is also published as the RIRA column in the 9/11/10 Main Street WIRE.